By TheGeneral – 25 June 2026
Hello and welcome to the dev diary about one of the most played countries and a tree originally coming with Millennium Dawn… CHINA!
China is one of the greatest powers of the game and it could use an update. Now, firstly I just wanted to start updating the current tree, but it ended up becoming a complete rework.
The Chinese tree is massive, so I can’t tell everything in detail, but I’ll get on with the basics of China. Do keep in mind that this is a work in progress, so you can see placeholders and the numbers are subject to change. Without further ado:
China starts with a couple of problems. Their corruption is high, states have water shortages, their economy is old-school, and for modern technology they are either blocked by the West or dependent on Russia. Not ideal for a super power.
| Technological Dependence | Russian Arms Dependency |
|---|---|
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| Water Shortages | Chinese Political System |
|---|---|
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China’s starting national spirits
Now, the old-school economic model of China doesn’t need to be a bad thing. As you might know, China has a lot of people. Allowing factories to take in more people should reduce unemployment by a lot.
Economic Tree
It’s quite expanded and grouped into two categories. First you focus on the regions China has, later you work towards the specific sectors China has or wants. One of the important ones for a modern China is the semiconductor sector.
In this branch you work on removing the microchip dependence and work on your own chips by negotiating with the USA or reverse-engineering machines from ASML.
Or in the Taiwanese collaboration tree, you can work together with Taiwan to improve your situation.
Every time your self-reliance reaches a milestone, you can lower the effect of the national spirit and eventually remove it.
Other parts of the sectors are:
| Oil and resources | Banking |
|---|---|
 |  |
| Steel | Construction |
|---|---|
 |  |
| Automobiles | Agriculture |
|---|---|
 |  |
And networking
So you have a lot of options to determine which sector you want to improve first. They all give bonuses you want, but the choice is which one you need first. Do you want to get your construction going so you can build your country faster, or do you want to fix your energy problems so you don’t need to waste your civs on oil? That choice is up to you.
You can’t always continue improving your sectors. For instance, you can’t continue farming if your country is lacking water. Another problem China has is corruption. This will increase the cost of ALL your economic focuses by 10%, which can result in pretty substantial costs. And China doesn’t have the greatest income either. This can be solved by following the Xi Jinping path in the political tree, which gets me to the political side of things!
Political Tree
The political tree is mostly updated. For now we kept the historical routes we have. Later we will add alt-history in combination with Taiwan, so stay tuned for that!
Before we dive into the tree, we introduced a new system for China, called the National Committees.
The Central Committee system is a way to represent how China functions, where the Central Committee uses departments to do their (dirty) work for them. We introduced a National Congress as well. Every time the National Congress starts, you can appoint new committees to increase their influence and their associated bonus. Active departments are shown in yellow. You can see their progress and their bonuses on the same screen. The congress missions are aimed at their historical date. Then you have a week to select your new organisations. When you don’t select one, the game will randomise them for you, so you won’t have a waste.
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The committees will gain their own focus tree, like an inner circle, so they also help you in other focuses as well instead of being permanent modifiers. But more on that later.
For now, this is the current leader tree:
Jiang Zemin
Hu Jintao / Zeng Qinghong
Xi Jinping / Bo Xilai
The faction system of China has been moved to a balance of power, where the range determines who becomes leader. So if you want a Young Prince like Xi Jinping or Hu Jintao, you focus on that side of the BoP.
At the end of the National Congress, the new leader will be chosen.
This will be it for China for now. In the next Chinese Dev Diary we will cover the foreign policy and military focus tree, where I want to leave behind one teaser:
