Carved out of the Republic of China as a concession to the Zaibatsu at the end of the Greater East Asian War, the State of Guangdong is an experiment in corporate colonialism, an unnatural entity existing between its Chinese roots and its Japanese suzerain. Despite its independence, Guangdong is far beneath Japan, China, or even Manchukuo in status - its Chief Executive playing second fiddle to the rest of the Co-Prosperity Sphere, even as the Four Companies of Guangdong greedily exploit Guangdong's land and people for their own benefit.Guangdong is a country without a nation: a society bound together by wire transfers, banknotes, and share certificates. In the glittering Three Pearls of Guangdong - Honkon, Makao, and Kōshu - the Four Companies and the Chief Executive indulge in boardroom politics as the Japanese expatriates lord over the Cantonese-Japanese Zhujin, who struggle for recognition as second-class citizens. Beneath them all, the Chinese are herded from their ancestral towns into the electronics sweatshops on the Pearl River, a people displaced inside their own homeland. And as Asia awakens, few ask: will Guangdong survive the storm to come?