Taijan

Taijan is a small island nation in the southwestern portion of Esportiva, south of Sakhovelo in the Esportivan Western Ocean.

History
Taijan was originally discovered in the late seventeenth century by pirates on the run from the Uitbregenian navy. These pirates discovered the inlet at Coco Bay and set up seasonal settlements from which they traded with the native Taijanis. Around the same time, the first escaped slaves reached Taijan and established villages deep inland, where they mixed with the native populations and formed a maroon population.

Colonization came to Taijan in the early eighteenth century with the arrival of a Uitbregenian armada which attempted to put down the pirates and established a plantation economy, indenturing many of the local populace as laborers and forcing the pirates to flee overland to what is now Nova Algiers and Nova Tunis. Uitbregenian colonial rule would last until 1919, when Taijanis successfully lobbied for independence.

Unfortunately, independence was not total, as the island's government was still heavily reliant on the Green Island Fruit Cooperative, GifCo, for financial support. When GifCo was threatened with bankruptcy following the stock market crash of 1929, industrialist Felix del Negro bought it out wholesale and began implementing widespread changes, including enfranchising Taijan's Asian population, who had arrived as indentured laborers in the 1870s and been widely excluded ever since.

GifCo began liberalizing its hold on Taijani politics in the mid-1950s following del Negro's death, and in 1971 the Taijani Supreme Court ordered it broken up into its component parts and nationalized. A new constitution was written with significant restraints on the free market, and the Nationalist Party was elected to power. What followed was a period of inflation characterized by large public works projects, many of which went unfinished when the government lacked the capital to pay its workers.

The Nationalists were forced out of power in 1980 in favor of the Green Taijan Alliance or GTA, which forced out many of the foreign interests that had backed the Nationalists' projects and began a program to stabilize the currency and rebuild the economy through import substitution and nationalization of industry. Unfortunately, when the crack epidemic began in 1984, Taijan's lack of a military or armed police made it an ideal transfer point between buyers and sellers, and the epidemic spread quickly to Taijan's streets.

The GTA introduced increasingly draconian measures aimed at combating the influence of the drug cartels, none of which worked, but in 1988, after several years of deep-cover operations, the Taijani Federal Police and the Occulus Virid, Taijan's covert intelligence agency, were able to bring down most of the cartel operations. What resulted was a stagnant economy, bloated by entitlement programs introduced to keep people away from the crack industry, and unable to gain any traction.

The Orange Block emerged around this time in Nova Algiers and called for a radical liberalization of Taijani foreign trade laws, a lowering of trade barriers, and for the Taijani government to embrace foreign direct investment. These claims were somewhat tempered by the Block's alliance with the more centrist Nationalists to form a government in 1992.

The nineties saw Taijan adopt a neoliberal economic policy under the Orange Block-Nationalist alliance, concentrating on its perceived comparative advantage of liberal drug laws and ecological stewardship to corner the niche markets of sustainable production and exports of hemp and cannabis. Coupled with an increase in imports in certain sectors, the plan worked reasonably well, and by 2010, Taijan's GDP, adjusted for rampant inflation during the 1980s, matched its GDP prior to the breakup of GifCo.

Sports
Sports are a large part of Taijani cultural life, and have been an important part of Taijani identity since independence. The first professional sports league in Taijan was the Green League, founded with GifCo money in 1931, that brought together eight of Taijan's athletic clubs into an organized league for the first time: Montem Virid, Coco Bay City, St. Christopher Civic, St. Christopher Metro, St. Ignatius, Nova Tunis, Lepers, and St. Jermaine. The league would later expand to three divisions of eight teams, with the second division being called Gold and the third division Red after the colors of the Taijani flag (there was no "black" division to avoid the appearance of segregation).

Football remained the dominant sport throughout the twentieth century, with the exception of a brief period in the nineteen-sixties where track and field was considered a more "genuine" Taijani passion. Such sentiment died out in 1970 with the foundation of the Coco Bay Capitals and the merger of the two St. Christopher clubs into the United; these two clubs would dominate the Green League for a decade thereafter.

Green Star formed in 1975 in Montem Virid out of the local Communist party, and soon became a championship contender, outshining FC Montem Virid, while Lion of Judah and the Nova Algiers FC, nicknamed the Maroons and later adopting the name formally, arose in New Zion and Nova Algiers, respectively, and soon played in the Green League.

The 1990s saw the dominance of the "big four", that is, Nova Tunis, St. Christopher United, Green Star, and the Coco Bay Capitals, who won every Green League title from 1990 until 2002, when the Maroons held up the trophy for the first time. Dynamo Nova Tangiers was founded in 2004, and worked its way up to the Green League soon thereafter. St. Ignatius was promoted back to the Green League in 2007 and would remain there, eventually clawing its way back to UICA standing after many years of irrelevance, while Lion of Judah sank into the Gold League following two decades in the Green.

Basketball was introduced to Taijan with the liberalization of trade laws in the 1990s, and soon became a sensation, especially in southern cities like Coco Bay, St. Ignatius, and New Zion. The Green League of basketball was founded in 2005 and showcased such stars as Lion of Judah center Kenny Ubrik. Presently, basketball is largely the domain of the young, southern elite, concentrated in Nova Tangiers and New Zion.

Other sports are played in Taijan, predominantly at the university level, including American football, rugby, lacrosse, and netball. The St Jermaine Templars played a single season in NationStates College Football before the costs became too much for the administration to bear.