Red Planet is a 2007 short novel by The Bestseller Project.
It is January 2021 and the remnant People's Republic of China has just announced its imminent intention to resume its long-suspended programme of terraforming the planet Huo Xing (formerly Mars).
Notes
editChina landed two humans on Mars in 2013, two weeks before the UN mission, and claimed the planet for the Motherland. (Five years earlier Lt. Harvey L. Farmer (NASA) had raised the UN and US flags, claiming planet for "the Democracies of the World" via remote-controlled robot, but this had never been officially recognised by the majority of the UN member nations.) They officially renamed the planet Huo Xing (the Mandarin name for Mars) and began work to establish a colony, announcing plans to terraform the planet within 15 years using Chinese nanotechnology.
When China dropped "the People's Republic of" and held its first and only "democratic" election in 2019, the Martian colony—which by this stage consisted of a huge complex of modules and prefabricated enclosures housing more than 480 men and women—announced its independence, and claimed the title of the PRC for itself.