I was writing a comment in response to some of what I was seeing in the comments here, but this got too huge and I didn't want a massive block of text in what's supposed to be a more casual environment. These are my own observations, suggestions, and cautions about modern socialist nations.

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Victoria 3 already has all the nouns and verbs for the kinds of countries that we're talking about - council republic single-party state or autocracies, likely with interventionist economies or a somewhat modified economic state to simulate market socialism. I would lean towards a modified Corporatized Unions as well, given that the state owns the unions and not the other way around. As someone who has actually talked with people from China, no they aren't really on track towards socialism, and while I think that a determined player should have little trouble performing a socialist reconstruction relative to executing a communist takeover in most western countries (maybe France could have a word on the subject), the status quo of China is hardly communist or working towards communism, they're just multipolar and anti-american. Part cold war legacy diplomacy - rapprochement is hard especially since they want to keep all of their internal messaging mostly the same, so it's easier to just stay on the red side of the line even if they aren't red much at all - part just practicality of building a sphere of influence. Selling yourself as different from the other guy.

Again, this position is based on the fact that I live in a part of the world that got a lot of exchange students from China while I was growing up, and heard a lot of different things about it from different people who had different beliefs about their mother country, many of whom were loyal to it. I am leftist as well myself (intersectional leftist, not radlib), and getting to see how the PRC was and how it ended up like it did is part of that - seeing how what made it authoritarian was extremely familiar. Recognizable. Capitalist.

Deng Xiaoping once said that socialism doesn't mean you have to be poor. Now the party is rich, and the nation is richer than it was, but it's a nation now - if it ever wasn't before - and not a socialist state. Their vanguard is in tatters, and it would need to rally hard if they want to try building communism again. Much of the infrastructure is still in place, but the tradition isn't really there. Hence my argument for its form - still by construction a council republic, but by now steeped in traditions of state ownership before the workers.

While I know less about Vietnam I am aware that according to the WEF it is one of the most capitalist-friendly countries on the planet, which means lax regulations at every level of course. Again, one could renew a country like that, it would take some doing.

and north korea is... lol. They are stripping down the revolutionary paint from their pseudomonarchical society as we speak. Divided Korea is hell on earth no matter which side of the parallel you're on, let's not kid ourselves with lofty democratic beginnings. You might want a journal entry to kind of set the tone on their system, given its strangeness, but also so little comes out of Joseon that it might be a struggle to truly do it justice.

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Do let me know if I'm missing anything. When I started writing this it was more a response to the people arguing about the depictions of eastern post-cold war socialist states as fascists, which I do still think oversimplifies heavily, but now it's more advice and input I feel.

Fascism is not 'when authoritarianism', authoritarianism can feature in basically any country. We are seeing in real time how the rise of fascism across the west is mostly coming into the possession of state powers that already existed and supercharging them. Liberal institutions have been equipped with and using the tools of authoritarianism for decades - these things are more familiar to those of us who live in comfort than we might want to recognize. At the start date the massive crackdowns and propaganda campaigns to crush labour power in the US and UK during the Thatcher/Reagan years are just winding down, ushering in the rise of Neoliberalism. The heady optimism of the Cold War's end to come crashing down as Europe fails to meet the task of rebuilding what was once the Warsaw Pact.

I've got a friend in eastern Germany who is living, right now, the consequences of Germany's failure to truly put itself back together. Over thirty years later. That should be the best case scenario - everyone remembers the Berlin Wall, there was a western country ready to catch the GDR's people as they fell. Now most people are voting AfD, and those with enough awareness to avoid falling for fascist populism are wondering if the wall was really so bad. Toppling it hasn't seemed to solve any problems, after all.

For the record - yes the GDR was very bad, the worst of the Eastern Bloc. From the Statsi, to the frontline nature meaning the grip was tighter, to all the normal parts of life as Soviet puppets. The fact that they've gained so little by knocking down the wall should tell us something about the western world.

And that's not to rag on West or South Germans either - from what I have seen, the whole country is rotten, only a few parts of the federation are actually prospering with the rest being massive resource sinks that the political class and bureaucracy refuse to fix. The indicators are materialist, not that the GDR should come back and we need a second distinct Ost-German national community or something.

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Anyways, hopefully this will at least be a containment area for the discourse that was like half of the comments section. Or maybe you got some useful information about something here. Who knows? Hopefully, the devs manage to put together a fun and interesting mod with a level of connection to our contemporary era.