I can't help but think this is all happening because Asia of Darkness is supposed to be "exotic." We can't go in knowing anything about what to expect, so everything has to be rebuilt from scratch, meaning the unfamiliar new factions and conflicts have approximately half a book of development behind them. And because White Wolf can't do rules or setting updates without metaplot explanations, it's all justified in-setting by the Eternal Vampire Race War.
But I think maybe the creators of Kindred of the East might have succumbed to their own Orientalist branding. Call it a hunch, but some parts of this book feel like the writers were trying to create something that felt exotic to themselves. It's the only explanation I can think of for why, when tasked with making a parallel knockoff of their popular game, Vampire: the Masquerade, they got the fundamental building blocks entirely wrong.
See, Vampire: the Masquerade had a gameplay loop embedded directly into the structure of the setting. The politics of the setting revolve around a conflict between two incompatible sects with mutually opposed goals - the status-quo-preserving Camarilla and the recklessly millenarian Sabbat - and each were credibly global threats. You could set a game in the biggest Camarilla stronghold in the world and "some Sabbat assholes show up to cause trouble" is a viable plot. But also, the sectarian conflict could generate internal conflicts - like, someone who wants to become powerful within the Sabbat vs someone who wants to make the Sabbat as a whole more powerful vs characters who are only part of the Sabbat because they were victims of its power.
And then, at a narrower taxonomic level, you got the clans. Which are like character classes that are not strictly voluntary. So there's clan vs clan conflict, advancement in the clan conflict, clan vs sect conflict, clan advancement in the sect conflict, and players can never entirely escape these jokers for the same reason it can be so difficult to escape your family - they made you what you are, and you were never in a position to consent to the act until long after the fact.
Finally, the narrowest level - city politics. All of the above is reified through the expedient of some dude and his cronies. That's the scope and scale of politics. Somebody is talking shit about you at Elysium and it can be a proxy for sect or clan issues, but it's also entirely possible that you just don't like each other.
Vampire: the Masquerade may not be my favorite game, but there's no denying it has an airtight formula for stirring up rpg-type shit at the gaming table. This is catnip for theater kids. So it's unclear why Kindred of the East takes the formula and tosses it out the fucking window.
It's got a sort of "splat and local government" dynamic, but the only source of conflict seems to come from mortal nationalism.
At the highest level of kuei-jin organization is the Court and a court is like . . . a local culture. Like, you set the game in Changan and that's Jade Court territory and it's just . . . a scholarly vibe. It's somehow allied with the rest of the Five August Courts of the Quincunx, so there's no real court vs court conflict, but it also means that its culture feels like a specialist function of an ill-defined larger organization (the Quincunx, presumably, though I assume that it's only called that because its an alliance of five courts) that . . . devotes itself to conservative Chinese imperialism?
There are non-Quincunx courts, and it's clear that the Quincunx doesn't like or respect them (and that the feeling is mutual), but it's unclear what they would even fight over. The Blood Court is in Beijing and the Golden Court is in a grab-bag of Southeast Asian countries, and never the twain shall meet ("No other court can approach the Golden Courts' range of cultures and it's questionable whether the Chinese Courts would even want to").
It's not that there's nothing to do. There are plots here - continuing to fight WW2 decades after the fact, endlessly relitigate the Meiji Restoration, become a fashion pervert for God, over the dead bodies of those who would try to stop you - but those are incidental to the Court structure, rather than an intrinsic part of it.
And somehow, the character splats are even worse. The dharmas are like character classes that are voluntary (so voluntary, in fact, that people can and do change dharma canonically and there's even a high-tier power that forces someone to do so) and the ideal party composition is exactly one of each. So I think there's an argument that it might be kind of fun to play a Devil Tiger or Thousand Whisper (et al) and have their distinct aesthetics/philosophies inform your character, but each one is a personal path. I can imagine a clash of personalities between characters of different dharmas, but I can't foresee any situation where a dharma would lead to divided loyalties. They are explicitly supposed to complement each other and make the unit stronger from diversity. The closest WoD counterpart is Werewolf: the Apocalypse's auspices (moon phase divisions).
Actually, that's a pretty good analogy. Kindred of the East is like Werewolf: the Apocalypse without the Tribes and without the ongoing futile war against the Wyrm. It's unclear who it's even for . . .
Oh, wait, I think the Kindred of the East Companion might have provided a helpful picture:
Though, now that I put it that way, there may be more overlap between me and the average Kindred of the East fan than it's comfortable to admit.
Ukss Contribution: So there is a certain degree of racial chauvinism in this book, but I can't quite pin down its motives or origin, because it mostly takes the form of an absolute conviction that the Kuei-jin totally outclass the Kindred. Is this an in-character bias or the opinion of the authors? I can't tell.
And because I can't tell, and because I wouldn't know what to make of it even if I could, I'm going to include Kindred of the East Companion in Ukss. However, I'm going with something abstract.
The Japanese and Chinese vampires in Shanghai continue to fight each other and it's explicitly due to lingering bad blood (and if you think that's a pun, you're wrong, Kuei-jin don't drink blood, they consume chi) over WW2. In real world terms, it's kind of grim to think about, but it is a genuinely interesting idea in vampire fiction - vampires continuing a war from their mortal days, one that is entirely unrelated to vampire nonsense, even after the living belligerents have been at peace for decades.
I think Ukss could have a conflict like that.
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