by Tom Clancy
After he graduated from college Wei became a municipal official in Chongqing, rising to the role of assistant deputy mayor. He left public service a few years later to go to Nanjing University Business School for his master’s in economics and a doctorate in administration, and then he spent the latter half of the 1980s and all of the 1990s in the international finance sector in Shanghai, one of China’s new Special Economic Zones. The SEZs were areas established by the Communist central government where many national laws were suspended to allow more free-market practices in order to encourage foreign investment. This experiment with pockets of quasi-capitalism had been an unmitigated success, and Wei’s education in economics, and to a greater extent his business and party connections, put him at the center of China’s financial growth and positioned him for even greater things to come.
He was elected mayor of Shanghai, China’s largest city, at the turn of the millennium. Here he pressed for further investment from abroad and further expansion of free-market principles.
Wei was handsome and charismatic, and popular with Western business interests, and his star rose at home and around the world as the face of the New China. But he was also a proponent of strict social order. He supported only economic freedom; the residents of his city saw no liberalization whatsoever in their personal freedoms.
With China’s humiliating loss to Russia and the USA in the war over Siberia’s gold mines and oil fields, the majority of the government in Beijing was sacked, and Wei, the young, vibrant symbol of the New China, was called to national service. He became the Shanghai party chief of the Communist Party and a member of the Sixteenth Politburo.
For the next few years Wei split his time between Beijing and Shanghai. He was a rarity in government, a pro-business communist who worked to expand the SEZs and other free-market areas across China while, at the same time, supporting hard-line stances in the Politburo against liberal political thought and individual liberty.
He was a child of Mao and the party, and he was a student of international finance. Economic liberalism was a means to an end for Wei, a way to bring foreign money into the country to strengthen the Communist Party, not a way to subvert it.
After China’s brief war with Russia and the United States, it was thought by many that China’s economic hardships would destroy the country. Famine, a complete breakdown of national and provincial infrastructure, and ultimately anarchy were on the horizon. Only through the work of Wei and others like him was China able to stave off a collapse. Wei pressed for the expansion of the Special Economic Zones and the establishment of dozens of smaller free-market and free-trade areas.
A desperate Politburo conceded, Wei’s plan was implemented in its entirety, and China’s quasi-capitalism grew by leaps and bounds.
The gambit paid off. Wei, the chief architect of the financial reform plan, was rewarded for his work. His successes, along with his Princeling status and political pedigree, made him a natural to take over the role of China’s minister of commerce in the Seventeenth Politburo. As he stepped into the role of director of national financial policy, China’s economy was blessed with double-digit growth rates that seemed like they would last forever.
But then the bubble burst.
The world economy entered a protracted downturn shortly after Wei became commerce minister. Both foreign investment into China and exports out of China were hit hard. These two components of the economy, both of which Wei deserved credit for revolutionizing, were the major driving factors of the nation’s double-digit growth rate. They were wellsprings of money that all but dried up when the world stopped buying.
A further expansion of SEZs orchestrated by Wei failed to stop the downward spiral toward catastrophe. Chinese purchases of real estate and currency futures around the world turned into money pits as the European financial crisis and the American real estate downturn broke.
Wei knew how the winds blew in Beijing. His earlier success in free-market reforms to save his country would now be used against him. His political enemies would hold up his economic model as a failure and claim that increasing China’s business relationships with the rest of the world had only exposed China to the infectious disease of capitalism.
So Minister Wei hid the truth of China’s failing economic model by shifting his focus to gargantuan state projects, and by encouraging loans to regional governments to build or upgrade roads and buildings and ports and telecommunication infrastructure. These were the types of investments seen in the old communist economic model, a central government policy to foster economic expansion via massive central planning schemes.
This looked good on paper, and Wei presented growth rates in meetings for three consecutive years that, while not as good as in those first years of expansion after the war, still hovered at a respectable eight or nine percent. He dazzled the Politburo and the lesser houses of government in China, as well as the world’s press, with facts and figures that painted the picture that he wanted them to see.
But it was smoke and mirrors, Wei knew, because the borrowing would never be repaid. Demand for Chinese exports had weakened to a relative trickle, regional government debt had reached seventy percent of GDP, twenty-five percent of all loans were nonperforming in Chinese banks, and still Wei and his ministry encouraged more borrowing, more spending, more building.
It was a house of cards.
And coinciding with Wei’s desperate attempt to hide his nation’s economic problems, a new troubling phenomenon swept across his country like a typhoon.
It was called the Tuidang movement.
After the central government’s woeful response to a calamitous earthquake, protests filled the streets all over the nation. The government pushed back against the protesters, certainly not as forcefully as they could have, but with each arrest or discharge of tear gas the situation grew more unstable.
As the leadership of the crowds was dragged off and imprisoned, the demonstrations moved off the streets for a time, and the Ministry of Public Security felt they had the situation well in control. But the protests moved online in the new social networking and chat board sites available in China and abroad, via well-known workarounds to get past Chinese government Internet filters.
Here, on hundreds of millions of computers and smart phones, the spontaneous protests turned into a well-organized and powerful movement. The CPC was slow to react, while the Ministry of Public Security had batons and pepper spray and paddy wagons but no effective weapons with which to counterpunch the electronic 1’s and 0’s of a viral uprising in cyberspace. The online manifestation of the protests morphed into a revolt over the span of many months, culminating in Tuidang.
Tuidang, or “renounce the party,” was a movement whereby first hundreds, then thousands, and then millions of Chinese citizens publicly left the Communist Party of China. They could do it online, anonymously, or they could make a public announcement outside the country.
In four years the Tuidang movement boasted more than two hundred million renunciations.
It was not the raw number of people who had left the party in the past four years that had the party concerned. In truth, it was difficult to determine the true number of renunciations, because many of the names on the list distributed by the leadership of the Tuidang movement contained pseudonyms and common names that could not be independently verified. Two hundred million dissenters may have been, in truth, only fifty million dissenters. But it was the negative publicity created for the party by those who publicly renounced their membership abroad, and the attention that the success of the uprising was getting in the rest of the world, that scared the Politburo.
Commerce Minister Wei watched the growing Tuidang movement and the anger, confusion, and fear that it created within the Politburo, and he considered the hidden economic problems of his nation. He knew that now was not the time to reveal the looming crisis. Any major austerity reforms would have to wait.
Now was no time to show the central government’s weakness in
dealing with anything. It would only inflame the masses and bolster the revolt.
* * *
At the Eighteenth Party Congress something incredible happened that was completely unforeseen by Wei Zhen Lin. He was named president of China and general secretary of the Communist Party, making him the ruler of his house of cards.
The election had been, in Chinese Politburo terms, a raucous affair. The two standing members deemed the most likely to take over had both fallen from grace within weeks of the congress, one for a corruption scandal in his home city of Tianjin, and the other due to an arrest of a subordinate and a charge of espionage. Of the remaining Standing Committee members eligible in the election, all but one were members of alliances with one or the other of the disgraced men.
Wei was the odd man out. He was considered an outsider still, unaligned with either faction, so at the relatively tender age of fifty-four he was elected as the compromise candidate.
The three highest offices in China are the president, the general secretary of the Communist Party of China, and the chairmanship of the Central Military Commission, the chief of the military. At times the same person holds all three roles simultaneously, but in Wei’s case, the CMC chairmanship went to another man, Su Ke Qiang, a four-star general in the People’s Liberation Army. Su, the son of one of Mao’s most trusted marshals, had been a childhood friend of Wei’s, together in Beijing and together in Switzerland. Their simultaneous ascendance to the highest levels of power in the nation proved that the Princelings’ time to rule had come.
But from the beginning Wei knew the co-leadership would not mean partnership. Su had been a vocal proponent of military expansionism; he’d given hawkish speeches for domestic consumption about the might of the People’s Liberation Army and China’s destiny as the regional leader and a world power. He and his general staff had been expanding the military over the past decade, thanks to twenty percent annual increases in spending, and Wei knew that Su was not the type of general to build his army only so that they would impress on the parade ground.
Wei knew Su wanted war, and as far as Wei was concerned, a war was the last thing China needed.
* * *
Three months after taking two of the three reins of power, at a Standing Committee meeting at Zhongnanhai, the walled government compound in Beijing west of the Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square, Wei made a tactical decision that would result in his placing a pistol against his temple just a month later. He saw it as inevitable that the truth about the nation’s finances would come out, at the very least to those on the Standing Committee. Already rumors of problems were filtering out of the Ministry of Commerce and up from the provinces. So Wei decided to head off the rumors by informing the committee about the coming crisis in “his” economy. To a room of expressionless faces, he announced that he would propose a curtailing of regional borrowing and a number of other austerity measures. This, he explained, would strengthen the nation’s economy over time, but it would also have the unfortunate effect of a short-term downturn of the economy.
“How short-term?” he was asked by the party secretary of the State Council.
Wei lied. “Two to three years.” His number crunchers told him his austerity reforms would need to be in place for closer to five years in order to have the desired effect.
“How much will the growth rate drop?” This was asked by the secretary of the Central Commission of Discipline Inspection.
Wei hesitated briefly, and then spoke in a calm but pleasant voice. “If our plan is enacted, growth will necessarily contract by, we estimate, ten basis points during the first year of implementation.”
There were gasps throughout the room.
The secretary said, “Growth is currently at eight percent. You are telling us we will experience contraction?”
“Yes.”
The chairman of the Central Guidance Commission for Building Spiritual Civilization shouted to the room, “We have had thirty-five years of growth! Even the year after the war, we did not contract!”
Wei shook his head and replied in a calm manner, striking a stark contrast with most of the rest of the men in the room, who had grown animated. “We were deceived. I have looked at the ledgers for those years. Growth came, mostly as a result of foreign trade expansion that I initiated, but it did not happen in the first year after the war.”
Wei saw, rather quickly, that most in the room did not believe him. As far as he was concerned, he was merely a messenger informing others of this crisis, he was not responsible for it, but the other Standing Committee members began leveling accusations. Wei responded forcefully, demanding that they listen to his plan to right the economy, but instead the others spoke of the growing dissent in the streets, and fretted among themselves about how the new problems would affect their standing in the Politburo at large.
The meeting only deteriorated from there. Wei went on the defensive, and by the end of the afternoon he had retreated to his quarters in the compound of Zhongnanhai, knowing that he had overestimated the ability of his fellow Standing Committee members to understand the grave nature of the threat. The men were not listening to his plan; there would be no more discussion of his plan.
He had become secretary and president because he had not joined an alliance, but in those hours of discussions about the grim future of the Chinese economy, he realized he could have done with some friends on the Standing Committee.
As an experienced politician with a strong sense of realpolitik, he knew his chances for saving his own skin in the current political climate were small unless he announced that the growth and prosperity proclaimed by thirty-five years of previous leadership would continue under his leadership. And as a brilliant economist with complete access to the ultra-secret financial ledgers of his country, he knew that prosperity in China was about to grind to a halt, and a reversal of fortune was the only future.
And it was not just the economy. A totalitarian regime could — theoretically, at least — paper over many fiscal problems. To one degree or another this is what he had been doing for years, using massive public-sector projects to stimulate the economy and give an unrealistic impression of its viability.
But Wei knew his nation was sitting on a powder keg of dissent that was growing by the day.
* * *
Three weeks after the disastrous meeting in Zhongnanhai compound, Wei realized his hold on power was under threat. While on a diplomatic trip to Hungary, one of the Standing Committee members, the director of the Propaganda Department of the Communist Party, ordered all the state-run media outlets in the nation, as well as CPC-controlled news services abroad, to begin airing reports critical of Wei’s economic leadership. This was unheard of, and Wei was furious. He raced back to Beijing and demanded a meeting with the propaganda director but was told the man was in Singapore until the end of the week. Wei then convened an emergency meeting at Zhongnanhai for the entire twenty-five-member Politburo, but only sixteen members appeared as requested.
Within days, charges of corruption appeared in the media, claims that Wei had abused his power for personal gain while mayor of Shanghai. The charges were corroborated with signed statements by dozens of Wei’s former aides and business associates in China and abroad.
Wei was not corrupt. As the mayor of Shanghai he’d fought corruption wherever he found it, in local business, in the police force, in the party apparatus. In this endeavor he made enemies, and these enemies were only too willing to give false witness against him, especially in cases where the high-ranking coup organizers made offers of political access in return for their statements.
An arrest warrant was issued for the Princeling leader by the Ministry of Public Security, China’s equivalent of the U.S. Department of Justice.
Wei knew exactly what was going on. This was an attempted coup.
The coup came to a head on the morning of the sixth day of the crisis, when the vice president stepped in front of cameras in Zhongnanhai and announced to a stunned inte
rnational media that until the unfortunate affair involving President Wei was resolved, he would be taking charge of the government. The vice president then announced that the president was, officially, a fugitive from justice.
At the time Wei himself was only four hundred meters away in his living quarters at Zhongnanhai. A few loyalists had rallied at his side, but it seemed as though the tide had turned against him. He was informed by the office of the vice president that he had until ten a.m. the next morning to allow representatives from the Ministry of Public Security into his compound to effect his arrest. If he did not go quietly, he would be taken by force.
Late in the evening on the sixth day Wei finally went on the offensive. He identified those in his party who were conspiring against him, and he convened a secret meeting with the rest of the Politburo Standing Committee. He stressed to the five men who were not conspirators that he considered himself a “first among equals” and, should he remain president and general secretary, he would rule with an eye toward collective leadership. In short, he promised that each and every one of them would have more power than they would have if they put someone else in his place.
His reception from the Standing Committee was cold. It was as if they were looking at a doomed man, and they showed little interest in aligning themselves with him. The second-most-powerful man in China, the chairman of the Central Military Commission, Su Ke Qiang, did not say a single word during the meeting.
Throughout the night Wei had no idea if he would be overthrown in the morning — arrested and imprisoned, forced to sign a false confession, and executed. In the predawn hours his future looked even darker. Three of the five PSC members who had yet to commit to the coup sent word that, though they would not encourage his deposal, they did not have the political clout to help him.
At five a.m. Wei met with his staff and told them he would step down for the good of the nation. The Ministry of Public Security was notified that Wei would surrender, and an arrest team was dispatched to Zhongnanhai from the MPS building on East Chang’an Avenue, on the other side of Tiananmen Square.