Ultimatum

by Matthew Glass

  Olsen turned to his own aide and was passed a sheet with the details of the latest group of detainees, mostly cyberdissidents and environmental campaigners, whose cases the United States wanted to raise. Chou took the list with a fatalistic expression and listened as Olsen detailed the president’s concern for action on these cases.

  “We would very much like not to have to continually make such representations, Foreign Minister.”

  “Then don’t make them,” said Chou in English.

  “We are committed to supporting the process of democratization wherever we feel it is possible. This has been the policy of the United States government since as far back as President Truman, and this administration takes that responsibility seriously. We will help in any way that we can.”

  “The government of the People’s Republic does not require the help of the United States in this,” replied Chou in Mandarin. The translator, a young woman, spoke in flawless, American-accented English.

  “What help does it require from the United States?” asked Olsen.

  Chou smiled. “That is a friendly question.”

  “We are all friends, I hope, Foreign Minister.”

  “I hope so, Mr. Secretary.”

  “Do you have an answer? President Benton would only be too pleased to know.”

  Chou passed the list to the note taker. “I have taken note.”

  “Can I tell President Benton anything specific?”

  “My government is concerned at the continuing occupation of Colombian territory by military forces of the United States. China cannot support the occupation by one country of another sovereign country’s territory.”

  Olsen sighed. They were going to have to go through the charade of talking over the Colombian intervention, as if the Chinese government really cared.

  Chou then proceeded to give a rundown of the history of the U.S. involvement in Colombia since President Shawcross’s decision to send troops. Olsen responded by pointing out certain discrepancies between Chou’s version and reality. He also pointed out that President Benton had met with President Lobinas, the Colombian leader, only a week previously in Washington, and President Lobinas had reaffirmed his support for the Cartagena Points, which outlined the objectives of the American intervention. Chou responded by saying that the Cartagena Points required modification. “Mr. Secretary,” he said, “I advise you that we will continue to call for this in international forums, and the progress of relations between our two countries cannot be divorced from this. Nor from the stand of the United States towards the province of Taiwan. Since this is our first meeting, I would like to make clear the position of the government of the People’s Republic of China on this matter.”

  It was one of the clearest positions in the whole world, but that wasn’t going to stop Chou laying it out, which he did, over most of the next hour, going all the way back to the surrender of Japanese forces at the end of the Second World War and progressing methodically through every twist and turn in the saga, including the U.S. Congress’s Taiwan Relations Act of 1979, the Four Communiqués, and the Manila Understanding of 2017, which set out ceiling levels of PRC troop, naval, and air deployments in the three provinces facing Taiwan and in the Taiwan Strait. He lingered particularly over the Manila Understanding, lambasting it for its manifest unfairness and the sheer impossibility of maintaining its conditions. Part history lesson, part polemic. The Chou treatment, as it was known to foreign ministers around the world. Everyone had to experience it, at least once. At the end of it, their time together was almost up.

  “There’s one more thing I’d like to raise,” said Olsen.

  Chou stared back at him blankly.

  “Foreign Minister, shall we have a moment in private?”

  “If you wish,” said Chou. He glanced at his interpreter and note taker and gestured to the door. Oliver Wu and Olsen’s aide left as well.

  “Foreign Minister, I would like to discuss carbon emissions,” said Olsen in English.

  Chou looked at him as blankly as before. “What is to discuss, Mr. Secretary?”

  Olsen hesitated. “Are you satisfied with the Kyoto process?” he asked cautiously.

  “The Kyoto process throughout its history has been extremely unfair to developing economies,” replied Chou, giving the standard response.

  “In which you include the Chinese economy, I suppose?”

  “Of course.”

  “Even though your GDP is now greater than that of the United States.”

  “With 1.6 billion people to feed, Mr. Secretary. How many mouths in the United States?”

  Olsen nodded. He didn’t want to get bogged down on that. He tried again. “And apart from the Kyoto process?”

  “Mr. Secretary, what is there apart from the Kyoto process?”

  Was that a question, wondered Olsen, or an answer?

  There was silence.

  Olsen was aware of Chou watching him expectantly.

  “What is it specifically that you wish to discuss, Mr. Secretary?”

  “I want to be sure our two countries will work together to deal with this. I’d like to be sure that this is as high a priority to the government of the People’s Republic as it is to the government of the United States.”

  Chou shrugged. “The developmental stage of each country must be taken into account. When the United States, the EuroCore and the other developed economies accept their responsibility in this, then the Chinese government will do all in its power to achieve a just agreement for this problem.”

  Olsen gazed at him. That was the standard line. There didn’t seem to be any more, not a hint that anything at all was to be read into that statement beyond the actual words. Chou probably didn’t even know about the negotiations that had been taking place in Washington. It was a waste of time having come here, thought Olsen, or at least having talks with Chou. He had no power in the hierarchy.

  “Is there something else?” said Chou.

  “No,” said Olsen.

  Chou got up. “Come, Mr. Secretary, let us have lunch.”

  ~ * ~

  Afterward Olsen had meetings with Zhai and then Ma, each of which Chou attended. Of the leading figures in the party, Olsen knew Zhai best, having worked with him in the negotiations for the establishment of the UN’s permanent peacekeeping force years earlier. They had spent plenty of long, bleary nights on opposite sides of negotiation tables. More rarely, on the same side. They greeted each other like old friends.

  The discussions were superficial. Ma said nothing when Olsen raised Kyoto. Zhai came out with Chou’s line, although delivered in a more amicable manner. Olsen got Zhai alone for ten minutes as they walked from one room to another, dropping back behind the pack of officials, and still there was nothing. They were giving him a united front. It was Kyoto or nothing. And Kyoto, of course, weak and unenforceable as it was, was tragically unfair to China.

  The last item on the schedule was the meeting with Wen. Twenty minutes. Five minutes photo op, fifteen minutes talk. But you could say a lot in fifteen minutes, Olsen knew. Sometimes it was only one or two sentences that mattered.

  Chou and Olsen, accompanied by Ambassador Finkler, Elisabeth Dean and the whole entourage from both sides, walked down a red-carpeted corridor toward a meeting room. The first thing Olsen noticed when the door opened was that no press was there. Hui, the vice president of China, was waiting for him. Hui was nothing but a figurehead. Olsen saw someone else beside him. Ding.

  Hui started to speak. An interpreter began speaking almost simultaneously.

  “Secretary Olsen, please accept President Wen’s deepest apologies. He is unable to meet you today and has asked me to humbly express his regrets.” Hui came forward to shake Olsen’s hand.

  “Please tell President Wen that I appreciate his sending you, Vice President Hui, in his place.”

  “No one can take the place of President Wen, Mr. Secretary,” said Ding.

  There were smiles at the remark.

  Ding
came forward to shake Olsen’s hand as well. “President Wen also asked me to send his apologies.”

  “Thank you, Minister Ding.”

  “Let us sit,” said Hui, gesturing to four armchairs, behind which stood two upright chairs for the interpreters.

  They sat. Chou occupied the fourth armchair. The others in the entourage stood at the other end of the room.

  “President Wen would like to know whether your meetings have been fruitful,” said Hui.

  “Very fruitful,” replied Olsen. “Although it is a great disappointment not to be able to meet President Wen.”

  “Yes,” said Hui.

  “Still,” said Ding, “many photographers would be with us now if President Wen was here. We could not have this quiet talk.”

  “The photographers would go,” said Olsen.

  “Yes,” said Ding, “but the press is sometimes troublesome, don’t you think?”

  “I guess that’s the price we pay.”

  “Such an irritation,” said Hui, and he laughed.

  There was no sign of humor on Ding’s face. “Sometimes the troublesome press is more than just an irritation, wouldn’t you agree, Secretary Olsen?”

  Olsen gazed at Ding, wondering why he was pushing the point. “A free press is an important part of any democracy, Minister Ding,” he said carefully. “The irritation we sometimes feel with it is a price worth paying.”

  “I think President Benton was irritated some weeks ago with the press, is that not so?”

  Olsen didn’t reply. He watched Ding intently.

  “President Wen sends his regrets that that occurred. He takes no satisfaction in this.”

  Olsen glanced at Chou. The foreign minister was looking at Ding without any sign of particular interest on his face. Hui’s look was similarly unrevealing.

  Olsen turned back to Ding. “As I said, the occasional irritation from the press is a price worth paying.”

  Ding nodded. “As you say, Mr. Secretary.”

  “President Benton hopes there will soon be greater cooperation between our government and yours,” said Olsen.

  “Yes,” said Hui, smiling. “Our governments must cooperate.”

  “President Wen would like you to pass on his words to President Benton,” said Ding. “He asked me to tell you this. It is important to him.”

  Ding was watching him closely. Olsen nodded. “Tell President Wen that I certainly will.”

  ~ * ~

  Wednesday, April 27

  United States Embassy, Tokyo

  It was midnight in Tokyo, eleven a.m. in Washington. Larry Olsen was on the secure connection to the president, highest level of encryption, and Alan Ball and John Eales were listening in. The president asked Olsen to tell him once again what Ding had said.

  “So it was one of Wen’s guys who leaked?” said Eales. “One of his guys leaked and now he’s saying sorry.”

  “Not necessarily,” said Olsen. “Wen’s saying he’s sorry it happened. He’s not saying he’s sorry he did it. Mr. President, we don’t know whether Wen’s admitting some kind of responsibility, but what seems clear is he didn’t want to see you put on the spot. Even if the leak didn’t come from them, he’s saying he’s sorry if you were embarrassed. He takes no satisfaction from that, to use Ding’s words.”

  “And is that good?” asked Benton.

  “I think so. It means he’s not treating you as an enemy. Your enemy, you want him to be humiliated. When you have a friend, you don’t want him to lose face. If he loses face, it’s hard for you to be his friend even if you want to be. So that’s good.”

  John Eales glanced at the president. “It could be a lie.”

  “What was that, John?” said Olsen from Tokyo. “I didn’t catch it.”

  “I said it could be a lie. Wen could have been happy to see us humiliated, if that’s what he thinks happened. He might be telling us he wasn’t so he can set us up again.”

  “I don’t have that feeling, John.”

  “So you take it at face value?”

  Olsen laughed. He didn’t take anything at face value. “I think what Wen’s saying here is, there was obviously a moment of embarrassment for the president—maybe he knows how it happened, maybe he doesn’t—but anyway, he’s sorry it happened, and he doesn’t want us to think that he either engineered it or feels that he benefited from it. As we noted at the time, Mr. President, the Chinese press made very little of it, which is consistent. I think the message must have gone out from the government pretty damn quickly that this thing wasn’t meant to be covered.”

  Benton was silent for a moment. “So where does that leave us?”

  “Well, it looks like Wen is managing this himself,” said Olsen. “That’s number one. Number two, he’s saying he’s not trying to hurt you in public.”

  “Who else knows?” asked Benton.

  “From what they said to me yesterday, none of them. Not even Zhai broke ranks. I gave him an opening, but he didn’t say a thing.”

  “Larry, that’s not possible, is it?” said Eales.

  “No, I don’t think so. Some of them must know.”

  “Ding?”

  “He might not. Wen could have just told him to say what he said to me. He would have said it.”

  “How do we know Wen told him?” said Ball. “It might have been his own idea.”

  “He said it in front of Hui and Chou. If Wen didn’t tell him, it’d get back to him.”

  Benton wondered if the way Wen was handling this made him vulnerable. “If he hasn’t shared it with Zhai or Chou, but he has, say, with Ding, where does that leave him? What if one of them finds out?”

  In Tokyo, Olsen rolled his eyes. “Mr. President, I do not think you want to go playing Chinese party leaders off against each other. That’s a minefield. You don’t want to even take a step into that.”

  “But it’s something to keep up our sleeve, right?”

  “Up our sleeve, Mr. President. A long way up our sleeve.”

  “All right.” Joe Benton glanced at Eales and smiled. Scaring Larry Olsen wasn’t something you could do every day. “Incidentally, where are the Japanese on the Kurils?”

  The dispute between Russia and Japan over the lower Kuril Islands dated back to the Second World War, when the U.S.S.R. took control of the territory. It flared periodically between the two countries and had come to the fore again in the past year with a series of incursions by Japanese fishing vessels into the area. Japan was angling to get the islands back, and Olsen knew before he arrived in Tokyo that he was going to be pushed for U.S. support.

  “Honosawa gave me a solid half hour today on how it was time for Japan to have them back and it was the historic responsibility of the U.S. to help.”

  Eales snorted “What did you say?”

  “I gave him a solid half hour back along the lines of how he should take a look at what happened in the ten years before they lost the Kurils before they start talking about historic responsibility. We’ve definitely got some leverage there. But even if we helped them on the Kurils, whether the Japanese would put their relationship with China at risk by coming in with us on sanctions, I think that’s another question. Anyway, Russia’s the better choice for us. I’d trade the Kurils for Russian energy sanctions any day.”

  So would Benton. If they did get to the point of launching sanctions against China, Russian support would be crucial, and it didn’t take a foreign policy expert to figure it out. The Russian republic supplied a third of China’s oil needs and close to eighty percent of its gas.

  Benton glanced at Alan Ball. His face was grim.

  “All right,” said the president, “we’re getting way ahead of ourselves. This isn’t about getting Russia to apply sanctions. Let’s get back to Wen. Where are we, Larry? Summary. What have we learned, where do we stand?”

  “The key thing, Mr. President, is like I said, it’s personal with Wen. He’s taking charge of the issue.”

  “And his view is?”

&
nbsp; “That’s harder to judge. When I hinted to Ding that we needed to work together better, there was nothing back.”

  “So what are you saying, Larry?” asked Eales.