There was an interesting parallel that went largely unnoticed except among historians and military types. In the late 18th century, when European ships were buying and carting off vast loads of Chinese goods of every type, the western powers approached the emperor to request that China reciprocate by buying western goods. Empty ships on the return voyage to China meant lower profits and higher prices in Europe. The emperor, with typical arrogance, told the envoys that Europe had nothing that China needed or wanted and that their products were inferior to what China possessed. Unfortunately, the emperor had apparently failed to notice that the West did have one thing which China did not: ships with large guns. What ensued was a war in which China was forced to open its ports and to buy a product that would later spawn other conflicts: opium.
While few in the West think historically, most being occupied with more important concerns such as sitcoms and sports, China has studied its history carefully. Their 5 year, 10 year and 20 year plans ensure that such mistakes are not repeated and that one day soon China would be the one who had the ships with big guns. Up to this point, their plan had worked quite well and their power had grown, but if there was a single flaw that one could point to in their strategy, it might be their continued love affair with arrogance. The current situation was a perfect example; they still had not grasped the sea change in the attitude of the average citizens in the West. This was leading them to a potentially perilous conclusion: that the West would, in the end, back down.
News of heightened tensions in the South China Sea reached a public that was already fatigued and disgusted by China’s display of bratty behavior. That officials in Beijing would, after everything else they had done, try to prevent goods from reaching the United States was almost beyond belief. For the first time in anyone’s memory, there were so many demonstrators around the Chinese embassy that riot troops were called in to prevent a breach of the Chinese compound. No room in the embassy was now beyond the noise of the angry crowd, and the ambassador messaged his concern to Beijing. That the reply was a rebuke did not bode well for future events.
More troubling was the burning of a tractor-trailer rig whose contents appeared, at least from the logo on the trailer, to be Chinese. Four youths in a fast car had hurled a Molotov cocktail at it and driven off. The president finally took to the airwaves in an attempt to calm things down, but in a move that baffled everyone, his speech made it clear that he blamed the Republicans. This time Senator Baines remained in his Senate seat as other Republicans and even a few Democrats denounced the president for such an absurd and uncalled for partisan gesture. The president’s inept and ill-considered words managed to do what few at this point thought even possible: make things worse.
Some of the more volatile members of society combined their already shaky grasp of propriety with liberal amounts of alcohol, and the torched truck incident began to be repeated. In several cities, flash mobs looted stores under the pretext of protesting Chinese goods. That most of these goods somehow ended up in their homes and apartments did not seem to them at all inconsistent. Community leaders appealed for calm and, for the most part, it was at least partially restored.
Holly had returned home to a well-deserved rest, but given the fragile state of the public mind at the moment, an appeal was made to see if her considerable charm could be used to reignite the spirit of cooperation instead of Molotov cocktails. In spite of the fragile state of her own mind, her indomitable spirit once again rose to the occasion and she delivered a speech in the House of Representatives that had all present on their feet. Without regard to party affiliation, every major news organization broadcast the speech in its entirely and within the hour it went viral on the internet and social media.
Perhaps it was the youthfulness of the speaker, perhaps it was what she had been through; for whatever reasons most of America listened and heeded. The faltering boycott began to return to an organized and focused state and, for the most part, the violence subsided. The president wisely kept his mouth shut for a change. Once again breaths were held and all eyes were on China.
Tourism there had trickled virtually to a halt. Hotels, restaurants and tourist attractions were devoid of customers. Airlines cut their flight schedules as frightened flyers stayed home or boycotted altogether. Tour guides squatted before empty attractions eating cheap noodles. Trade shows didn’t bother to open as most buyers had canceled. Factories laid off workers who would not be receiving unemployment checks. The mood that at first had been frustration was evolving into anger. Try as they might, Chinese censors had not been entirely successful at hiding what had happened in Tianjin and its aftermath. With increasing numbers of displaced workers on the streets, rumors flew and smuggled reports of Holly’s speech in Paris reached more and more people.
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In the combat information center aboard the Dinh Tien Hoang, officers watched the converging flights of Chinese J-10’s and Vietnamese SU-27’s, now inside each other’s air-to-air missile envelope. China and Vietnam were within a finger’s breadth of war. Any one of the eight pilots approaching each other at super-sonic speed was capable, either by intent or miscalculation, of starting a conflict that could envelope several nations as well as plunge an already teetering world economy into the abyss.
As blips on radar screens drew closer, a Vietnamese pilot with exceptional eyesight could now make out the distant shapes of the approaching Chinese fighters. He and all the others were well aware that he who fires second dies first. He prepared to lock up the closest, a move that would seen by Chinese attack radar sensors and would provoke a counter response and mean the inevitable launch of missiles. With his finger poised to perform the lock, his sharp eyes detected a maneuver, or so he thought. His heads up display confirmed what his eyes had just told him: the Chinese fighters were turning.
The Vietnamese flight leader ordered his flight to turn away and circle to the East, over the projected path of the ships below. He had no way of knowing that the Chinese commander in Hainan had orders that his fighters were to attempt to intimidate the convoy into turning back to Viet Nam but were not to attack unless fired upon.
Also unbeknownst to him was a parallel battle raging in Beijing. In China, the Politburo Standing Committee of the Communist Party and the PLA (People’s Liberation Army), to all extents and purposes, controls the country. The Politburo Standing Committee consists of four to nine people, typically older men, who make all major decisions in China. But implicit in the decisions taken by them is the acquiescence of the People’s Liberation Army.
The current crisis was a perfect demonstration of what happens when the two groups disagree. On the one side, Li Guo Peng, presumptive heir to the presidency and a hardliner with powerful friends in the PLA, felt that that China’s amazing success is attributable to its iron fist and intransigence in international affairs. On the other side, Sheng Guangzu, the Chinese Premier felt that the days of governing from the turret of a tank were over and more democracy must be introduced to avoid turning the growing insurrection into a civil war.
Sheng Guangzu was, by all appearances, the antithesis of Li Guo Peng. Short of stature and quiet in manner, his early years had been marred by the arrest of his parents during the Cultural Revolution. Raised by an aunt, he had dedicated himself to the battle of logic and reason since his size and disposition did not lend themselves to the life of a warrior. In 1991, when he rose to give his first speech of any significance, chuckles were heard around the hall since at his full height of five foot three inches, only his head could be seen above the lectern. However, the power of his speaking style and the obvious wisdom of his words quickly brought a respectful silence to the hall as his listeners discovered a man who would one day be referred to as the Mark Twain of China. He was also destined to become one of the youngest men to ever sit on the Politburo Standing Committee.
In recent weeks, however, a mystery had not been unfolding. Not . . . since unfolding implies to some extent being revealed and reveal is a w
ord that China would like to strike from the lexicon entirely, such is the secrecy with which they prefer to conduct their affairs. The mystery that was not unfolding was Sheng’s disappearance. The Premier had not been seen in public in almost three weeks.
As Premier, Sheng’s job is to organize and maintain the bureaucracy. Some speculated that he had failed in this in two ways: first he had not maintained the public order. Unrest was growing and before his disappearance, he had spoken of the need for more democracy. Democracy is one of many words that Chinese censors are instructed to delete or block wherever they encounter it. That the premier was openly advocating for it was, at least in the minds of his enemies, dangerous. He had also utterly failed to detect what was going on in Hong Kong and Tianjin.
Li Guo Peng, Sheng’s nemesis, had not been successfully navigating the Chinese bureaucracy for more than two decades by being unwilling or unable to seize opportunity wherever he found it. He had correctly assessed that both the army and the majority of the old men on the Standing Committee favored forceful action and, above all, saving face. It was he who had strongly advocated sending the navy into the Yellow Sea in the fruitless and highly embarrassing attempt to capture the Americans and thereby cover up the Tianjin affair. And it was he who pushed for a naval embargo of all ships destined for the United States which carried goods in support of the American boycott.
Sheng had actually argued forcefully in favor of admitting what had transpired in Tianjin, punishing the culprits and moving on, but he had been brushed aside by those for whom saving face is everything. Despite the incontrovertible facts, the Standing Committee and the PLA had allowed Li to hang both these failures on Sheng, blithely asserting that it was under Sheng’s purview as premier and was therefore his fault. It seemed not to matter that the responsibilities of the premier had not the least thing to do with the navy or actions against foreign nations. The premier’s absence in public suggested that Li had been successful, not only in blaming Sheng, but in removing him from any chance of ever attaining the presidency.
China’s succession process, if one could call it that, had always been opaque in the extreme. It somewhat resembled the old Soviet Union where, if a leader was said to have a cold, one might infer that what was actually cold was his corpse. At any rate, the disappearance of the premier, at least from the public eye, did not bode well either for his health or his well-being. That all this was happening concurrent with the boycott and China’s military misadventures implied instability, and instability involving a nuclear power is always troubling. But the events that were taking place in tightly guarded rooms in Beijing were extraordinary, even by Chinese standards.
For several weeks Li’s clique had largely held sway, though he had not been given an entirely free hand, either in terms of a full-blown crackdown or a go ahead to take additional military action on the South China Sea. Sheng’s allies and even some of the hard-liners had made a forceful case that events in the South China Sea and the disastrous military response to the Tianjin debacle had only weakened China’s hand. They used as evidence the fact that West had actually succeeded in doing what had heretofore been thought impossible: cooperating to a degree that was making the boycott effective. There was danger of further uniting the West against China.
As a result, Li and his allies in the PLA had been forced to employ what amounted to a bluff on the South China Sea. It had failed miserably when Vietnam’s ships simply continued sailing eastward without so much as a wave. China had now been humiliated twice in the eyes of the world. Li and his allies dared not ignore the possibility that another colossal loss of face could ultimately result in their being purged. One of Sheng’s strongest allies on the Standing Committee was working diligently to accomplish precisely that.
Ma Wen was nine years old when his father and mother took part in the infamous ‘Long March.’ The Communist armies, in danger of encirclement by Chinese Nationalist Party forces, had embarked on a series of marches which were said to have covered 8,000 miles and from which only ten percent of the original force survived. Ma’s mother had been one of those who perished as the army traversed some of the most difficult terrain in China. This heroic event in Chinese history had resulted in the elevation of Mao Tse Tung to the leadership of the most populous country on the planet. It also meant that Ma Wen had a very special pedigree and a powerful voice on the Standing Committee.
In his long life, Ma Wen had come full circle. Mao Zedong was said to have been responsible for the murder of more than forty million people during his reign. Those who survived did so in part by never questioning his decisions. Ma Wen had not only witnessed this but had participated in much of the horror that was China in those decades. He had personally overseen the uprooting and imprisonment of most of China’s educated and cultural classes during the disastrous Cultural Revolution. He had personally signed the death warrants of countless of China’s most gifted citizens, simply because their intelligence was a threat to a regime that valued obedience above all else.
Now, with the perspective of time and the wisdom of his eighty-seven years, Ma realized that while brutality encourages obedience, it must be constantly reapplied. Decades of continual brutality had resulted in a nation of cowering slaves who produced only what they were forced to and never, ever took any initiative. Ma and others felt that for China to grow, there must be a system of rewards. In what was one of the most clever moves in human history, they decided to create a capitalist economic system within a Communist political system. Although they well understood that freedom is a powerful drug and that once unleashed would be difficult to control, they also knew that without it, China would continue to mirror the nation of zombies that is North Korea.
In the intervening years, China’s metamorphosis had turned a drab gray cocoon into a brilliant butterfly of neon cities with daring skyscrapers, high-speed trains and a population that was, for the most part, content to have cars, refrigerators and televisions and all the coveted goods formerly reserved for the West in exchange for obedience to the Communist Party. For the first time, the Chinese people could actually aspire to own the goods they produced. In the early years of this transformation, bicycles carrying small refrigerators and televisions were a common sights as the exhilaration of consumerism spread across China. But as the age of I-Phones and the internet dawned, the very technology and innovation that made these goods possible created challenges for the Communist Party by revealing another world, a world which the Party did not wish its people to see.
Armies of censors vainly struggled to block the images that made the people long for more freedom, more choice. But it was like trying to catch every raindrop in a storm. With each new technological innovation, the futility of it only grew as the government appeared more repressive and pathetic. Now the very thing that had made China’s growing power possible was threatened – cheap exports. China’s new found greatness was fueled by the world’s insatiable thirst for affordable goods. It was the enormous influx of dollars from the sale of these goods abroad that built the bullet trains and skyscrapers, not to mention the ships and planes that now threatened the South China Sea. Only by controlling everything from wages to the exchange rate of the yuan could the Communist Party keep export prices low and foreign demand high.
The old men knew that democracy would inevitably lead to higher wages which would in turn result in reduced demand and more competition from other nations; this was already occurring. If the rush toward democracy were not curtailed, the end game would be the diminution of China’s wealth and power and the end of the dream of the Chinese Communist Party – global domination. Li Guo Peng did not intend to allow this to happen. He had successfully sidelined the moderate Sheng, but Ma Wen was proving to be a far greater challenge. His pedigree and position in the Party were unassailable. Indeed, were it not for his age, he might well be the next Chinese President. Clearly, he could not be purged or even attacked.
But Ma Wen had become weak in Li’s eyes. He had vet
oed the use of force against the Vietnamese frigate, in part because he feared that it might actually prevail in a battle with the Chinese warship. Of the latest Russian design, the frigate was a formidable ship and losing a battle to it would be an unacceptable loss of face. Of course, China could have brought far more force to bear than could Vietnam, but a large scale conflict would not be expedient at this point in time.
Ma had also sided with Sheng in preferring to admit and deal with events in Tianjin, but the PLA had overruled them both, and a disaster had ensued. Now, with the American boycott growing and beginning to spread to Europe, Ma felt that it was not an auspicious time to throw more fuel on the fire. He felt strongly that China could outlast the United States in terms of the boycott and that the American public pressure would soon force Washington to capitulate.
Li seethed at what he perceived as timidity. He was convinced that China had reached a position of sufficient strength to call the bluff of any nation; his friends in the PLA concurred. But Ma and his allies stood in the way of going all in and Li resolved to break the impasse. He had formulated a plan, one that he would share with no one, not even the other hardliners. He would tell them only once the plan had been executed. Li was about to gamble everything on an audacious and dangerous move. If it failed, he would likely pay with his life.
Two Peasants and a President Page 29