Blue Warrior (3 page)

4

China National Petroleum Headquarters
Beijing, China

1 May

Z
hou Yi watched the automatic window blinds blot out the smog-choked sky. He sat in a crowded conference room on the top floor of one of the three glass-and-steel monoliths of CNPC headquarters, buildings that were as gray and uninspiring as Beijing’s nearly unbreathable atmosphere. His morning runs in the park the last few days had burned his lungs and stung his eyes. Unfortunately, he was in for more of the same in here. The older executives seated around the long mahogany table lit up cigarettes after tea and coffee had been served by the waitstaff, and now the air in the conference room was clogged with acrid smoke.

As the recently appointed vice president of business affairs of the newly formed Sino-Sahara Oil Corporation, Zhou was expected to spend more time in Beijing, which technically was his birthplace but hardly his home. The grandson of an original Politburo Member and the son of a princeling on the ruling Standing Committee, Zhou was as close to royalty as a communist regime would allow. This gave him unprecedented freedoms, powers, and privileges, but equally binding responsibilities both to his family and his nation. Responsibilities that the handsome and athletic forty-year-old took quite seriously despite his famously hedonistic lifestyle.

Zhao believed he could best fulfill those responsibilities by remaining out in the field and Skyping meetings like this one rather than sitting in a sealed conference room. But when Zhao’s uncle, the chairman of CNPC, summoned him back to company headquarters, Zhao was compelled to obey both as a dutiful nephew and as an up-and-coming executive in the state-owned enterprise that had made his entire family extremely rich over the last four decades—nearly three billion dollars in total.

But Zhou’s meteoric rise was due primarily to his outstanding performance in the field, not his family connections. He’d just outmaneuvered a European energy consortium and brokered a lucrative new oil contract with the Azerbaijani government, still reeling from the Russian invasion nearly two years before. Zhou’s latest promotion was just another rung up on the lofty ladder of his ambition. He had already climbed high, and swiftly, but he had much farther to go. He also knew that one false step from this great height would be fatal to his career, if not his life.

Zhou sat bolt upright in his leather chair and wore the standard gray business suit so common among his peers. However, his suit was an elegant English, hand-tailored affair, perfectly cut to his broad shoulders and accented with a stunning light blue Italian silk tie and pocket square. The effect was bold, even brash, but not rebellious. Zhao was completely committed to serving the cause of China, but equally committed to serving it with style.

The analyst presenting today’s briefing was a member of the Ministry of State Security. Zhou knew him well. They had risen through the ranks of the MSS together, though Zhou’s membership in his nation’s foreign intelligence service was itself a closely guarded state secret.

Zhou’s government properly understood that economic development was itself a weapon in the war against the West, and resource acquisition was key to furthering China’s blistering economic growth. The Western nations still waved the flag of “free enterprise,” but its most successful corporations long ago abandoned pure capitalism in exchange for securing favors with their respective ruling classes by
guaranteeing the politicians’ perpetual reelection in exchange for favorable tax and regulatory policies that guaranteed the “too big to fail” corporations hegemonic dominance in their markets.

Zhou constantly marveled at America’s repudiation of its own past greatness. During his university days, Zhou met more committed communists on the campuses of UCLA and Harvard than he ever had in Beijing. The running joke among the ruling class in China these days was that if you wanted your child to study socialism, send them to an American Ivy League school, but if you wanted them to learn about capitalism, send them to Shanghai. Not only was China a more capitalist nation than the United States these days, it vigorously applied the lessons of American economic development that the Americans themselves had long forgotten. In a short period of time, aggressive, mercantilist trade policies catapulted a newly independent nineteenth-century America into the ranks of the wealthiest nations of Old Europe. Now America ran half-trillion-dollar annual trade deficits, exporting both wealth and jobs as quickly as it was accumulating debt from the same nations with which it ran trade deficits, particularly mercantilist China.

America was in rapid decline, even as its few ruling elites and their “too big to jail” client corporations accumulated ever-more-egregious amounts of wealth and political power. China understood, in fact, that it was because American elites enriched themselves without responsibility to their society that the United States was in an economic and political death spiral. China believed that capitalism should serve the interests of the state. American political elites apparently believed in crony capitalism where the state served the interests of the capitalist masters. The twenty-first century would soon decide which of the two systems was most viable.

The lights dimmed and a 4K HD digital projector lit up a massive screen on the far wall. Images of various African nations, Chinese corporations, and specific industrial enterprises—particularly oil and other natural resources—flashed on the screen as the analyst spoke. No recording devices, tablets, or even paper and pencils were allowed in the room today. Today’s meeting was top secret, and the security
services feared the Western intelligence agencies and their vast cybersurveillance efforts. CNPC was a known target, particularly of the CIA. The purpose of the briefing was for policy orientation only.

“Today, there are over eight hundred Chinese corporations operating in nearly every nation on the African continent,” the analyst began. “Many of them are engaged in resource extraction to meet the growing demand of our rapidly expanding industrial and manufacturing sectors.” Icons matching African resources and Chinese industries flashed in sequence. “Every day, new resource potentials are being discovered and developed across the continent, but none so important as the recent location of new uranium and, amazingly, massive rare-earth-element deposits here in the Saharan desert, in the far reaches of Mali. In fact, Mali may have the world’s single greatest known deposit of lanthanum.”

The screen zoomed in on an image of northeastern Mali to emphasize its importance. The executives gathered around the table whispered excitedly. Lanthanum was critical for the manufacture of batteries. Hybrid cars like the Toyota Prius required more than ten kilograms of the mineral per vehicle, and more hybrids were being brought to the market every day. China itself was now the world’s largest car market, and hybrids were key to the expansion of that market. The startling new REE discovery in Mali was obviously the reason why this top secret emergency meeting had been called.

“As you are all well aware, China is the world’s largest producer of rare earth elements, giving us nearly monopolistic control over their use. This allows us to minimize their costs for ourselves but also deny their use to our biggest competitors.” From an earlier briefing, Zhou knew that the seventeen chemical elements on the periodic table known as REEs weren’t, technically, “rare” so much as widely dispersed throughout the earth’s crust—but seldom in harvestable amounts. Those elements were critical in other key new technological products like wind turbines, lasers, and cell phones. China was the country with the greatest concentration of REE deposits and was currently mining between 80 and 90 percent of all REEs today. That near monopoly provided China
with a significant competitive advantage it had no intention of relinquishing. That competitive advantage was one of the reasons why Los Angeles Metro had purchased its first all-electric buses from the Chinese corporation BYD.

“Fortunately,” the analyst continued, “Mali has recently signed new contracts with the Sino-Sahara Oil Corporation, which includes provisions for all other forms of underground resource acquisition. Unfortunately, Mali, like most other African nations, might soon be tempted to reconsider the terms of the very generous contracts we have signed with them. They also have an indigenous population problem in the area.”

“You mean the Tuaregs,” Zhao said. Prior to his new appointment, Zhao had thrown himself into research into the Sahara region. The vast desert occupied significant portions of Mali, Algeria, Niger, and Libya, which also happened to be the most important resource states in the area. Nomadic Tuareg warrior clans had freely roamed the vast Sahara since the fifth century before Christ.

“The Mali government has already begun operations to nullify the Tuareg problem,” the analyst said. “They are fractured and disorganized.”

“Are you referring to the Africans or the Tuaregs?” one of the executives blurted out. The room exploded with laughter. Even the stoic chairman grinned.

“The Tuaregs have been restless for quite some time,” Zhao interrupted. “Are you confident the government in Bamako is on top of this?”

The analyst smiled. “I believe the term
Tuareg
in Arabic means ‘abandoned by God.’ So, yes, unless God shows up, President Kouyaté should be able to quell them soon enough.”

“You just can’t trust a damn African,” a voice in the dark muttered. It was the vice president of one of the civil engineering firms building new highways in the rapidly expanding northern corridor. Murmurs rumbled around the table as graying heads nodded in agreement. “The Kenyans canceled one of our contracts for the new highway expansion
project between Mombasa and Nairobi last week. They claimed there were environmental concerns, but all they really were concerned about was more money.” The middle-aged executive slowly rubbed his open palm for emphasis.

Zhao knew what the engineer said was true, but it was only a small piece of the picture. China’s decades-old policy of “noninterference” in the domestic affairs of other nations meant his government would gladly do business with the tyrants and despots that the West shunned on humanitarian grounds. Chinese government and business officials also freely issued “soft” development funds and loans—financial transactions unencumbered by human rights provisions or even basic accounting principles. These aid packages were giant pots of money from which greedy, cruel African elites could dip freely for their personal use so long as Chinese interests were also served in the process.

Chinese firms were also quick to provide arms, ammunition, and other contraband items denied to dictatorial regimes by the moralizing Western powers. Security treaties and Chinese military bases soon followed. By such means, China swifly gained lucrative footholds across the continent.

But the other reality, Zhao knew, was that Chinese firms wreaked terrible environmental damage all over Africa in recent years—just as they had in their own country for decades. Over eight million acres of arable Chinese land were now so polluted they could never be used for food production. Arable land had decreased in China even as industrialization exploded. Africa, on the other hand, possessed the world’s largest supply of arable land and could amply serve as China’s new food basket if exploited properly.

Chinese companies also imported their own labor, even low-skilled positions, and dominated local economies. They were as rapacious and colonizing as the Great Powers had been in the nineteenth century, lacking only the missionary zeal of “the white man’s burden” to justify their efforts. The Chinese government no longer had any vested interest in spreading the gospel of communism, as it once had in the sixties—such quaint sentiments were bad for business. Freshly minted Third
World communist revolutionaries tended to nationalize key industries, and Chinese businessmen held no interest in that. Neither did Zhao. He fully appreciated the Africans’ concerns, but he didn’t care about them. Like his own government, Zhao was a supreme pragmatist. Economic development always came at a high price, and every great nation had to pay it at one time or another. If Africa wanted to develop with China’s help, Zhao reasoned, it should have to do so on China’s terms.