Two Peasants and a President (44 page)

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 disappea
r
ance, 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 i
n
controvertible 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 d
e
bacle had only weakened China’s hand.  They used as evidence the fact that West had actually succeeded in doing what had heretofore been thought i
m
possible: 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 pe
r
ished as the army traversed some of the most difficult terrain in China.  This heroic event in Chinese history had resulte
d 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 dec
i
sions.  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 Co
m
munist 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 pr
o
duced.  In the early years of this transformation, bicycles carrying small r
e
frigerators and televisions were a common sights as the exhilaration of co
n
sumerism 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 f
u
tility
of it
only grew as the government appeared more repressive and p
a
thetic.  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 e
x
change 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 una
s
sailable.  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 vetoed 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 e
x
pedient 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 Was
h
ington 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. 

Feigning illness and the unavailability of his usual doctor, Li asked Ma
Wen’s
doctor to see him.  Expecting to be dealing with the usual ailments of the most powerful men in China, Dr. Chen
Zu
stood poised with stethoscope hanging around his neck, waiting to shake the hand of a man he’d never met.   He wore a kindly smile, one soon to
be ruffled by an unusual demand
. 

******

“If the western economies, and indeed the world, are to find a light in this ever-darkening tunnel, then we must find the light switch together,” said Senator Baines, addressing the Senate.  “We cannot continue to rain down blows on each other’s economies and to brandish our swords and expect to move anywhere but downward into the abyss.”

“Make no mistake,” he continued, “my words are not a balm; I do not speak to calm you, rather to unite you to rise above what has gone before.  Let my message not be confused with weakness and indecisiveness, for they will only lead us back down the path from which we came.  Our voices must be as one, first: to admit to ourselves that we have allowed partisan diffe
r
ences to imperil our nation; second: to say to China that we can no longer
allow trade between our two nations to unfairly favor one side or the other; and third: that from this moment on, that nation’s attempt to dominate its neighbors and us by force of arms or wealth can only lead to disaster for all.  It . . . Must . . . Cease!”  

“I propose that each government appoint three representatives to fo
r
mulate rules to prevent the unfair trade practices that have placed us all in jeopardy.  I further propose that for ninety days, during which time the pa
r
ties will meet, that trade be resumed as it was before.  Finally, I propose that if, according to our representatives, at the end of ninety days, substantial progress has not been made to level the playing field, then this nation will reinstate recent tariffs.  China as well as the United States knows that these tariffs have caused pain for all.  I would therefore hope that the threat of their re-imposition will provide sufficient impetus for each side to move heaven and Earth to break the impasse.”

Some compared the senator’s words to Winston Churchill.  Others had nothing kind to say.  All agreed that a statesman was needed.  The president had considerable eloquence, but it now seemed to most that while he wore the hat of a statesman, in his heart he was not.  Many who had been swept away by his bold oratory and stirring words had come to the conclusion that they were just that, words.  Some had less flattering things to say, but few now thought that he was a man who could be trusted.  Two days after Senator Baines speech in the House, the president spoke similar words.  He would later try to take the credit, as he had done often in the past.  But few were listening.