“How badly will that hurt them?” SecState asked.
“Scott, I grant you it seems a little odd that the fate of a nation could ride on Victoria’s Secret brassieres, but money is money. They need it, and all of a sudden there’s a big hole in their current account. How big? Billions. It’s going to make a hell of a bellyache for them.”
“Any actual harm?” Ryan asked.
“Not my department, Jack,” Winston answered. “That’s Scott.”
“Okay.” Ryan turned his head to look at his other cabinet member.
“Before I can answer that, I need to know what net effect this will have on the Chinese economy.”
Winston shrugged. “Theoretically, they could ride this out with minimal difficulties, but that depends on how they make up the shortfall. Their national industrial base is an incredibly muddled hodgepodge of private- and state-owned industries. The private ones are the efficient ones, of course, and the worst of the state-owned industries belong to their army. I’ve seen analyses of PLA operations that look like something out of MAD magazine, just impossible to credit on first reading. Soldiers don’t generally know much about making things—they’re better at breaking them—and tossing Marxism into the mix doesn’t exactly help the situation. So, those ‘enterprises’ piss away vast quantities of cash. If they shut those down, or just cut them back, they could kiss this little shortfall off and move on—but they won’t.”
“That’s right,” Adler agreed. “The Chinese People’s Liberation Army has a lot of political clout over there. The party controls it, but the tail wags the dog to a considerable extent. There’s quite a bit of political and economic unrest over there. They need the army to keep things under control, and the PLA takes a big cut off the top of the national treasure because of that.”
“The Soviets weren’t like that,” POTUS objected.
“Different country, different culture. Keep that in mind.”
“Klingons,” Ryan muttered, with a nod. “Okay, go on.”
Winston took the lead. “We can’t predict the impact this will have on their society without knowing how they’re going to react to the cash shortfall.”
“If they squeal when it starts to hurt, what do we do?” Ryan asked next.
“They’re going to have to make nice, like reinstating the Boeing and Caterpillar orders, and doing it publicly.”
“They won’t—they can’t,” Adler objected. “Too much loss of face. Asian mind-set. That won’t happen. They might offer us concessions, but they’ll have to be hidden ones.”
“Which is not politically acceptable to us. If I try to take that to Congress, first they’ll laugh at me, then they’ll crucify me.” Ryan took a sip of his drink.
“And they won’t understand why you can’t tell Congress what to do. They think you’re a strong leader, and therefore you’re supposed to make decisions on your own,” EAGLE informed his President.
“Don’t they know anything about how our government works?” POTUS asked.
“Jack, I’m sure they have all sorts of experts who know more about the constitutional process than I do, but the Politburo members are not required to listen to them. They come from a very different political environment, and that’s the one they understand. For us ‘the people’ means popular opinion, polls, and ultimately elections. For them, it means the peasants and workers who are supposed to do what they’re told.”
“We do business with these people?” Winston asked the ceiling.
“It’s called realpolitik, George,” Ryan explained.
“But we can’t pretend they don’t exist. There’s over a billion of them, and, oh, by the way, they also have nuclear weapons, on ballistic launchers, even.” Which added a decidedly unpleasant element to the overall equation.
“Twelve of them, according to CIA, and we can turn their country into a parking lot if we have to, just it’ll take twenty-four hours instead of forty minutes,” Ryan told his guests, managing not to get a chill when he said it. The possibility was too remote to make him nervous. “And they know that, and who wants to be the king of a parking lot? They are that rational, Scott, aren’t they?”
“I think so. They rattle their saber at Taiwan, but not even much of that lately, not when we have Seventh Fleet there all the time.” Which, however, burned up a lot of fuel oil for the Navy.
“Anyway, this cash problem won’t actually cripple their economy?” Jack asked.
“I don’t think so, unless they’re pretty damned dumb.”
“Scott, are they dumb?” Ryan asked State Department.
“Not that dumb—at least I don’t think so,” State told the President.
“Good, then I can go upstairs and have another drink.” Ryan rose, and his guests did the same.
“This is lunacy!” Qian Kun growled at Fang half a world away, discussing what turned out to be the same set of issues.
“I will not disagree with you, Qian, but we must make our case to the rest of our colleagues.”
“Fang, this could mean ruin for us. With what shall we buy wheat and oil?”
“What are our reserves?”
The Finance Minister had to sit back and think about that one. He closed his eyes and tried to remember the numbers on which he got briefed the first Monday of every month. The eyes opened. “The harvest from last year was better than average. We have food for about a year—assuming an average harvest this year, or even a slightly short one. The immediate problem is oil. We’ve been using a lot of that lately, with the PLA’s constant exercises up north and on the coast. In oil, we have perhaps four months in reserve, and the money to purchase another two months. After that, we will have to cut back our uses. Now, we are self-sufficient in coal, and so we’ll have all the electricity we need. The lights will burn. The trains will run, but the PLA will be crippled.” Not that this is an entirely bad thing, he didn’t add. Both men acknowledged the value of the People’s Liberation Army, but today it was really more of a domestic security service, like a large and well-armed police force, than a real guarantor of their national security, which had, really, no external threats to deal with.
“The army won’t like that,” Fang warned.
“I am not overly concerned with their likes and dislikes, Fang,” the Finance Minister countered. “We have a country to bring out of the nineteenth century. We have industries to grow, and people to feed and employ. The ideology of our youth has not been as successful in bringing this about as we were educated to expect.”
“Do you say that…?”
Qian shifted in his chair. “Remember what Deng said? It doesn’t matter if the cat is black or white as long as it catches mice. And Mao exiled him soon thereafter, and so today we have two hundred million more mouths to feed, but the only additional funds with which we do it came to us from the black cat, not the white one. We live in a practical world, Fang. I, too, have my copy of The Little Red Book, but I’ve never tried to eat it.”
This former railroad engineer had been captured by his bureaucracy and his job, just like the last one had been—he’d died at the relatively young age of seventy-eight, before he could be expelled from his Politburo chair. Qian, a youthful sixty-six, would have to learn to watch his words, and his thoughts, more carefully. He was about to say so when Qian started speaking again.
“Fang, people like you and me, we must be able to speak freely to one another. We are not college students full of revolutionary zeal. We are men of years and knowledge, and we must have the ability to discuss issues frankly. We waste too much time in our meetings kneeling before Mao’s cadaver. The man is dead, Fang. Yes, he was a great man, yes, he was a great leader for our people, but no, he wasn’t the Lord Buddha, or Jesus, or whatever. He was only a man, and he had ideas, and most of them were right, but some of them were wrong, some of them don’t work. The Great Leap Forward accomplished nothing, and the Cultural Revolution, in addition to killing off undesirable intellectuals and troublemakers, also starved millions of our people to death, and that is not desirable, is it?”
“That is true, my young friend, but it is important how you present your ideas,” Fang warned his junior, non-voting member of the Politburo. Present them stupidly, and you’ll find yourself counting rice bags on a collective farm. He was a little old to go barefoot into the paddies, even as punishment for ideological apostasy.
“Will you support me?” Qian asked.
“I will try,” was the halfhearted answer. He had to plead Ren He-Ping’s case as well this day, and it wouldn’t be easy.
They’d counted on the funds transfer at Qian’s ministry. They had contracts to pay for. The tanker had long since been scheduled, because they were booked well in advance, and this carrier was just now coming alongside the loading pier off the coast of Iran. She’d load four hundred and fifty-six thousand tons of crude oil over a period of less than a day, then steam back out of the Persian Gulf, turn southeast for the passage around India, then transit the crowded Malacca Strait past Singapore and north to the huge and newly built oil terminal at Shanghai, where she’d spend thirty or forty hours offloading the cargo, then retrace her journey back to the Gulf for yet another load in an endless procession.