War of Eagles

NINE

The twentieth-century Chinese Communist leader Liu Shao-ch’i once said that there could be no such thing as a perfect leader in China. The nation was too large, its population too diverse.

“If there is such a leader,” the philosopher-politician posited in a collection of his writings, “he is only pretending, like a pig inserting scallions into its nose to look like an elephant.”

Balding, stocky Prime Minister Le Kwan Po was not sure he agreed that China was ungovernable. But it was true that leading this nation of provinces with vastly different histories and needs required an individual of uncommon wisdom and resourcefulness. There is a tale told about the last dowager empress of China, Tz’u-hsi, whose reign was marked by the rise and fall of the turbulent Boxer Rebellion. The insurrection was named for the men at the center of the revolt, the secret society of the Righteous Harmonious Fists, which was founded in 1898 and fought to keep China from falling under the undue influence of foreigners. The empress approved of the modern conveniences brought by British, Russians, Japanese, and Americans, devices such as telegraphs and trains. But she disapproved of missionaries and foreign influence over Chinese affairs. It was a difficult balance to support them both.

One morning, a Boxer was captured after murdering a British businessman on his way to the embassy. The Boxer beat him to death in his carriage, the businessman’s Chinese driver having run off at the sight of the attacker. One of Tz’u-hsi’s advisers wanted the Boxer beheaded. Another counselor warned that to do so would only encourage the Boxers to hit harder. The empress allowed the execution to take place, though not for the attack on the foreigner. In her decree she stated that the man’s actions had set one of her ministers against the other and disturbed the tranquillity of the morning. For that crime, and that only, he was to die.

Le Kwan Po contemplated the complexities of gestures and appearances as his state car pulled away from the government building at No. 2, Chaoyangmen Nandajie, Chaoyang District, in Beijing. His own life was full of such careful maneuvers. For example, the prime minister had two cars. One was a Chinese-made Lingyang, the Antelope, and the other a more comfortable Volkswagen Polo manufactured at the German-run plant in Shanghai. He rode the Antelope in Beijing, the Polo in the less populated countryside.

Always a balance for appearances, he thought. Please the nationalists while holding something out for potential foreign investors.

Except for the driver, the prime minister was the only passenger in the chauffer-driven car. Typically, an aide and a secretary rode home with the sixty-six-year-old native of the remote Xizang Zizhiqu province near Nepal. But the prime minister felt like being alone tonight. He wanted to reflect on the disturbing events of the day.

He looked out the window as the car drove past the lighted monuments and palaces surrounding Tian’anmen Square. It was a hot and rainy night. Large drops ran down the window. They smeared the lights of the city — fittingly, on a day when nothing was clear. The driver guided the small sedan through narrow side streets. At this hour, in this weather, the lanes were sparsely populated with the carts and bicycles that filled them during the day. The vehicle moved quickly toward Le Kwan Po’s nearby Beijing residence on the top floor of the exclusive Cheng Yuan Towers apartment complex. The prime minister had another official home, a weekend retreat in the Beijing suburbs at the foot of Shou’an Mountain near Xiangshan Park. During the week the prime minister preferred to remain in the city. That allowed him to work as late as possible. It also permitted him to stay synchronized with the pulse of Beijing.

It enabled him to watch those who wanted his job or sought to remove him as a thoughtful, mediating influence.

The prime minister enjoyed the tranquillity of the countryside, yet that scenic, agrarian world was China’s past. The future was in the increasingly cosmopolitan capital and cities like Shanghai, with their proliferation of students and businessmen — many of them from rich Taiwan, the supposed enemy. That was another act for an acrobat greater than any the Beijing Opera had yet produced: solving the Taiwan question. Chinese businesses were growing enormously due to investments coming across the strait. The Chinese military was being held to the budgetary levels of previous years as the threat from both Taipei and Russia was diminished. That did not make high-ranking career officers happy. Fewer commands meant fewer promotions. It caused grumbling up and down the ranks.

Though Le Kwan Po knew what the empress experienced a century ago, he did not have her wisdom. He had not fought wars and rivals, dealt with prejudice against his gender and heritage, nor had to guard against or formulate regicidal plots. He was simply a conservative career politician, the son of a schoolteacher mother. His father had been a village magistrate at twenty-one and had risen regularly to positions in town, county, municipality, province, and finally the central government. He was not the prime minister solely because of his experience in government. He was here because, unlike his colleagues, he had not made any serious missteps. His background was spotted and propped with careful alliances and cautious agendas.

Even more important than the ruthless will of the dowager empress, however, the prime minister did not have her unilateral authority to act. In addition to the president and vice president above him, there was a cabinet with very powerful and ambitious ministers and the National People’s Congress with its proliferation of special interests, both local and personal.

The current struggle between Chou Shin, head of the secretive 8341 Unit of the Central Security Regiment, and People’s Liberation Army hero General Tam Li was outside the prime minister’s experience. According to reports Le Kwan Po had received from the Ministry of State Security — the Guojia Anquan Bu, or Guoanbu — the two rivals had begun a long-simmering face down today in two foreign ports. And that was just part of the problem. Tam Li was one of those officers who was unhappy with the lack of growth in the military. If his two displeasures converged, and he wished to express them at home, he could be a formidable threat to the stability of the nation.

It was just like it was in feudal times, when every man of importance had centuries of hate behind him. Then, even if a man was willing to look past personal differences with another, the shadow of their ancestors would not allow it.

It was quite a burden, the prime minister reflected.

It was also easier to defend clan honor centuries ago, when a man was surrounded by like-minded individuals, and vast distances made confrontation an occasional matter. Today, the few men who harbored different loyalties, who had different goals, were in very close proximity. For the most part they managed to work together in the name of nationalism.

But not always.

The rain tapped on the roof. The prime minister reached into the vest pocket of his white trench coat. He withdrew a case of cigarettes and lit one. He sat back. Whenever China finally managed to reverse the trend and spread its influence around the world, there were two things he hoped. First, that his people would learn to make a car as good as a BMW or a Mercedes. And second, that they could produce a cigarette as soul-satisfying as a Camel.

The prime minister did not know how he wanted to pursue this conflict between proud, stubborn, influential members of the government. It was not a matter he wished to present to the president or vice president. Disputes between officials, even those with international ramifications, were the responsibility of the prime minister. He was supposed to be able to settle them.

Le Kwan Po wished that securing peace was as easy as sacrificing a minor third party, the way the dowager empress did with the Boxers. Of course, that only delayed the inevitable, having to deal with the rebellion itself. The foreign powers sent their own armies to China to crush the nationalists. Not only did the empress decline to stop them, she embraced their Western ways.

China did not.

The dynasty fell shortly after Tz’u-hsi’s death. Nationalist forces were so upset with her legacy that they blasted open the royal tomb, stole the riches, and mutilated her remains. The anti-imperial backlash allowed Dr. Sun Yat-sen and Chiang Kai-shek to come to power, each espousing a form of Western-style republic that opened wounds and created political and ideological chaos. It was not until Mao Tse-tung and the Communists came to power in 1949 that order was truly restored.

That had been a proud time, centuries in the making. Le Kwan Po remembered hearing his father read of the events from newspapers that were published in a tiny print shop in their small village of Gamba. The prime minister’s uncle set type there in the evening. During the day, he worked in a quarry that was literally in the shadow of Mount Everest. The young Le could still vividly remember the joy in his father’s voice as he read about the end to the civil war that had tortured a nation already bleeding from the long war with Japan. He was almost giddy about the victory of the Communists over the republicans — who had the temerity to call themselves nationalists — certain it would help those who had to work all day, every day, just to support a small family in an extremely modest lifestyle.

When the newspaper was closed by the new regime, Le Kwan Po’s uncle was asked to stay on to typeset a new weekly publication, Principles from the People’s Administrative Council. The young boy was as proud as he could be when he attended the new school that the Communists opened in Gamba, and he was selected to read the first issue to the class.

The senior members of the current government — this prime minister included — remembered the taste and feel of disorder. They did not want to see it return, not as a result of student demonstrations in Tian’anmen Square or from disagreements among powerful members of the government.

The prime minister exhaled smoke through his nose. He thought about the fake elephant of Liu Shao-ch’i. Somehow, he would have to convince the warring forces that he was a dragon. That the only way to defeat him was to put their differences aside and join forces.

Le Kwan Po did not know how he was going to do that. All he knew was one thing.

That it had to be done, and done quickly.