Fat Years - Chan Koonchung [99]
He Dongsheng was just waiting for a major stroke of luck that would allow for the accomplishment of big things. Privately his plan was known as the “Action Plan for Ruling the Nation and Pacifying the World.” This title followed the old neo-Confucian slogan, but no matter how many sleepless nights he spent thinking about it, with its echoes of imperial Confucianism, he just couldn’t come up with a new name.
If a major crisis didn’t occur in a timely fashion, the transition from the then ruling group to a new ruling group would be fraught with danger. On the one hand, the Communist Party’s transfers of power have always been dangerous—full of fierce power struggles between various inner-party factions. On the other hand, there have certainly been many problems during the past few years, starting with the 2008 financial tsunami. Contradictions in Chinese society have intensified, Party officials have been shown to be at fault at every turn and have indeed grown extremely weak; they have given their enemies much food for criticism. If things continued like that right up to the next Party Congress, the ruling group would certainly have had to step down. He Dongsheng was not a member of the ruling group’s inner circle; at the time, he was merely a major figure who had served consecutive Party leaderships. He had a pretty good idea, though, who was slightly less reprehensible, and who was much more unscrupulous. He rather preferred to support the empowerment of some of those technocrats who had little family background to recommend them. Be that as it may, he didn’t want to be dragged into a power struggle between various factions; he didn’t want to see China’s political situation thrown into greater turmoil due to transfer of power within the Party.
He needed Heaven’s help. If, about a year before the scheduled transfer of power, a major crisis occurred and the Politburo decided to scrupulously follow his “Action Plan for Ruling the Nation and Pacifying the World”—with that, He Dongsheng believed, China would certainly be saved. Of course, future generations would never know how much blood, sweat, and tears he, He Dongsheng, had contributed to the perfection of this strategy. They would never know that his plan was his own ingenious design to preserve Communist Party rule in China forever. All the credit would go to the existing party-state leadership.
He Dongsheng had grasped very early on the imminence of another crisis in Western capitalism. His own investment strategy was to bet against the U.S. dollar. He had been in Zhongnanhai for so many years, and at first, like all the other high officials, he spent as much as possible of his Chinese renminbi in purchasing dollars. About ten years earlier, he became less confident about his dollar assets. At that point, he exchanged his American currency for Canadian dollars, to pay for his only son’s school fees overseas. He also purchased a mansion in an old bourgeois neighborhood called Shaughnessy in Vancouver. With the remainder of his American funds, he bought into gold, petroleum, and other mineral and energy stocks with the intention of hanging on to them long term. Even more importantly, he decided to retain a good deal of renminbi and invest them in the Chinese real estate market. He didn’t play the Chinese stock market because he couldn’t spare the time, didn’t like the duplicity and lack of transparency of the whole game, and didn’t want to appear