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By Root 1510 0

operator. The new cabinet didnt have the usual collection of in-and-out political figures who needed to stroke the press to further their own agendas. Ryan had chiefly selected people with no real agenda at all, which was no small feat—especially since most of them seemed to be competent technicians who, like Ryan, only seemed to want to escape Washington with their virtue intact and return to their real lives as soon as they finished serving their country for a short period of time. The career diplomat had not thought it possible that his countrys government could be so transformed. He assigned credit for all this to that madman Japanese pilot whod killed so much of official Washington in that one lunatic gesture.

It was then that Xu Kun Piao showed up, sweeping in to the greeting room with his official entourage. Xu was General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Peoples Republic of China, and Chairman of the Chinese Politburo, though referred to in the media as the countrys "Premier," which was something of a misnomer, but one adopted even in the diplomatic community. He was a man of seventy-one years, one of the second generation of Chinese leaders. The Long March survivors had long since died out—there were some senior officials who claimed to have been there, but a check of the numbers showed that if they had, theyd been sucking their mothers nipples at the time, and those men were not taken seriously. No, the current crop of Chinese political leaders were mainly the sons or nephews of the original set, raised in privilege and relative comfort, but always mindful of the fact that their place in life was a precarious one. On one side were the other political children who craved advancement beyond their parents places, and to achieve that theyd been more Catholic than the local communist pope. Theyd carried their Little Red Books high as adults during the Cultural Revolution, and before that theyd kept their mouths shut and ears open during the abortive and predatory "Hundred Flowers" campaign of the late 50s, which had trapped a lot of intellectuals whod thought to keep hidden for the first decade of Maoist rule. Theyd been enticed into the open by Maos own solicitation for their ideas, which theyd foolishly given out, and in the process only extended their necks over the broad block for the axe that fell a few years later in the brutal, cannibalistic Cultural Revolution.

The current Politburo members had survived in two ways. First, theyd been secured by their fathers and the rank that attached to such lofty parentage. Second, theyd been carefully warned about what they could say and what they could not say, and so all along theyd observed cautiously, always saying out loud that Chairman Maos ideas were those which China really needed, and that the others, while interesting, perhaps, in a narrow intellectual sense, were dangerous insofar as they distracted the workers and peasants from The True Way of Mao. And so when the axe had fallen, borne as it had been by the Little Red Book, theyd been among the first to carry and show that book to others, and so escaped the destruction for the most part—a few of their number had been sacrificed, of course, but none of the really smart ones who now shared the seats on the Politburo. It had been a brutal Darwinian process that they had all gotten through by being a little smarter than those around them, and now, at the peak of the power won for them by brains and caution, it was time for them to enjoy that which theyd earned.

The new crop of leaders accepted communism as truly as other men believed in God, because theyd learned nothing else, and had not exercised their intellectual agility to seek another faith, or even to seek solutions to the questions that Marxism could not answer. Theirs was a faith of resignation rather than enthusiasm. Raised within a circumscribed intellectual box, they never ventured out of it, for they feared what they might find out there. In the past twenty years, theyd been forced to allow capitalism to blossom within the borders of their country,