The Bear and the Dragon - Tom Clancy [316]
Fang had never before considered all of these thoughts in toto. Like the others, he'd worried a lot when the college students had demonstrated, building up their "goddess of liberty" out of plaster or papier-mache—Fang didn't remember, though he did remember his sigh of relief when the PLA had destroyed it. It came as a surprise to him, the realization of how snared he was here in this place. The power he and his colleagues exercised was like something shown before a mirror that could be turned on them all instantly under the proper circumstances. They had immense power over every citizen in their country, but that power was all an illusion—
—and, no, they couldn't allow another country to dictate political practices to them, because their lives all depended on that illusion. It was like smoke on a calm day, seemingly a pillar to hold up the heavens, but the slightest wind could blow it all away, and then the heavens would fall. On them all.
But Fang also saw that there was no way out. If they didn't change to make America happy, then their country would run out of wheat and oil, and probably other things as well, and they would risk massive social change in a groundswell from below. But if to prevent that, they allowed some internal changes, they would just be inviting the same thing on themselves.
Which would kill them the more surely?
Did it matter? Fang asked himself. Either way, they'd be just as dead. He wondered idly how it would come, the fists of a mob, or bullets before a wall, or a rope. No, it would be bullets. That was how his country executed people. Probably preferable to the beheading sword of old. What if the swordsman missed his aim, after all? It must have been a horrid mess. He only had to look around the table to see that everyone here had similar thoughts, at least those with enough wit. All men feared the unknown, but now they had to choose which unknown to fear, and the choice was yet another thing to dread.
"So, Qian, you say we risk running out of things because we can no longer get the money we need to purchase them?" Premier Xu asked.
"That is correct," the Finance Minister confirmed.
"In what other ways could we get money and oil?" Xu asked next.
"That is not within my purview, Chairman," Qian answered.
"Oil is its own currency," Zhang said. "And there is ample oil to our north. There is also gold, and many other things we need. Timber in vast quantities. And that which we need most of all—space, living space for our people."
Marshal Luo nodded. "We have discussed this before."
"What do you mean?" Fang asked.
"The Northern Resource Area, our Japanese friends once called it," Zhang reminded them all.
"That adventure ended in disaster," Fang observed at once. "We were fortunate not to have been damaged by it."
"But we were not damaged at all," Zhang replied lightly. "We were not even implicated. We can be sure of that, can we not, Luo?"
"This is so. The Russians have never strengthened their southern defenses. They even ignore our exercises that have raised our forces to a high state of readiness."
"Can we be sure of that?"
"Oh, yes," the Defense Minister told them all. "Tan?" he asked.
Tan Deshi was the chief of the Ministry of State Security, in charge of the PRC's foreign and domestic intelligence services. One of the younger men here at seventy, he was probably the healthiest of them all, a nonsmoker and a very light imbiber of alcohol. "When we first began our increased exercises, they watched with