hardships would destroy the country. Famine, a complete breakdown of national and provincial infrastructure, and ultimately anarchy were on the horizon. Only through the work of Wei and others like him was China able to stave off a collapse. Wei pressed for the expansion of the Special Economic Zones and the establishment of dozens of smaller free-market and free-trade areas.
A desperate Politburo conceded, Wei’s plan was implemented in its entirety, and China’s quasi-capitalism grew by leaps and bounds.
The gambit paid off. Wei, the chief architect of the financial reform plan, was rewarded for his work. His successes, along with his Princeling status and political pedigree, made him a natural to take over the role of China’s minister of commerce in the Seventeenth Politburo. As he stepped into the role of director of national financial policy, China’s economy was blessed with double-digit growth rates that seemed like they would last forever.
But then the bubble burst.
The world economy entered a protracted downturn shortly after Wei became commerce minister. Both foreign investment into China and exports out of China were hit hard. These two components of the economy, both of which Wei deserved credit for revolutionizing, were the major driving factors of the nation’s double-digit growth rate. They were wellsprings of money that all but dried up when the world stopped buying.
A further expansion of SEZs orchestrated by Wei failed to stop the downward spiral toward catastrophe. Chinese purchases of real estate and currency futures around the world turned into money pits as the European financial crisis and the American real estate downturn broke.
Wei knew how the winds blew in Beijing. His earlier success in free-market reforms to save his country would now be used against him. His political enemies would hold up his economic model as a failure and claim that increasing China’s business relationships with the rest of the world had only exposed China to the infectious disease of capitalism.
So Minister Wei hid the truth of China’s failing economic model by shifting his focus to gargantuan state projects, and by encouraging loans to regional governments to build or upgrade roads and buildings and ports and telecommunication infrastructure. These were the types of investments seen in the old communist economic model, a central government policy to foster economic expansion via massive central planning schemes.
This looked good on paper, and Wei presented growth rates in meetings for three consecutive years that, while not as good as in those first years of expansion after the war, still hovered at a respectable eight or nine percent. He dazzled the Politburo and the lesser houses of government in China, as well as the world’s press, with facts and figures that painted the picture that he wanted them to see.
But it was smoke and mirrors, Wei knew, because the borrowing would never be repaid. Demand for Chinese exports had weakened to a relative trickle, regional government debt had reached seventy percent of GDP, twenty- five percent of all loans were nonperforming in Chinese banks, and still Wei and his ministry encouraged more borrowing, more spending, more building.
It was a house of cards.
And coinciding with Wei’s desperate attempt to hide his nation’s economic problems, a new troubling phenomenon swept across his country like a typhoon.
It was called the Tuidang movement.
After the central government’s woeful response to a calamitous earthquake, protests filled the streets all over the nation. The government pushed back against the protesters, certainly not as forcefully as they could have, but with each arrest or discharge of tear gas the situation grew more unstable.
As the leadership of the crowds was dragged off and imprisoned, the demonstrations moved off the streets for a time, and the Ministry of Public Security felt they had the situation well in control. But the protests moved online in the new social networking and chat board sites available in China and abroad, via well-known workarounds to get past Chinese government Internet filters.
Here, on hundreds of millions of computers and smart phones, the spontaneous protests turned into a well- organized and powerful movement. The CPC was slow to react, while the Ministry of Public Security had batons and pepper spray and paddy wagons but no effective weapons with which to counterpunch the electronic 1’s and 0’s of a viral uprising in cyberspace. The online manifestation of the protests morphed into a revolt over the span of many months, culminating in Tuidang.
Tuidang, or “renounce the party,” was a movement whereby first hundreds, then thousands, and then millions of Chinese citizens publicly left the Communist Party of China. They could do it online, anonymously, or they could make a public announcement outside the country.
In four years the Tuidang movement boasted more than two hundred million renunciations.
It was not the raw number of people who had left the party in the past four years that had the party concerned. In truth, it was difficult to determine the true number of renunciations, because many of the names on the list distributed by the leadership of the Tuidang movement contained pseudonyms and common names that could not be independently verified. Two hundred million dissenters may have been, in truth, only fifty million dissenters. But it was the negative publicity created for the party by those who publicly renounced their membership abroad, and the attention that the success of the uprising was getting in the rest of the world, that scared the Politburo.
Commerce Minister Wei watched the growing Tuidang movement and the anger, confusion, and fear that it created within the Politburo, and he considered the hidden economic problems of his nation. He knew that now was not the time to reveal the looming crisis. Any major austerity reforms would have to wait.
Now was no time to show the central government’s weakness in dealing with
At the Eighteenth Party Congress something incredible happened that was completely unforeseen by Wei Zhen Lin. He was named president of China and general secretary of the Communist Party, making him the ruler of his house of cards.
The election had been, in Chinese Politburo terms, a raucous affair. The two standing members deemed the most likely to take over had both fallen from grace within weeks of the congress, one for a corruption scandal in his home city of Tianjin, and the other due to an arrest of a subordinate and a charge of espionage. Of the remaining Standing Committee members eligible in the election, all but one were members of alliances with one or the other of the disgraced men.
Wei was the odd man out. He was considered an outsider still, unaligned with either faction, so at the relatively tender age of fifty-four he was elected as the compromise candidate.
The three highest offices in China are the president, the general secretary of the Communist Party of China, and the chairmanship of the Central Military Commission, the chief of the military. At times the same person holds all three roles simultaneously, but in Wei’s case, the CMC chairmanship went to another man, Su Ke Qiang, a four- star general in the People’s Liberation Army. Su, the son of one of Mao’s most trusted marshals, had been a childhood friend of Wei’s, together in Beijing and together in Switzerland. Their simultaneous ascendance to the highest levels of power in the nation proved that the Princelings’ time to rule had come.
But from the beginning Wei knew the co-leadership would not mean partnership. Su had been a vocal proponent of military expansionism; he’d given hawkish speeches for domestic consumption about the might of the People’s Liberation Army and China’s destiny as the regional leader and a world power. He and his general staff had been expanding the military over the past decade, thanks to twenty percent annual increases in spending, and Wei knew that Su was not the type of general to build his army only so that they would impress on the parade ground.
Wei knew Su wanted war, and as far as Wei was concerned, a war was the last thing China needed.
Three months after taking two of the three reins of power, at a Standing Committee meeting at Zhongnanhai, the walled government compound in Beijing west of the Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square, Wei made a tactical decision that would result in his placing a pistol against his temple just a month later. He saw it as inevitable that the truth about the nation’s finances would come out, at the very least to those on the Standing Committee. Already rumors of problems were filtering out of the Ministry of Commerce and up from the provinces. So Wei decided to head off the rumors by informing the committee about the coming crisis in “his” economy. To a room of expressionless faces, he announced that he would propose a curtailing of regional borrowing and a number of other
