He had stopped in at the Oval Office to look through papers on welfare reform before going on to a small dinner in the White House. The telephone interruption reminded him of the time. Only a handful of his closest colleagues had the number. Bradlay picked it up. The caller was Marty Weinstein, his National Security Adviser. `Mr President, I'm sorry to disturb you,' he said.
On the eve of Operation Dragonstrike China was an economically powerful one-party state, ruled behind the scenes by the People's Liberation Army, a military force of two million men under arms. At the leadership's disposal were strategic nuclear weapons, a blue-water navy and a modernized air force.
The economies of Russia, the United States, and Europe were inextricably linked with China. Boeing, Motorola, Mercedes, Siemens, GEC, and other multinationals had factories and investment locked up in the Chinese market. The Russian arms industry, the main survivor of the Yeltsin years, supplied much of the equipment and technical know-how to China's growing military-industrial complex, especially its air force and navy. Western democracies had become resigned to Chinese human rights violations. The hope that the country would fragment like the former Soviet Union had proved to be an illusion.
The Chinese economic miracle had astonished the world, but the Communist Party's leaders were themselves only too aware of the problems posed by sustaining such rapid growth. Corruption was widespread; food shortages returned to haunt the Party. It had to keep 1.3 billion people believing (or at least not resisting the thought) that only the Party held the Mandate of Heaven to rule China. To bolster its popularity, the Party developed an ideology of authoritarian nationalism which stressed the unique qualities of Chinese culture and civilization. It reminded the Chinese people that democracy was alien to their society. It invoked the great sage Confucius, who said the bonds that united the Chinese nation were like those which held the family together: respect for one's parents and for the institutions of government. Opponents of the regime argued that this selective mixture of nationalism, authoritarianism, xenophobia, and expediency was not much more than an Asian form of Fascism. They warned that China posed the greatest threat to world peace since the rise of Fascist Germany and Italy in the 1930s.
By the mid-nineties, the Party leadership was convinced that the United States planned to contain China's growth. Confirmation came in March 1996, when United States warships were deployed in the South China Sea to protect Taiwan during Chinese military exercises. The PLA vowed that it would never again be humiliated by America. Funds being used for civilian infrastructure development were diverted to accelerate the modernization of the military. The areas of concentration were the navy, air force, and missile research. A strategic partnership with Russia was forged.
There were also economic reasons to build up the nation's military capability. China's independence in energy supply was being eroded by its rapid development. To maintain the momentum China had become a huge net importer of oil. It felt vulnerable to the vagaries of the international oil markets. The government believed the only largely untapped reserves of oil were around two remote and uninhabited groups of reefs and shoals in the South China Sea known as the Spratly and Paracel Islands. They were 800 kilometres apart, and lay in one of the world's busiest waterways. Oil exploration had been limited because the territory was contested. China had a historic claim to the whole of the South China Sea, but its ownership was disputed by several countries in the region: Vietnam, which argued a history of occupation and development of the islands, and the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia, all of which could mount plausible claims to some of the islands and a lot of the South China Sea. These waters, which carried the shipping routes between the Indian and Pacific Oceans, were a vital waterway for all countries of the region, especially Japan, which had to import virtually all the energy it consumed. Nearly a quarter of world ocean-going trade crossed them each year.
By the end of the twentieth century, as the forces of national pride and economic vulnerability converged, East Asia became embroiled in an arms race. There was a sense that the serene days of living under the security umbrella of the United States would soon end. America was tired. Its carping about human rights had made it unpopular among nations whose Western-educated leaders preached the virtues of strong leadership and warned of the dangers to social cohesion of Western decadence. The region felt it was ready to look after itself; it was impatient to do so. Many of the South-East Asian countries prepared to defend themselves. Both Japan and China were jostling to inherit the mantle of regional leader. Yet Japan was unwelcome because of its record of colonization during the first half of the twentieth century; China because of its cultural chauvinism.
Defence spending in East Asia became the highest in the world. Between 1994 and 1996, budgets in some countries went up by more than 20 per cent as they commissioned new aircraft and fighting ships. Japan became the highest spender on defence of any country in the Pacific apart from America. Its security relationship with the United States, once rock solid, was cracking under the strain of yet more vociferous American demands for Japan to open its market, and a desire among a new generation of Japanese leaders to see the country stand on its own two feet. China's plans remained veiled in secrecy. It designed fighter aircraft with Pakistan. It bought warplanes and fighting ships from Russia. It hired teams of Russian scientists to work on delivery systems for long-range missiles. It dispatched agents to Europe, America, and Australia to bring back technology which was denied to it by the international community on the open market. Within a few years, it had created the ability to project its power regionally through combined naval and air operations. What it lacked in technology it made up for in human ingenuity.
The overriding consideration for China's leaders had remained unchanged since Mao proclaimed the founding of the People's Republic in October 1949: preservation of Communist Party rule. Yet, by the dawning of the twenty-first century, the Party's grasp on power was uncertain. The leadership's fear of luan (chaos) was palpable. They needed a fresh mandate. A war to recover sovereign territory rapidly moved from being a plausible to a necessary way ahead. In pursuit of their aims, China's leaders were prepared temporarily to forfeit economic development for nationalism, and to take casualties in war. President Wang concluded that none of China's smaller Asian neighbours would risk conflict, nor were they united enough to confront China as a single military force. Only Vietnam would fight. Wang knew from personal experience how well the Vietnamese could fight. This time, however, the outcome would be different. Historically, the Chinese and Vietnamese were known as `brother enemies'. The Vietnamese Communist Party had already held provincial-level elections and had hinted at full parliamentary and presidential elections within the next five years. It had signed a bilateral defence treaty with France, its former colonial power.
Dragonstrike, the Chinese military occupation of the South China Sea and the humbling of Vietnam, would receive widespread support throughout China. It would legitimize the Party's grip on power, secure energy supplies, challenge the military power of America, and declare China the regional leader in East Asia.
The interruption came at the end of an informal dinner with Michael Stephenson, the Prime Minister, Charles Wentworth, the Foreign Secretary, Peter Makinson, the Party Chairman, and their wives at No. 10 Downing Street, the Prime Minister's official residence in London. A light-hearted conversation about the party's bank overdraft was quickly forgotten when a duty officer handed the Prime Minister news of the Chinese attacks.