Plotting Thrillers in the Fog of China

November 21, 2009

By ALEX BERENSON

President Obama stood at a “town hall” meeting in Shanghai last week, fielding questions from eager Chinese students, an American leader demonstrating the give-and-take of democracy to a nation under one-party rule. Except that the students were mainly members of the Communist Youth League, hand-picked by the Chinese Communist Party, and the first question set the tone: “What measures will you take to deepen this close relationship between cities of the United States and China?”

All in all, the “town hall” exemplified the sort of stagecraft that the Chinese seem to specialize in — managed in a way that is so obvious as to be condescending, but still successful at stifling dissent.

The moment reminded me of why I decided, three years ago, to center my second spy novel, “The Ghost War,” on a conflict between the United States and China.

For novelists, China’s rise is pure gold. The Communist Party’s opacity and its passion to control China’s image have had the opposite effect: they feed Western fears of China’s intentions, and dare Western thriller writers to invent disaster.

Never mind that so far the Chinese have not projected military power outside of East Asia, that they prefer to compete mainly by accumulating dollars by the trillion. Military power grows from economic strength, and military analysts do not doubt that the People’s Republic could one day become a full-bore competitor to the United States, offering its protection to all manner of governments throughout the Persian Gulf and Africa.

For journalists, couldis a blank page. But novelists exist to fill that space. So, in 2006, after outlining my book, I procured a tourist visa (I doubted the regime would welcome any working spy novelist, let alone one whose day job was being a business reporter for The New York Times), and went off to China.

The trip was fascinating. I’d been to the People’s Republic in 1988, before the protests in Tiananmen Square forced China’s rulers to liberalize their economic policies. I vaguely remembered a gray Communist country, with empty stores and note-pad sized currency. No more. On Beijing’s giant avenues, cars and buses crowded out bicycles. Giant skyscrapers towered above Guangzhou and Shanghai. Even Xian, in the interior, was bustling and prosperous.

But I can’t pretend that I left China with a better understanding of the machinations at the top of the Communist Party. Those doors stayed closed to me, as they do to nearly all Westerners.

Journalists and spies find such obfuscation frustrating; they are reduced to reading between the lines of official statements and guessing at the shifting alliances and ideologies of the middle-aged men who run China. Facts are hard to come by.

But the opacity that maddens reporters is manna for novelists, and the novelist in me had a fine time imagining what might be happening behind closed doors in Beijing. What if a hard-line Chinese general wanted to take control of the People’s Republic? Could he maneuver China and the United States into a clash, a limited war, to grab control?

I did have a few facts to work with. Military analysts and the Pentagon say China has sharply increased its military spending in the last decade (though it remains far less than the $680 billion the United States will spend this year). The People’s Liberation Army Navy (yes, that’s its name) has been developing submarines and super-fast torpedoes whose only logical targets are American naval vessels. Beijing is trying to build ties all over the world, especially with resource-rich nations in Africa. And China has deep national scars from the quasi-colonialism it faced during the 19th and 20th centuries.

Are old resentments and a shifting balance of power enough to push nuclear-armed powers to the brink of war? In the real world, probably not. In a spy novel, absolutely.

Readers sometimes comment on the realism of my novels. But I don’t aspire to realism. I want, instead, the illusion of realism — a little like the way the Chinese government cares little about the reality of public consent, so long as it has the appearance of consent.

If I can conjure an image of the meetings of the Politburo Standing Committee that seems accurate to you the reader, I’ve succeeded. After all, Hu Jintao — the general secretary of the committee — is unlikely to complain. (If only he would. What publicity that would be!) To steal an old joke: If a bear is chasing both of us, I don’t have to outrun the bear. I just have to outrun you.

And so I and other spy novelists can only hope that the Chinese, and the rest of the world’s authoritarian regimes, stick with their stage-managed town halls, Internet censorship, and jailings of mouthy dissidents. During the 1990s, we had reason to worry: democracy seemed to be spreading globally, international tensions fading. Now, though, those dark days are behind us, and we can get back to imagining the worst without fear of contradiction.

Bad for the world, I suppose. Lucky for us.