Dragon Strike -- A Novel of the Coming War with China (Future History Book 1) Read online

  DRAGON STRIKE

  THE MILLENNIUM WAR

  by

  HUMPHREY HAWKSLEY AND SIMON HOLBERTON

  © Humphrey Hawksley and Simon Holberton 2012

  Humphrey Hawksley and Simon Holberton has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published 1997 by Sidgwick & Jackson

  For Jonie and for Kerryn

  About the Author(s)

  HUMPHREY HAWKSLEY has been a BBC Correspondent in Asia for ten years. In the eighties he was in Sri Lanka, India and the Philippines. From 1990, he was based in Hong Kong as a regional correspondent. He has reported from more than twenty Asian countries during the most exciting time of their twentieth-century development. In 1994 he was appointed China Bureau Chief and became the BBC's first television correspondent based in Beijing. Since then he has travelled extensively through the country.

  SIMON HOLBERTON has completed two tours of Asia. Most recently he was Hong Kong Bureau Chief for the Financial Times (1992-6) where he reported on China's preparations for the takeover of the colony, and the modernization of its vast economy. In the mid-1980s he reported on Japan and Korea for the Melbourne Age (1984-6). In 1996 he returned to the Financial Times in Britain where he writes about energy.

  PREFACE

  The events described in this book have not yet happened

  ... It is a future history, an exercise in military and political prediction, about a country whose emergence as a world power is one of the most important developments of the late twentieth century. The arrival of China on the world stage, however, poses problems not encountered by the world's democracies for well over fifty years. Like Europe challenged by an ambitious Germany in the first half of this century, Asia is challenged by China, which has marked out its own plans for expansion in its detailed claims to Tibet, the South China Sea, and Taiwan. In the spring of 1996, along China's eastern coastline, the People's Liberation Army conducted extensive military exercises that were little more than practice for an invasion of Taiwan. The year before there were skirmishes in the South China Sea as China sought to underline its disputed claim to that territory.

  At the same time, China claims America has plans to contain its growth and begin a new Cold War. Those who have spoken out on this range from moderate academics to the present day leaders themselves such as President Jiang Zemin and Prime Minister Li Peng. The 1996 bestselling book by five young writers called China Can Say No encapsulated a new wave of belligerent Chinese nationalism which regards a confrontation with America as inevitable.

  With Dragonstrike we have taken current trends, created a scenario, and seen it through to the end. To illustrate the threatening side of China's policy we have drawn on already published material, especially from the army newspaper Jiefangjun Bao, with its detailed claims to the South China Sea and how the military plans to achieve them. Most of what we put in the mouth of Wang Feng, our fictitious Chinese President, has been said by Chinese officials or appeared in the official Communist media over the past few years. In a similar way we have used authentic Japanese voices for some of what Noburo Hyashi, our fictitious Prime Minister of Japan, has to say. His account of the Amber system on pages 173nd much of his speech to the nation on pages 255s taken from The Japan that can say `No', by Akio Morita and Shintaro Ishihara. We have given references for our published sources throughout.

  The political, military, and financial sections were discussed and worked on at length by experts. David Tait, former Operations Officer of the attack submarine HMS Opossum, helped us design the submarine battles exploiting to the full Chinese diesel-electric technology. John Myers, a former Royal Navy submarine commander, and Richard Sharpe, a former nuclear submarine commander and Editor of Jane's Fighting Ships, read and helped authenticate it. Former Royal Marine raiding troop officer David Dunbar helped plan the amphibious and helicopter assaults of the first day of Dragonstrike. Thanks are also due Ian Strachan, former fighter test pilot with the Royal Air Force, for his advice on the conduct of air warfare, and John Downing, a former Royal Navy intelligence officer, who helped with some of the information-warfare sections of the book. Many other still serving European and American military and intelligence officers gave their time to ensure the accuracy of the air, sea, and land battles, but their identities must remain secret. Any mistakes, of course, are our own.

  Patricia Lewis made helpful comments on the design of the Japanese nuclear bomb, while Steve Thomas commented upon the sections on Japan's nuclear weapons capability. Damon Moglen and Shaun Burnie supplied documents and advice on the same, while Nick Rowe helped with details of how civilian populations and their local officials might react in the event of a nuclear war. Our researchers included Sophie Gregg, Charlie Whipple and Gene Koprowski, Kurt Hanson, Keiko Bang, and others who prefer to remain anonymous.

  Diplomats constructed the meetings within the Western governments and we drew on the advice of experts in Hong Kong and London to piece together the impact Dragonstrike would have on financial markets. Peter Gignoux, John Mulcahy and Rosemary Safranek suggested how the Chinese might structure their manipulation of the markets. We used published sources, together with oil company executives who prefer to remain anonymous, for broader views about the outlook for oil markets, and the level of future oil exploration in the South China Sea. Ian Harwood and John Sheppard advised on how the world economy and major stock markets might look in 2001, and Paul Chertkow and Adrian Powell helped on foreign exchange matters.

  The real potential of China has only become apparent during the Clinton presidency. Yet at the time of writing, America has failed to draw up a comprehensive policy on how to deal with it. Ten years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, another power bloc is emerging. It is wealthy. It is expansionist. It has yawning cultural differences with the West. It is embittered about its past. China is a non-democratic one-party state, whose government has to prove itself to survive. This book has been written as a warning of what might happen if Western, and especially American, policy towards China is allowed to drift.

  HH SH

  PREFACE TO THE PAPERBACK EDITION

  There is always a risk in writing a book about the future that one will be proved wrong. However, since the publication of Dragonstrike in April 1997 events in East Asia have served to support our apprehension about China's rise as a world power. Indeed some events described in this book have now taken place.

  China has encroached upon disputed territory in the South China Sea. Its forces have skirmished with the Philippine Navy. It has taken an oil exploration vessel into Vietnamese-claimed waters. As forecast in Dragonstrike, China has bought two Russian frigates in its continuing efforts to create a blue water navy. The government has announced a strategic alliance with Russia to take it into the 21st century. There have been demonstrations against the Japanese occupation of the disputed islands in the East China Sea.

  One of China's first acts after taking back Hong Kong was to repeal human rights and democracy legislation. The government is continuing to ignore appeals about human rights abuses in China. The Communist Party has reaffirmed its commitment to indefinite one-party rule.

  This paperback edition is going to print as President Jiang Zemin is due in Washington for a summit with President Clinton. This will help determine modern China's position on the world stage. The main debate however about whether China is a weak developing nation or a global threat will continue. We
expect more elements of the Dragonstrike's future history to be proved correct. But we hope that ultimately enough attention is paid to China to ensure that our final predictions are wrong. As yet, we are unconvinced.

  HH SH

  CHRONOLOGY OF EVENTS

  Dragonstrike describes a series of events that are global in scale. In the table that follows the clock times in six of the most important time zones in the world are shown as they are at the beginning of each chapter.

  France and Germany are an hour ahead of GMT, Moscow two hours, and both the Spratly and the Paracel island groups are eight hours ahead, in the Chinese time zone. Because the tables show clock time the figures are different from those in a map of time zone differences which would show for example 8 as 8 because the sun passed across it at noon eight hours earlier.

  ONE

  Beijing, China

  Local time: 0500 Sunday 18 February 2001

  GMT: 2100 Saturday 17 February 2001

  A thin frost covered the paving stones around Tiananmen Square: the most haunting symbol of Chinese Communist power. The lights on its edges shone through the smog which hung around the city. The bored and cold figures of the young soldiers stood guard around the square, a monument to the Party's success in ruling the motherland. Apart from them it was empty. A furtive, eerie silence lingered across its hundred acres and its buildings.

  To the south was the Mausoleum of Mao Zedong, the twentieth-century emperor, whose turbulent revolutions had laid the seeds of today's robust one-party state. Out of granite he had built the Monument to the Martyrs of the People, 30 metres tall with 170 life-sized figures and a plinth, inscribed in his own handwriting Eternal Glory to the People's Heroes. To the east were the gigantic Museum of the Chinese Revolution and the Museum of History. To the west, the pillars and steps of the Great Hall of the People stretched more than 300 metres from one end to the other. Its banquet hall held 5,000 guests and the Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan Rooms served as memories to China's once lost territories and the humiliating dismemberment of the motherland.

  To the north was Tiananmen Gate, where Mao Zedong proclaimed Communist Party victory in 1949 and where his enduring portrait still hung. Five bridges ran from there towards the gates of the Forbidden City. Tiananmen Gate was the link between the new and the old emperors. The Forbidden City was the Great Within. There were 9,000 rooms in over 250 acres once attended by 70,000 Imperial Eunuchs. Its doors opened onto the square, from which was drawn the power and patriotism for the whole of China. Tonight this was the reference point for the man who wanted to be emperor. A few hundred metres to the west, next door to the Forbidden City, were the high, red-painted walls of Zhongnanhai. The sign inside the main gate proclaimed in large Chinese characters: To serve the People. Along the wall on the west side of the gate a slogan read: Long live the great Chinese Communist Party. On the east wall another paid tribute: Long live the unbeatable thoughts of Chairman Mao. The broad, uncluttered roads, the drooping willows, frozen lakes, reception rooms, and luxurious houses were more modern but no less mysterious, no less prohibited, than the Forbidden City was in Imperial times. The symbols of power in the modern state were everywhere surveillance cameras, microwave dishes, and radio transmitters. The armed men in green uniforms at the gates belonged to the Central Guards Regiment, once known as the legendary unit 8341, which had protected China's leaders since the Revolution. Their success record was remarkable for such a turbulent country. The unit of more than 8,000 men secured the secrets of the Communist Party. For Western intelligence, this was one of the least penetrable centres of power in the world. Recruits to the Guards Regiment had to be illiterate or barely educated and were usually from peasant families in remote mountainous areas. Not one senior leader had been assassinated since 1949. The guards were told that the Chinese President would leave shortly before 0500 hours. When the motorcade of three stretched Mercedes 88-series limousines approached, the heavy wooden gates swung open. Four motorcycle outriders on turbocharged 1100cc BMWs flanked the convoy at the front and back.

  They drove without flashing lights and sirens. It was a black convoy. The moon barely cut its image through the pollution. The streets were deserted. The homeless warmed themselves around fires under flyovers. The latest figures reported to the Politburo said the number of unemployed had now reached 250,000,000. That was the population of America wandering the country, homeless, tired, penniless. They had yet to become violent, but poverty had severed their bond to the Communist Party. Only fear kept them quiet.

  Chinese leaders usually preferred to travel by the network of underground roads and railways, but tonight President Wang wanted to savour the city he was about to change for ever. No one spoke in his car. The driver turned west onto the Avenue of Eternal Peace. To the left, they passed the Ministry of Foreign Trade and Cooperation, which had so skilfully coaxed in foreign investment. America's blue-chip companies, Boeing, Motorola, McDonald's, and others, were entrenched in billion-dollar investments and twenty-year finance plans. The landmarks above the Socialist buildings were the neon signs Kenwood, Digital, and Remy Martin. All had ignored the pleading of human rights groups and continued their business with the world's biggest authoritarian government. All had made money and advocated constructive engagement with Communism which had allowed the economy to boom. On the right, they passed the Air China offices, the Minzu Hotel, and the Bank of China. They crossed the Second Ring Road and went by the Military Museum, which would soon have another glorious victory to add to its exhibits.

  Further west, outside China Central Television, the regular guards had been replaced by a detachment from the Guards Regiment. They would also be outside the Xinhua (New China) News Agency building. Beijing's street lights became intermittent, the landmarks less important. In less than half an hour they passed the Summer Palace, the imperial retreat sacked by Western armies in the nineteenth century. The road wound round towards the Botanical Gardens, where they turned left into a country road flanked by peach orchards. Military aerials protruded from the ground. Antennas were on the hills in the distance. The Operations Command Centre of the People's Liberation Army was carved out of the mountain in the fifties when China believed it was under nuclear threat from the United States. The cavernous rooms were still used now.

  This was the culmination of the President's career, which began when he was given a pistol by his father at the age of five. He was born in the early 1940s in the mountains of Yan'an where Mao was running the civil war against the Nationalists. Wang's father, Wang Fei, was a veteran of the Long March and a Marshal. As the Communist Party became entrenched in power, the young Wang made friends with the sons and daughters of the leaders. He attended the elite 101 secondary school, where he was a star of the soccer team. In the army, he served in Yunnan in the south-west and in Heilongjiang on the Russian border in the far north-east, but the turning point of his career was the command of a regiment in the war against Vietnam of 1979. The campaign was a military disaster. It was meant to teach Vietnam a lesson for overthrowing the Chinese-backed Khmer Rouge government in Cambodia: instead, the skilled Vietnamese fighters slaughtered Chinese troops as they charged across the border in human waves. China lost between 15,000 and 20,000 men. Wang managed to capture the main border town of Lang Son. He blew up the city centre before withdrawing, and was convinced then that China had to modernize its armed forces. It should never be humiliated again by a foreign army. He also harboured an ambition to avenge the deaths of so many Chinese soldiers. Now, almost a quarter of a century later, Wang was about to launch his terrible riposte. Before the week was over, the strategic map of the Pacific would be redrawn. China's honour would be upheld and Wang's position as paramount leader established as unassailable.

  The motorcade turned right off the road into a straight driveway and under an arch decorated with a lone red star in the middle. The cars were expected. Sentries saluted. The convoy drew up in front of an innocuous ferroconcrete building. The lift to the underground
operations centre was waiting. President Wang stepped out onto a gallery overlooking the control room. Below him was a large, well-lit oblong room and opposite was a screen stretching almost the full length of the long wall. It displayed the southern half of China and South-East Asia to the coast of Australia in the south. From their consoles operations staff, using a computer mouse, could point and click on any highlighted object and bring up all current intelligence, including the whereabouts of political leaders. They could bring up other areas which might be involved in the theatre of war, such as troop deployments in northern India on the border with Tibet, Russian border activities, and Russian naval deployment in the northern Pacific. The disposition of the PLA Air Force and PLA Navy were shown. Red stars identified their position, next to which dialogue boxes identified the size, type, and disposition of the forces in question. The key enemy positions identified were Vietnamese, Philippine, Indonesian, Thai, Singaporean, and Malaysian air force units and warships. The state of alert of defence forces on Taiwan was being closely monitored. Agents would be updating regularly any civil disturbance in Taiwan, Hong Kong, or the more unruly provinces of southern China. A special unit of analysts was watching the military movements of the larger foreign powers: the USS Nimitz carrier group, on exercises in the Sulu Sea off the west coast of the Philippines, the joint British, Australian, and New Zealand carrier group on a goodwill visit to Brunei, and American and Japanese air and naval forces in the East China Sea.

  An aide to the President motioned him towards a flight of steps leading to the operations floor. As he began to climb down his presence in the room became known and a hush descended. When he reached the bottom he walked straight to a podium bedecked with the Chinese flag. An officer called the assembled officers and men to attention.