Blue Warrior

Zhou Yi watched the automatic window blinds blot out the smog-choked sky. He sat in a crowded conference room on the top floor of one of the three glass-and-steel monoliths of CNPC headquarters, buildings that were as gray and uninspiring as Beijing’s nearly unbreathable atmosphere. His morning runs in the park the last few days had burned his lungs and stung his eyes. Unfortunately, he was in for more of the same in here. The older executives seated around the long mahogany table lit up cigarettes after tea and coffee had been served by the waitstaff, and now the air in the conference room was clogged with acrid smoke.

As the recently appointed vice president of business affairs of the newly formed Sino-Sahara Oil Corporation, Zhou was expected to spend more time in Beijing, which technically was his birthplace but hardly his home. The grandson of an original Politburo Member and the son of a princeling on the ruling Standing Committee, Zhou was as close to royalty as a communist regime would allow. This gave him unprecedented freedoms, powers, and privileges, but equally binding responsibilities both to his family and his nation. Responsibilities that the handsome and athletic forty-year-old took quite seriously despite his famously hedonistic lifestyle.

Zhao believed he could best fulfill those responsibilities by remaining out in the field and Skyping meetings like this one rather than sitting in a sealed conference room. But when Zhao’s uncle, the chairman of CNPC, summoned him back to company headquarters, Zhao was compelled to obey both as a dutiful nephew and as an up-and-coming executive in the state-owned enterprise that had made his entire family extremely rich over the last four decades — nearly three billion dollars in total.

But Zhou’s meteoric rise was due primarily to his outstanding performance in the field, not his family connections. He’d just outmaneuvered a European energy consortium and brokered a lucrative new oil contract with the Azerbaijani government, still reeling from the Russian invasion nearly two years before. Zhou’s latest promotion was just another rung up on the lofty ladder of his ambition. He had already climbed high, and swiftly, but he had much farther to go. He also knew that one false step from this great height would be fatal to his career, if not his life.

Zhou sat bolt upright in his leather chair and wore the standard gray business suit so common among his peers. However, his suit was an elegant English, hand-tailored affair, perfectly cut to his broad shoulders and accented with a stunning light blue Italian silk tie and pocket square. The effect was bold, even brash, but not rebellious. Zhao was completely committed to serving the cause of China, but equally committed to serving it with style.

The analyst presenting today’s briefing was a member of the Ministry of State Security. Zhou knew him well. They had risen through the ranks of the MSS together, though Zhou’s membership in his nation’s foreign intelligence service was itself a closely guarded state secret.

Zhou’s government properly understood that economic development was itself a weapon in the war against the West, and resource acquisition was key to furthering China’s blistering economic growth. The Western nations still waved the flag of “free enterprise,” but its most successful corporations long ago abandoned pure capitalism in exchange for securing favors with their respective ruling classes by guaranteeing the politicians’ perpetual reelection in exchange for favorable tax and regulatory policies that guaranteed the “too big to fail” corporations hegemonic dominance in their markets.

Zhou constantly marveled at America’s repudiation of its own past greatness. During his university days, Zhou met more committed communists on the campuses of UCLA and Harvard than he ever had in Beijing. The running joke among the ruling class in China these days was that if you wanted your child to study socialism, send them to an American Ivy League school, but if you wanted them to learn about capitalism, send them to Shanghai. Not only was China a more capitalist nation than the United States these days, it vigorously applied the lessons of American economic development that the Americans themselves had long forgotten. In a short period of time, aggressive, mercantilist trade policies catapulted a newly independent nineteenth-century America into the ranks of the wealthiest nations of Old Europe. Now America ran half-trillion-dollar annual trade deficits, exporting both wealth and jobs as quickly as it was accumulating debt from the same nations with which it ran trade deficits, particularly mercantilist China.