Ultimatum (39 page)

Ball nodded grudgingly. “If you believe in the bilateral approach,” he muttered. “That’s a big if.”

“Agreed. Let’s set that aside.” Benton paused. “So what’s it going to take? If Wen genuinely opposes this, what kind of action will bring him into line? Here’s what I don’t understand. How can he be against this? How can he honestly not want to do a deal on this? Maybe we went out too belligerent, and he figured he had to do something to show we’re not in charge, but now he’s done that. How can he not want to do a deal now?”

“Maybe he does,” said Jackie Rubin.

“He hasn’t shown it. He’s just sitting back. This isn’t a zero sum game. It’s not we win, they lose. If we don’t do something, this is a disaster for everyone. How can the leader of any country who understands that not want to do a deal?” The president glanced in the direction of Oliver Wu. “I know what you’re going to say, Dr. Wu. It’s China, China continues, and the pain they can take outlasts anything we can take, so they’ll let the pain begin and then we’ll be the ones who fold. But is that still true? I may not be a China expert, but I question that. They have a middle class, they have an economy, this isn’t the China of Deng Xiaoping coming off the back of the Cultural Revolution. You told me yourself they have a serious problem with a democracy movement and an environmental movement, both of which pose threats to the party hegemony, and don’t tell me the kind of pain we’re talking about isn’t going to make that worse. Now, I can’t see how any kind of leader isn’t going to say, let’s deal with this in an orderly fashion. Let’s get to grips with it. That’s the best way we have of securing ourselves.”

“Not if the solution causes instability,” said Olsen.

“Well, maybe it does cause a little instability.”

“And if it does,” said Olsen, “it does it now. Whereas the issues we’re talking about don’t do it for maybe twenty years. And in the meantime, if we resist—I’m talking as the Chinese side here, on the extreme side, Ding for example—if we resist and the big bad Americans try to force a solution, we’re seen as the victim and we’re standing up for our rights and we use the nationalist argument to strengthen our hold, as the party, and to create a context in which we can clamp down on those elements that are destabilizing us. Mr. President, we’ve been through this.”

“But we don’t
know
.”

“No, we don’t know. There’s always stuff you don’t know. That’s the nature of the game.”

The president closed his eyes. “I cannot believe a leader would do that. I can’t believe he’d be prepared to do so much damage to his own people.” He looked up. Olsen was watching him skeptically. The others were watching him as well. “Am I being naive?”

Olsen threw back his hands, as if it wasn’t for him to answer.

“Alan?”

Ball shrugged.

He looked at Wu.

“That’s not a word I’d really use . . .”

“To my face you mean.” Benton smiled ruefully. “Huh?”

“I don’t know. I’m . . . sorry, sir.”

There was silence. Benton understood that no one else around the table, at least not the foreign policy experts, shared his incredulity.

“It seems to me there are two possibilities here,” said John Eales. “One is that Wen doesn’t understand what we’re dealing with, or what he was being offered by Gartner, or he doesn’t believe it. Possibly he hasn’t even had it presented to him properly, since we’ve got no idea what Chen actually said to him. And the other possibility is, he does understand it and, yes, he’s doing what Larry says he’s doing, and might even end up using it as an instrument to deal with domestic political problems.”

“Or he does know, and he does want to do a deal, but he’s constrained,” said Wu. “With respect, Mr. Eales, that’s a third possibility. He may not have the power on this we think he has.”

“Then if we take some kind of action, that just makes it worse for him, doesn’t it?”

“Not necessarily,” said Wu. “It might empower him by discrediting the people who are constraining him.”

“This is just great!” Benton shook his head in frustration. He thought American politics was complex, and it was. He was constrained on all sides, and nothing significant got through Congress without its share of pork barreling. With all the legislation he was sending to the Hill, he was up to
here
in that stuff. But at least he understood it. It even had a kind of transparency. But this . . . this was surreal. This was straight out of Kafka. “There must be an alternative to confrontation,” he said.

Olsen shrugged. “There is if we back down.”

“I’m not backing down. The United States can’t do the cuts in emissions for the whole world, and no one else will join us if China doesn’t. So China has to do it, that’s a given. But I’m not prepared at this stage to do something that creates an irreversible step that puts us in confrontation. Now, we agree it’s possible that President Wen doesn’t know all the facts, or that he doesn’t understand the implications. I’m not saying that’s definite. I’m not saying he isn’t using this for domestic purposes or that he’s not constrained. But I’m saying we don’t
know
that. It’s possible that he doesn’t know everything we think he knows. We just don’t know enough.”

Olsen watched the president skeptically.

“We don’t know, objectively, what Chen told him,” said Eales. “That’s a fact, Larry.”

“Chen’s Wen’s man.”

“But we don’t know what he told him.”

“Before I take another step,” said Benton, “I need to be sure, exactly, what Wen’s been told. I’m not going to escalate on the basis of a false premise.” Benton looked directly at Olsen. “This isn’t prevarication, Larry. I’m just not going to be irresponsible.”

Olsen shrugged, as if the thought that Benton was prevaricating had never entered his mind.

Benton glanced at Eales. Eales nodded slightly. The president turned back to Olsen and Ball.

“You two get together. Find me someone who can get to Wen. Someone you can agree on.”

~ * ~

Monday, May 9

Oval Office, The White House

F. William Knight was sixty-eight, a silver-haired banker who had first gone to China as a young Morgan Stanley associate in the gold rush days of the nineties and had been there, more or less, ever since. During the financial crisis of 2013, he was one of the few respected Western voices in the country when party officials were blaming foreign banks for everything from the collapse of the stock market to the condition of the roads in downtown Beijing. At that time Wen Guojie, a young party leader and nephew of a former premier of China with a power base of his own in Shanghai, was given the post of finance minister and told to clean up the mess. Knight had known him for years. Wen gave Knight a desk in his office and for the next eighteen months they worked literally side by side. The fact that the Chinese banking system didn’t disappear into the almost bottomless pit that had been dug for it by the failure to introduce adequate reforms over the previous decade was attributed to Wen and fuelled his subsequent rise to the top of the hierarchy. In reality, to the extent that any one man was responsible, it was F. William Knight.

Larry Olsen was with the president when Alan Ball brought Knight into the Oval Office. Ball, who knew the banker better than Olsen, did the introductions.

Knight was a tall man. Thin. Almost gaunt. The skin hung loose at his throat. Joe Benton wondered whether he was ill.

“I think Dr. Ball has explained something to you of what this is about,” said the president when they were sitting.

“Some, Mr. President.”

“Enough to get you to take the trouble of coming back from Shanghai. I thank you for that, Mr. Knight. I’m sure your time is scarce.”

Knight nodded slightly.

“I want to ask you, Mr. Knight, about your relationship with President Wen. Perhaps you can give me a quick summary of the history.”

Knight cleared his throat. “President Wen, as you know, had a background in ...” He cleared his throat again, frowning as he did, as if there was something he couldn’t quite get out of there. “Wen was always in the banking and the financial side, so I had quite a lot to do with him, probably from about 2003 or four. I first met him . . . this was before he was a minister, he was a vice president of the Bank of China at the time. I was senior vice president for Morgan Stanley, as it was then, for China. This was around the time when the first wave of foreign ownership was coming into the big four banks in China, you may remember, and of course Morgan Stanley was a player. And I would say, after that time, there would rarely have been more than a few weeks when I didn’t meet Wen in one context or another.”

“Tell me about 2013.”

“Well, 2013 was something else.” Knight gave the story of how he had worked with Wen.

“What about the Hong Kong massacre? Did Wen have anything to do with that?”

Knight closed his eyes briefly, as if being asked to look at something distasteful. “There was enormous repression across China in 2013 and fourteen, more than most people in the West knew about. To my knowledge, Wen wasn’t directly involved. He was utterly focused on the financial issues at that point and, in fact, as far as Hong Kong goes, I remember him being totally incredulous because of what it would mean for the recovery.”

“Slowing it, you mean?”

Knight nodded.

“And that was the only reason?”

“Wen Guojie is no more an advocate of massacre than you or I, Mr. President. But I concede there was a serious wave of repression at the time— I remember people saying it was the biggest crackdown since Tiananmen, and actually it extended quite a lot further, and certainly went on for longer—and I guess any senior party leader must have had some knowledge of that and at the minimum must have acquiesced. So I’m not trying to exonerate Wen Guojie. I’m just saying he had little direct responsibility, and in fact, given his role, repression, at least in Hong Kong, Shanghai, and the other financial centers, worked against what he was trying to achieve.”

“I’m just trying to understand what his mindset might be,” said the president.

Knight didn’t reply.

“What about since then? After the crisis? What’s your relationship?”

“I would say that Wen has always treated me as a private advisor on economic affairs. He’ll receive his advice from his ministries and then he might call me in and we’ll have a discussion. He rarely invites me to be present when there are officials around. The discussions we have, you understand, Mr. President, are quite informal. It’s usually over a drink.”

The president smiled. “What beverage does President Wen favor, as a matter of interest?”

“Single malts,” said Knight.

“When you have these talks, does he do what you say?”

“Sometimes,” said Knight. “The quality of his advisors has vastly improved over the years. His need for my input is far less than it was.”

“Do you ever disagree with him?”

“Often,” said Knight.

“Do you tell him that?”

“Of course. I doubt he would have asked my advice all these years if I didn’t.”

“Then he’s a wise man,” said the president.

Knight nodded.

“Tell me about him. What’s he like?”

Knight frowned. He cleared his throat. “I regard him as a friend, sir. That’s . . . pretty much all I would say.”

Benton nodded. Nothing the banker had said until now couldn’t have been discovered from other sources. Benton hadn’t heard anything he hadn’t already seen in the briefing on Knight that he had been given. Except the part about Wen favoring single malts, and that was probably well known, anyway.