NEW WORLD TRILOGY (Trilogy Title) (21 page)

Exacerbating this was the fact that the economy downsized its workforce as manufacturing technologies advanced and industries and companies emerged with little need for a large workforce.  As a result, many tens of millions of Chinese, the most in recorded history, were unable to find work and fell into long-term unemployment, eventually becoming stigmatised and, for many, ultimately unemployable.  University and college graduates were no exception; already having suffered high unemployment since late in the twentieth century, the number of unemployed graduates continued to climb, yet, ironically, the regime maintained its policy of building new educational facilities and encouraging a rise in the number of students well into the 2020s.

This, however, was not so much a severe miscalculation of the future needs for educated people in the country as it was a harsh social engineering programme primarily aimed at gaining revenue but also to secure, through desperation and hyper-competition, all the educated labour requirements the country may need in the future, regardless of the human casualties and the spurious rationale provided by the small group of self-aggrandising officials who initially proposed the idea to their peers in Beijing.

Evidently being an unsustainable programme, and responding to the ceaseless unrest and regular student protests that grew in number and intensity in the early years of the century, the regime eventually cut back on the number of students; nevertheless, numbers still remained excessive, so other placation strategies were enacted.  Student behaviour control was fostered by the initiation of what was euphemistically called the 'Student Harmony Movement,' which saw the creation of a tightly interwoven hierarchy of students in which regime-sponsored students and professional spies were placed in leadership positions and scattered throughout its tiers, ensuring that the peace was maintained through various mechanisms of power, such as regular, neo-Maoist-type propaganda meetings, a mandatory reporting programme, various forms of punitive punishment, and, not infrequently, other sophisticated terrorisation and intimidation practices.

Another strategy was employment blacklisting: known intimately by all students, this was a programme whereby employers and business regulatory departments were provided with access to a database of graduate profiles in which those marked as subversives could be readily identified and prevented from gaining any form of aboveboard employment or conducting a legitimate business in the Chinese territories; effectively, they were irredeemably ostracised from mainstream society.  The effect of this policy was almost immediate with nearly 80,000 graduating students being blacklisted in the first year alone — a fact that was widely publicised.  Moreover, being unable to obtain visas to leave the country, graduates quickly slipped through the cracks into social oblivion: those that were unable to hide by living comfortably off their parents found themselves in poverty, working illegitimately for next to nothing, turning to crime, and being targeted by police; only a few years later, if not still barely surviving in severe poverty, many were either in jail or dead, the grim statistics of which were intermittently paraded almost boastfully by the state-run media.

Within a few short months after the initiation of this programme, student activism reduced to an extremely small number of 'hard-core,' clandestine organisations that rarely dared to attempt any subversive actions because of the poor success rate and the near-certain social suicide that would result; the remnants of these groups were usually quickly infiltrated and exposed by spies and ordinary citizens whose social standing was set to be raised dramatically upon identifying them due to the regime's well-publicised and extremely generous reward programme designed to enlist as much of the population as possible.  Predictably, as the stranglehold was tightened over the following years, forming such groups became inconceivable and untenable within the student body.

In terms of the wider population, desperation was setting in for many.  By the time Ikaros arrived in Hong Kong, more than thirty million Chinese on the mainland were dying of starvation each year and rising — a figure that had jumped by 150 percent after over 260 million people were displaced by the sea-level rises.  Continuing inflation and environmental degradation saw many of the more vulnerable people falling off the social map without hope of being saved; families in this situation and other desperate conditions without other viable prospects often sent their babies and children to the military, where they would be raised to serve until discharged and abandoned without a pension after only receiving a token wage during their years of service.  Despite the well-known low pay and the poor conditions and treatment, more and more young men and women also tried to join the military services as it was considered a welcome reprieve from the poverty and the harsh realities and uncertainties of civilian life.

In order to maintain the 'harmony' of the state in general, the military machine increased massively in size throughout the first half of the century, taking on many more domestic peacekeeping roles as an auxiliary wing to the activities of the burgeoning police force, creating an unprecedented and awesome police state that refused to see the enormous population as an insurmountable obstacle to achieving near-total social control, impressive even in terms of Chinese history.  This was a process that seeped insidiously into many of the significant areas of the public and private lives of the citizenry in a systematic attempt to reduce the probability of social unrest towards zero: the orderly evacuation of low-lying areas and the 'resettlement' of the population was testament to this.  Well prior to the flooding, though, and leading the world in their campaign, a major component of their programme was the sectioning off and heavy patrolling of many thousands of selected towns and cities, which became havens for wealthy locals and elites, and were essentially exclusion zones, in which only controlled numbers of migrant workers and flooding refugees who managed to pass the selection criteria based on health and socio-economic utility were permitted to enter.  Beyond select towns and the cities, valuable farming areas were likewise patrolled and controlled to ensure continuing productivity.  With the help of locals, trespassing wanderers passing through or seeking work were quickly identified and dealt with: some were conscripted into the military, while others were tagged and taken to isolated locations, where they were told never to return under the threat of being executed if they did so — such executions became routine.  This approach ensured that all areas in the national interest were secured and maintained by the state and its organs.  The result was that, within the first year of implementation, more than a hundred million were relegated to the resource-impoverished exclusion zones without hope of ever being formally allowed entry into the protected zones, a figure that continued to rise gradually over the following years; moreover, those on the inside immediately began to live in fear that if they lost their wealth and status for whatever reason, they too would be mercilessly excluded from society without means of redemption — a situation that occurred countless times each year due to the fiercely competitive economic conditions and the enhanced politicisation of social relationships, both of which were highly visible within the social networks of the citizenry.

The new power that Beijing had attained, both at home and internationally, emboldened it to recant on promises of autonomy by completely annexing Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan politically, stripping them of their independent democratic systems and substituting them with typical CCP institutions run by high-ranking mainland communist party officials and civil servants under the strict and close guidance of Beijing.  There were, however, considerable differences between the way these territories and the mainland were managed due to the more stable and developed socio-economic conditions and the smaller populations found in Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan, which resulted in a certain amount of accommodation by the authorities, such as less severe social control measures.

Internationally, China extended its power into the farthest reaches of other nations' affairs and that of the organs of the international community, causing worldwide consternation and opposition to the regime and its vast array of intimidatory and unscrupulous tactics and strategies used in achieving its desired ends any way it could.  The many nations, organisations and corporations that tried to block China's path soon found that their suggestions, pleas and injunctions were largely ignored or turned against them, and other more aggressive manoeuvres that they employed were effectively trumped by the regime, which was willing to use any means at its disposal.  Consequently, it was clear that the global institutions, still known disparagingly and bitterly by much of the population everywhere as the 'toothless lions,' were unable to prevent hundreds of millions of people's lives being put at risk and being lost in a disturbing number of areas in the world as a direct result of the Chinese regime's underhanded actions.

All of this came to a critical point in late 2037.  Having expanded its navy and gained control of much of the south-east Asian shipping lanes, initially explained by the need to protect economic interests from the growing international concern about disruptions caused by piracy, the Chinese Regime eventually extended its activities into 'supervising' imports and exports throughout the whole of Asia and much of Africa and South America; this power was used as leverage for blackmail and bribery regarding the regime's political and economic interests.  Importantly, on December 19, 2037, just days after the hundredth anniversary of the beginning of the Nanjing massacre, during which a still-disputed number of Chinese soldiers and civilians were brutalised and massacred (anywhere up to 260,000) by the Imperial Japanese Army — at this time, the Japanese government still had not made reparations, nor an adequately contrite apology — in what became known as the Tokyo Incident, a PRC naval fleet detained seven international cargo ships carrying essential supplies destined for Tokyo Bay in the wake of the most severe earthquake the country had seen on record; due to this, over twenty thousand preventable fatalities were added to the overall death toll during the highly publicised and brazen stand-off.  Instead of accepting publicly that its actions were motivated by a well-timed and late-in-coming act of revenge and political strategy, the PRC claimed the following: firstly, it was merely attempting to resolve a technical dispute with the shipping companies involved and their suppliers; secondly, the deaths of Japanese citizens that followed were an unfortunate but unavoidable consequence; and, thirdly, the shipping companies were in fact the wrongdoers due to their lack of cooperation and should ultimately be seen as the cause of the delay and the tragedy.  Despite the obviousness of their politics, the CCP gained considerable support among its citizenry and great satisfaction was expressed during the one-week-long Nanjing Massacre and Japanese occupation remembrance events that took place all around the country and were extensively covered by the media.

Despite the complex web that the CCP spun in the coordination and execution of this whole affair, it was perhaps one of its most major international miscalculations in history.  The US6 and a core list of allies, including Japan, having been desperately looking for an opportunity, decided to use the Tokyo Incident to retaliate militarily; all other avenues, be they above board or otherwise, had clearly been shown to be futile against, and disrespected by, the diabolical political response mechanisms of the CCP.

The allied forces launched an all-out offensive on the PRC Navy forty-nine days later; this proved to be the start of the Trans-Oceanic Sino-World War, which lasted in various degrees of intensity for nearly fifteen years, and at some point involved all but the most isolated and unimportant of the world's nations in significant ways through some form of military or economic support or through the abundant social, economic and political consequences.

Being accustomed to the often not-so-subtle political and economic battles that had been being waged for over half a century, the PRC, the international institutions and the allied forces found it relatively easy to slip into such overt and sustained warfare, albeit a war that consisted mainly of small skirmishes, intimidation and a long series of parries and stalemates, allowing both sides to gain some small victories among the losses, all of which were easily able to be used as propaganda fodder for the war effort to be continued as it was evident to everyone that the detrimental economic effects and vulnerability to the every invidious whim of the PRC would be too great to endure if the war were ultimately lost.  Nevertheless, amid all the efforts to strengthen their navies and air forces, the struggle for hegemony caused more problems for the allies than it did for China because, although the US6 was the strongest of the allies, it was in severe economic turmoil at the very outset of war — as were several key allied countries — partly thanks to the long-standing, evolving and aggressive technique of the PRC to weaken other states gradually by encouraging dependence and subservience any way it could.

Almost from the outset of the war, the US6 displayed a disregard for many of the suggestions and resolutions of the international institutions and even the pleas of its allies by engaging in those actions deemed to be, no matter how curious, in its own best interests, regardless of the extensive human and economic cost to other nations, particularly its supposed allies; although far from the truth, the US6 seemed on the surface to be unwilling to be constrained when it was obviously dealing with a highly resilient political force that was prepared to do whatever it took to increase its power share and reduce that of others, essentially forcing relations into a zero-sum game.

Spurred on by the desperation caused by its own economic and political maelstroms, the US6 systematically spearheaded the extension of its covert and illegal actions wherever it decided was necessary in an attempt to neutralise external threats.  Despite resorting to commerce raiding, and instigating blockades and embargoes all around the world as it pleased, the US6 maintained its innocence throughout and propagandised and counter-propagandised around each event that was unable to be kept from the media, whitewashing and/or denying involvement in various illegal activities and atrocities, which culminated in the deaths of over seventy million people over the course of the war.