[The characters, places, organizations, events, and other elements appearing in this work have no connection whatsoever to reality and are fictional products of the author’s imagination.]
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June 29, 1979, Devenzer The Manor, Office
Henry was skimming through the newspapers Bart had prepared in time for the morning’s work when his jaw dropped.
‘Wait, isn’t this a bit much?’
[The Second Japan, or a Monster Beyond It: The “Asian Giant” Awakened by the White House’s Gamble Threatens America. — New York Time]
[Detroit to Japan, and Now Silicon Valley to Beijing? What Carter Is Selling Off Is “Our Tomorrow”! — New York Poster]
[Carter’s “Diplomatic Show”: Why Is the Stake Always the Worker’s Bowl of Rice? The Screams of the Great Lakes Industrial Belt! — Daily News]
[Technology Tribute Without Patents: The White House’s Ignorance Delivers a “Death Sentence” to American Manufacturing — Wall Street Journal]
[Donald Reagan’s Sharp Rebuke: “Is Carter Now Offering Our Future to the Communists?” — Washington Poster]
[The Price of Abandoning Taipei: Will the Pacific Now Become a “Sea of Red Nukes”? — LA Chronicle]
[Tears of the Great Lakes: Cars to Japan, Technology to China? — Chicago Tribune]
Influential papers in New York and Washington, even Chicago and LA, were all opening fire at once as if they had made a pact.
‘Our family’s employees are too good at their jobs, aren’t they? They’re making this explode all at the same time like they cast some wide-area buff?’
Of course, it was partly because Henry had been fanning the flames from behind the scenes, but the seed of the China threat theory he had thrown out had landed in more fertile soil than expected. Henry had assumed that since China at the time had picked a fight with Vietnam, gotten beaten, and was in a state of going hungry and begging, Americans would only snort at it. He thought they would dismiss it as a Third World country. So he had thought he would have to enlighten them himself, but in reality, there were already quite a few experts neurotic over Asia’s rapid growth!
Wasn’t this the era when Japan, that teacher of theirs, was mercilessly slicing apart America’s automobile and semiconductor industries and producing the unemployed? It was just that the logic of using China as a shield to contain the great evil called the Soviet Union had been strong from the standpoint of national defense and security.
When news of the establishment of diplomatic relations with China first came out, to the public, China was nothing more than “a poor country that can safely be ignored.” Back then, American conservative intellectuals had voiced their opposition, but they had been ignored. The media poured out rosy futures day after day. The public seemed briefly enchanted by the honeyed words that “if we sell just one can of Coke to each Chinese person, a market of one billion will open.”
But the moment intellectuals were horrified by Henry’s documents—by the specific data saying, “In the future, they will ignore patents and kill American industry with these technologies”—and began nodding along, the atmosphere changed rapidly. The authority of the ivory tower had elevated this prediction into truth.
A cold calculator began running in the citizens’ heads. They had been excited at the thought of selling one billion cans of Coke, but what if the cheap labor of those one billion people got their hands on American technology? Would my job still be safe tomorrow? A vague expectation of exports was replaced by a concrete fear of survival.
The leaked data was cruelly detailed. The warning that “your child will end up working in a factory in Beijing” was no longer a conspiracy theory. The latent fear that their children’s future might be mortgaged to some unfamiliar communist country in the East began to seethe like magma in the hearts of citizens who had been suppressing it.
Even in actual history, Carter was cursed for this decision then and would continue to be cursed for it in the future. Well, there were plenty of things for him to be cursed for, but the abuse he took for establishing relations with China was nothing to scoff at either.
It would be unimaginable in the future, but in this era, Southeast Asia was doing well, Korea was racing madly ahead while writing the Miracle on the Han River, and Japan had gone completely insane. All of East Asia except China was in the midst of bulking up, and that momentum was truly fierce. It was a time when everyone nodded along to the order: Europe, America, and then Asia.
And America itself? Modern people could never imagine it, but America in 1979 was absolutely not a country at the height of its power.
That year, America’s inflation rate pierced the ceiling at 11.3%, and bank loan interest rates exceeded a staggering 15%. The monster called stagflation was chewing up the lives of Americans. National pride had been hacked to pieces by defeat in the Vietnam War, and soon the Iran hostage crisis would break out, broadcasting to the entire world the naked face of America reduced to a paper tiger.
The industrial front was even more miserable. Under the assault of Japanese cars, Detroit’s automobile factories fell like leaves in the autumn wind, and the pride of “Made in USA” had long since become a thing of the past. To Americans who had to line up for kilometers in front of gas stations to fill up because of the oil shock, their pride was collapsing to rock bottom as they themselves believed America was sinking.
America in this era was a dark age suffering from severe defeatism, with everything—its economy, its national defense, and even its national pride—collapsing like dominoes. The true originator of the “Lost Decade” Japan would later experience was America during this period. In such a situation, Henry’s remarks were truly a torch thrown into a powder keg.
The order given late in the afternoon of June 23 had covered the pages of every newspaper in America in just six days. And in the weekly magazine [The Time], to be published three days later on Monday, an even more terrifying bomb was waiting.
The unfinished draft of [The Time] that Henry had checked in advance was chilling. The result the experts had completed by fleshing out Henry’s manuscript and pushing forward various statistical data pierced through the future so accurately that even Henry, the original writer, wondered, “Is there another regressor besides me?”
Especially rare earths. Henry had merely started from a simple sentence—China would later do this and that with rare earths, wouldn’t it?—and what emerged was a scenario for the outflow of “rare earth refining and processing technology.”
This scenario warned that the moment this unrivaled technology currently possessed by America combined with cheap labor and crossed over to China, the world would change.
“The moment America gives up processing due to environmental regulations and cost issues and builds factories in China, the core components that will one day go into America’s cutting-edge F-15 fighter jets and ballistic missiles will have to be manufactured entirely with Beijing’s approval.”
That was the main propaganda. The detailed explanation afterward laid out a scenario in which technology developed by America, technology that would be buried for reasons of environmental pollution and profitability, would cross over to China and transform into a weapon controlling at least 60% of the global supply chain; and without Chinese raw materials armed with overwhelmingly superior price competitiveness compared to America’s, American defense contractors would come to a halt.
Because it had the purpose of manipulating public opinion, some degree of exaggeration was mixed in, but apart from that, it also laid bare the true nature of China that Henry had witnessed to exhaustion in his previous life.
‘The rest seems to have come from the draft I wrote, but what is this?’
Henry pulled out one particularly eye-catching sheet from the pile of newspapers. It was the front page of the [LA Chronicle], the stiff texture of the paper palpable in his hand. He took a sip of bitter coffee and slowly scanned down the headline.
[The Price of Abandoning Taipei: Will the Pacific Now Become a “Sea of Red Nukes”?]
…According to a secret agreement exposed by an internal government source, the White House is attempting to strip away Taiwan’s strategic defense shield in exchange for gaining Beijing’s vast market. This will lead to a chain reaction of independent nuclear armament among our Asian allies, and the Pacific we love will ultimately transform into a “sea of death” where tens of thousands of uncontrollable nuclear missiles cross back and forth. China will divert the precision glass technology provided by America to multiple warhead guidance systems for nuclear missiles and complete preparations to turn our living rooms into infernos at any moment.
“Ah, this was the seasoning the experts sprinkled onto my draft, wasn’t it? A sea of nukes… It’s certainly provocative. Their fear marketing is something else.”
With a bitter smile, Henry opened the other newspapers lying beside him one after another. The main dish, the weekly magazine [The Time], had not even been published yet, but the encirclement of public opinion had already been flawlessly completed.
The [Wall Street Journal] used the blood-chilling phrase “the White House’s ignorance” and coolly warned that this treaty, which lacked clauses protecting intellectual property rights, would drive American companies to their deaths, while the [Daily News] boiled the anger of the blue-collar class by saying that the “worker’s bowl of rice” was being used as the stakes in Carter’s political gamble.
The front page of the [Chicago Tribune] in particular was almost desperate.
[Tears of the Great Lakes: Cars to Japan, Technology to China?]
It had shaken the entire public sentiment of the Midwest by reminding them of the decline of the Rust Belt. Even the [New York Time], called the pride of New York, was intellectually scolding the disaster Carter’s diplomatic gamble would bring under the title “Is He Giving Birth to a Second Japan?” The [New York Poster], which he had not expected much from, was also drawing unexpectedly excellent aggro.
Henry gathered the newspapers together and dropped them onto the table as if throwing them. From the elites of the East to the middle class of the West, and even the workers of the Midwest. Now, across all of America, Carter’s trade agreement was about to be branded not as a “bridge of hope” but as a “national suicide express.”
‘This is only the firepower from the first day. Starting tomorrow, the newspaper bastards will go even crazier trying to grab readers’ attention, won’t they?’
“I’m curious how Carter will respond. At this level, shouldn’t they at least run some breaking news?”
Filled with anticipation, Henry turned on the TV in his office and flipped through the channels. But the scenes on the screen were nothing but peaceful.
“The newspapers are burning up their pages trying to tighten the noose around Carter’s neck, and yet on that idiot box, all there is are housewives spinning something and cheering because they won a washing machine. No wonder the public doesn’t know the U.S.-China trade agreement is raising up a second Japan. Sigh, how frustrating. Still, this is America, I suppose…”
And this was also when the gap between American elitism and the general public widened even further, setting the stage for the masses to become stupid.
Paradoxically, America rose to its overwhelming position today partly thanks to the experience of hitting rock bottom during this period, because the empire driven to the edge of a cliff chose an unprecedentedly harsh prescription in order to survive.
It began with Fed Chairman Paul Volcker committing the insane act of raising interest rates all the way to 20%. After a bloody struggle in which companies fell like autumn leaves and the unemployed poured into the streets, he finally succeeded in executing the cancer cell of the economy: inflation. Yes, he succeeded. So it was not for nothing that future Fed Chairman Powell’s role model became Paul Volcker, nor was it for nothing that he benchmarked Volcker’s methods and madly took big steps and giant steps, raising interest rates sharply again and again.
Reagan, who followed Carter, poured oil onto the American economy after its constitution had been improved. “Reaganomics,” centered on bold tax cuts and deregulation, restored the wildness of corporations and led the legendary long boom of the 1980s. He did not stop there; under the banner of a strong America, he defined the Soviet Union as an “evil empire” and drove forward an unlimited arms race. In the end, the Soviet Union, unable to endure the war of attrition, collapsed on its own along with its economic bankruptcy.
The result of pouring money insanely into defense spending at that time was that in the Gulf War that would later break out, the entire world would witness America’s overwhelming technological gap, as if facing aliens, and recoil in horror. Quite literally, America’s military might was driven deep into the entire globe.
‘In the end, America is a country where one genius elite feeds the ignorant masses…’
As with all things in the world, there could be no price for a sinking giant vessel making a U-turn. Starting in 1980, America’s middle class was silently annihilated, and the polarization of wealth widened beyond control. The rich became astronomically wealthy, and the elites received an education on a completely different dimension from ordinary citizens, turning into a new breed of humanity, but the masses, who made up the overwhelming majority in number, grew increasingly ignorant and stupid.
Society became infinitely tolerant of flaunting wealth, and individual success became an object of worship regardless of what process had led to it. It was an era when the severe materialism that would continue into the future openly raised its head. It was also around this time that young, capable “Yuppies,” obsessed solely with success and consumption, began pouring into the streets.
.
.
.
As Henry clicked his tongue at the absence of network news coverage, President Garter, in the Oval Office of the White House, let out something like a groan as he looked over the daily newspapers spread across his desk.
“How is this possible? This article... it pinpoints, with chilling accuracy, the tariff-reduction conditions and scope of technological cooperation we merely floated during working-level negotiations. Did information leak?”
Standing beside him, FBI Director William Webster rifled through a file with a troubled expression.
“Mr. President, our investigation found no trace of any internal document being leaked wholesale. In fact, the tariff reductions and range of technological cooperation were matters that experts had already been speculating about to some extent. But there is something else far more bizarre and frightening.”
“Bizarre? What on earth is it?”
Director Webster took out a document envelope damp with cold sweat and placed it on Garter’s desk.
“This is the source document our agents obtained in connection with the incident. As you can see, it is not an official classified document. It is closer to a sort of ‘warning report on China’s rise,’ combining issues currently under review by our government with future macro-level projections. But its tone is excessively sophisticated and razor-sharp. And it is venomously negative toward China. Every poisonous clause and nuclear-sea scenario the newspapers are shouting about right now was excerpted from this report.”
Garter frowned as he turned the first page of the report.
“Where did this first come from?”
“According to our investigation, this document was first delivered discreetly to editor-in-chief Willie E. Borelli. Borelli became convinced it was the scoop of a lifetime and consulted eminent Ivy League professors and economists to verify the objectivity of the information. That was where the trouble began. The senior scholars in academia were stunned by the report’s insight, and they began circulating copies among themselves and debating it. The information spread rapidly through the vast net of the intellectual class.”
Director Webster swallowed dryly before continuing.
“At present, this report has even flowed into rival newspapers, where it has been reworked according to each outlet’s own editorial line. The FBI has been deployed, but hundreds of professors and journalists have already shared the contents, making it impossible to identify the original distributor. Our internal assessment is... we may never uncover the force behind this scheme. However, there are several countries we can make educated guesses about.”
Garter tapped the corner of the report with his finger and spoke in a low voice.
“You can’t uncover the force behind it? You can do no more than guess?”
“Mr. President, it appears the very method of initial delivery to Borelli was planned so as to leave no trail. There truly is not a single trace. Not of the initial deliverer, nor of any accomplice who disseminated it. Either we cannot find a suspect, or there are too many suspects. Even if we were to investigate not one group but the entirety of the academic world as suspects... there are already more than a few who shared it voluntarily. This single, meticulously polished report has seized control of America’s entire brain.”
“Whew... So who do you think is behind the creation of this strange document?”
Director Webster hesitated briefly before continuing.
“According to our internal assessment... it will likely be difficult to identify a specific individual or organization. But it is clear who stands to gain the most if this report becomes reality. First, Korea. Park Jeong-ui is obsessed with nuclear development right now. The ‘Asian nuclear domino’ logic spread by this report provides him with the perfect justification for nuclear armament. The logic being that, since America cannot protect them, they must arm themselves. Japan is the same. It will use this threat as a pretext to cast off the restraints of its peace constitution and move toward becoming a military power. Taiwan goes without saying.”
Webster looked Garter straight in the eye and concluded.
“In the end, it is most likely that Asian intelligence agencies colluded with American conservatives to orchestrate this. It is a highly advanced psychological operation aimed at derailing your U.S.-China trade negotiations to prevent technology leakage and secure their own military autonomy. This is not a simple information leak. It is a massive act of national lobbying, cloaked in the skin of the media, pressing a blade right beneath our chin.”
Garter tightened his grip on the report. The sound of paper crumpling helplessly cut sharply through the silence of the office.
“So the FBI is saying it will surrender to a mere bundle of papers? Are you truly telling me you can’t uncover the backing behind this to the end?”
“Mr. President, we will do everything in our power to find the initial deliverer, but because this operation was designed meticulously to leave no trail, there is a high probability we will come up empty. As for rooting out those who spread it, it has already gone beyond the realm of crime and exploded across the entire intellectual class. Thousands of intellectuals have become intoxicated by this logic. As long as the First Amendment remains alive, we cannot arrest them all, can we?”
And on July 2, the issue containing the “1979 China Threat Theory” was published.