NOTE: This is part of a continuing online novel. Here is the Table of Contents.

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Anyone wondering about China’s historical isolation need only look at a map.

South and east of Hong Kong and Shanghai are the toughest pirates in the world. They come out of coves in Vietnam, Cambodia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Indonesia, like sharks smelling blood. Any unarmed boat is easy prey. They are in-and-out in a half-hour.

Kofi Annan knew this. He also knew that the likely destination of the Chinese mercy fleet would be east and south Africa. That was always the destination of mercy, although mercy never seemed to reach his poor troubled continent.

He also needed a new power base, one he could match against the growing American pressure for his resignation in the wake of what they called the “oil for food scandal.” Scandal, bah! The U.S. had done business with the same people for years. Both Clinton and Bush’s father knew exactly what his son had been up to. These bastards think they can rule the world? They wouldn’t even rule New York, if he could only beat the growing gap between his spending and what a cut-off of U.S. dues might mean. The gap made him a pauper.

So Annan was happy to meet with China's U.N. ambassador, Zhang Yishan, in his office, and happy to give him all the cooperation Zhang sought. The ships would fly the UN flag, but they would be accompanied by Chinese naval officers, with small patrol ships disguised as lifeboats.

And in return China would increase its UN dues, as befitting the role of a Great Power, with an up-front payment in cash, in Yuan, before the world’s press. Despite all claims to the contrary the UN operates by the Golden Rule, he who has the gold makes the rules. And Annan now knew that the U.S. was no longer the only place he could go for gold. He was no longer a puppet but a player. Annan smiled brightly during the ceremony and reporters noted a shark-like demeanor to him.

Shark fin soup is a noted Chinese delicacy. It was served to officers on the first day out of port, as the mercy ships began their crossings. To the naked eye the ships were indeed naked, and that was the Chinese intent. But in fact they carried many barbs. The hunters would become the hunted. And electronics officers on board would jam and scramble the radio frequencies used by the pirates as they came in, so that word of their capture could not get out.

The battles were short and, to Chinese eyes, quite sweet. Fast boats would come on, their guns firing, the men on them ready for plunder. What first seemed like lifeboats would be dropped, but these were no ordinary lifeboats. In fact, they were far more heavily-armed than the boats of the pirates, the men in them far better-trained. And the motors on the “lifeboats” let them outrace any pirate who thought he could escape. The same winches that had brought down the “lifeboats” were then used to bring up the pirate ships, so that they disappeared from the sea, and others had no warning that these were not, indeed, the merchantmen they appeared to be.

The result, after a leisurely crossing of four days, was a hold filled with criminals, heads shaved and put into orange jump suits, who could be delivered to Singapore authorities personally by China’s ambassador to that country, Zhang Yun. This was done with much fanfare, as a way to end a row over a visit the previous summer by Singapore’s incoming leader to China’s island province.

Hard men were paraded along the dock as cameras rolled, and Zhang shook hands warmly with Singapore prime minister Lee Hsien Loong. The pirates' fast boats were quietly off-loaded and handed over, with somewhat less fanfare, to Singapore police, who could share them with Malaysian and Indonesian authorities.

From his office in New York, George Soros read all this on his Bloomberg terminal and smiled. It was a diplomatic triumph on every level. While the Bush Administration continued to antagonize the world, China was befriending it, isolating the Americans as never before. Peace was at hand with Taiwan, ties were improved with ASEAN and Africa. Even the UN was on-board with the Chinese diplomatic offensive. Quietly Soros began buying Yuan again at 6.26 on the dollar, and smiled as the price rose through the day.

Soros knew, as every other trader buying Yuan for Dollars that day knew, that the Chinese mercy fleet wasn’t really a giveaway. Like all Chinese actions it was layered like an onion.

The diplomatic triumph was one layer. Another was the upward pressure the donations placed on Chinese produce prices. Because farmers were being pushed into cities they had finally been organized and automated, so they needed the relief. While most of the relief would go to the growing number of Chinese mega-farms, some would trickle down to the smaller farmers, enough so that the continuing flow of men and women to the cities might abate a little, and China’s internal cohesion might increase a little as well.

Another layer of the onion lay in Africa. The goods were not really going to be free. There would be proper respect paid to the donors and the people would pay for them, through African middlemen who took them from the docks into remote villages, or who offered protection to relief agencies who did that job. The donations would help keep many African governments in power, perhaps even help create one in Somalia, and all those leaders would know who was responsible for their good political fortune.

In addition to food, however, China also needed to dump electronics, and it was this that Richard Branson was carefully considering from his new office in Johannesburg’s Carlton Center. He had frowned as he watched his new trading floor being installed, not at the equipment, but at the bandwidth it was pulling from the local Internet, and from the one fiber optic line that connected Johannesburg to Cape Town, then to India and the World Wide Web. If the supply of bandwidth could not keep up with demand, he knew, Virgin Maverick would fail.

Then he smiled, that devilish Branson grin TV viewers knew so well. This won’t take much bandwidth at all, he thought. He had his new African secretary call Hangzhou, China, and seek out Mr. Ren Zhengfei, CEO or Huawei Electronics, that nation’s top telecommunications equipment company.

Virgin Maverick would be happy to deal, through Mr. Ren, and offer Huawei a cash contract for running new fiber through both oceans around Africa, if Mr. Ren could help Virgin Maverick get in on China’s electronic dumping. Branson knew that customers could easily be lined up in South America as well as Africa, enough to take as much as China needed to get rid of, on the strong discounts China needed in order to clear the docks. What was old generation cellular equipment, or PC equipment, would be brand new gear in Buenos Aires, in Pretoria, or in Monrovia.

All the money moving as part of these deals could run through the Carlton Center, where strong bank secrecy guaranteed by Branson’s deals with Thabo Mbeki meant no one’s name need ever be published.

The new Hong Kong was launched.