Ninety-One: Farewell to Bai Jianjun

In the third day, Wei Hua flew back to Hong Kong. Once home, he began to think about the problem of organizing a Chinese resistance movement. Many matters now lay before him. Manpower was not something he needed to worry about at the moment, but everything else demanded his attention.

First, there was the question of a military training base for the resistance. Where would he train these people? Second, where would the movement get its weapons? Neither the training base nor the instructors could be obtained through William. At this moment, the United States was secretly supporting the Suharto government. Without covert backing from the American government, Suharto’s faction would not have seized power so easily through a coup. William, after all, was an American; he could not betray the national interests of the United States. Moreover, he worked for the Central Intelligence Agency. What Wei Hua was planning was precisely the sort of thing they would fiercely oppose. How could William possibly help him?

The weapons problem was somewhat easier to solve. At worst, he could buy them on the black market. But he had never bought such things before and did not know how. It was not the kind of matter he could inquire about openly, so that trouble was no small matter either. Still, Wei Hua felt that perhaps the data preserved in his biological computer would offer a solution.

Another matter that demanded careful thought was absolute secrecy. Wei Hua did not want the resistance movement to interfere with his money-making plans in the United States. Just thinking about the stock market crash of 1987 and the Gulf War of 1991 made his blood stir; those were prime opportunities to make a fortune. If he were now branded by the American government as a persona non grata, then making money off Americans would become much more difficult. Secrecy was therefore the first priority.

Wei Hua shut himself away at home for three days to think it through, then called Bai Jianjun and invited him to his house at Repulse Bay. Once Bai Jianjun was seated, Wei Hua said:

“I want to do something big, and I need your help. By ‘you’ I mean the government on the mainland. I wonder if that’s possible.”

“What is it? Tell me about it. If I can’t decide, I can report it upward. The higher-ups have a good impression of you, especially the people in the military.”

How could they not? Wei Hua thought to himself. He had just given the military five million U.S. dollars to buy transport vehicles, and as for how those funds were used, he had no intention of interfering. Five million U.S. dollars exchanged into yuan came to nearly twenty million. How many Jiefang trucks could that buy? At least a thousand.

“I need a group of people, mainly sailors and military instructors. If the mainland can provide weapons, I’ll need a batch of those as well. But don’t worry, I’ll pay for the weapons. The people you send must keep secrets, and they must not be exposed as having come from the mainland.”

“What exactly are you trying to do?” Bai Jianjun knew from the moment he heard the conditions that this was no trivial matter. He definitely could not make the decision himself, so he needed the full details.

“I sympathize deeply with the plight of the Chinese in Indonesia. No matter how you look at it, they are our countrymen. As a Chinese person, how could I possibly feel comfortable seeing them bullied by the Indonesians? I feel very uneasy about it. You may need to be mindful of appearances, but I can act. I plan to establish a Chinese resistance movement in Indonesia and train a group of people to resist on behalf of the Chinese there. We cannot simply stand by while our own people are humiliated and do nothing. We have to make our voices heard, even if only faintly. At the very least, the Indonesians must know that the Chinese are not people they can bully at will. Some things I cannot accomplish on my own, or if I try to recruit people myself, the risk of exposure is too great. That is why I need help.”

“My plan is to use the cargo ships of my Deep Blue Overseas Shipping Company to smuggle those resistance members out, then find a place to train them militarily. After that, I’ll provide the funding to send them back to Indonesia to lead the Chinese resistance movement. We may not necessarily seek to replace the Indonesian government, but we must fight for the lawful rights of the Chinese in Indonesia. For training these people, I hope you can supply the personnel. Otherwise, I’ll have to bring in my Vietnamese men. The biggest issue is the training site. I don’t have a suitable location. The mainland has good relations with several African countries, so could the mainland step forward and help us establish a training camp in some small country in inland Africa? As for weapons, that’s easy enough. If you can’t provide them, I can buy them on the black market. I should be able to get them.”

Wei Hua spoke to Bai Jianjun in an unhurried tone. In truth, he was taking a gamble. Based on his understanding of the second-generation leadership, once they learned of his plan, they would absolutely support it. The war in the southern frontier at present had already been driven forward by that same leadership. They were not the sort of people to swallow losses; in other words, they were hardliners.

Bai Jianjun nearly fainted upon hearing Wei Hua’s words. This boy had only been out for a few days, and already he was planning something this huge. This was no small matter and had to be reported at once. So he said to Wei Hua:

“You stay put these next few days. Don’t go anywhere! I’m going back to Beijing right now! Damn it, I’m Chinese too, and I hate those Indonesians just as much. If I could help our own people, I would have done it long ago. But I can’t. Besides, our position is rather sensitive, so we can’t just say whatever we want. Everything has to follow the instructions from above; we can’t act recklessly on our own, can we? Still, the fact that you’re thinking of our compatriots in Indonesia already earns my respect. I’ll send your plan to the top. Wait for my news.”

Bai Jianjun left. That very day he hurried back to Shenzhen, then took a plane to Beijing.

At that time, many of the founding generals who had spent their lives in the military were still alive and serving in leadership positions within the armed forces. These were men who had crawled out of mountains of corpses and seas of blood, hard and unyielding all their lives. They had fought the Japanese, then fought Chiang Kai-shek, then fought the Americans, and they had never lost. Yet on the issue of Indonesia, they had been angered and had long kept that anger bottled up inside.

At the time of the September 30 coup in Indonesia, most of these men were in poor circumstances and could not possibly send troops to intervene. Now that a war had broken out with a neighboring country, military intervention was even less likely, and there was still the United States watching from the sidelines. But now that someone had put forward such a plan, one that would certainly be unwelcome to the Indonesians, how could they not offer full support?

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