The Mandarin Code Read Online Free

autonomy.
    Smooth top-down vertical lines, mellow like pearl and jade . . .
    After three years, he’d been rewarded with appointment to the Party’s finance committee, a high-level role that gave him access to the upper echelons of the Politburo. He was determined to impress.
    Jiang had soon been charged with running one of China’s biggest state-owned companies, and he became a familiar name to the bankers from Wall Street and London who’d initially expected the same riches they’d milked by flogging off lazy, capital-starved enterprises from the former Eastern Bloc. But while Russia and its Soviet allies were easy pickings for these vultures, Jiang was formidable.
    He married a sharp economic brain with determination and dogma. He championed the workers, arguing that China had a responsibility to ensure that its most vulnerable had the same rights as those who, through accident of birth or other connections, had risen to the top.
    A curved arc, flexible and vivid . . .
    He was centre stage as China made giant strides to catch the West. He became associated with a group of conservatives, the ‘New Left’, who were convinced that the greatest threat was not from outside forces, but from those within the party who wanted China to become a pale imitation of America and Japan.
    He was an ultra-nationalist who believed the adoption of Western ideas poisoned his country. Now he was able to make change. And exact revenge.
    Not since its imperial glory had China possessed the wealth and the power to strike at a weakened foe. He would need resolve, but he was not alone. Other key figures on the committee shared his view. Oh, and that fool in the White House had opened the door. President Jackson’s declaration that China was a currency manipulator represented an opportunity to push back. Hard.
    The challenge was to take the Chinese people with him. To harness their sense of nationalism and direct their anger towards the West. Once that began he would pour oil on the fire. He would not stop until China emerged victorious.
    And if the world had to be torn asunder and remade, then so be it.
    Jiang stood back and admired his work. His brush dripped, glistening black, as he soaked up Mao’s revolutionary edict.
    When the enemy advances, withdraw; when he stops, harass; when he tires, strike; when he retreats, pursue.

CHAPTER FIVE
    Canberra
    The trembles. The slightest of trembles. George Papadakis studied his hands for the telltale sign that one of the most powerful men in the nation was as nervous as a sixteen-year-old at a school formal.
    He switched on his iPad, flicked to that journal of torment. It was nudging 6am and today marked the first Newspoll of the year. An election year. The numbers would not be a surprise because Papadakis, the Prime Minister’s chief of staff, was always given a preview the night before the results went public. It was how The Australian interpreted the raw data that really mattered. How the views and prejudices of 1200 voters were spun, twisted, beaten up and spat out would dictate the sort of day that Martin Toohey and his minority Labor Government would have.
    Every radio and television station, every two-bit ‘analyst’ with a Twitter handle, would be waiting to wring Newspoll for every last drop. For just over two years, the broadsheet had used the fortnightly measure of the national pulse to persecute Labor. If the numbers fell, the Oz would boldly predict an imminent move against Toohey, despite there being no viable alternative. No change would be dubbed ‘flat-lining’, conjuring images of a government on life support. A miraculous rise was a ‘dead-cat bounce’ that briefly masked Labor’s long-term, irreversible decline.
    Since the last election The Australian had not written one positive word about the minority government that had survived despite the conservative cliques’ ceaseless predictions of its imminent