Chia Pao-yu is alive and well!

The Beijing University pro-democracy activist is living in exile under an assumed name, Jean Valjaur (JV). As was rumored in the prequel, Year of the Earth Serpent Changing Colors, Chia was not executed for helping to organize the April-June 1989 Tiananmen Square protests.

Now in Paris, he has witnessed the Bataclan terrorist attacks, the Yellow Vest protests, and survived the COVID-19 (or Horseshoe Bat) pandemic—after having survived the AIDS pandemic in China in the 1980s.

During the Horseshoe Bat pandemic lockdown, Chia pursues his self-study of Asian influence on western culture, with a focus on pop artists and beat poets. He likewise critiques the views of western “Maoists,” like Mylex H. Galvin (the pro/antagonist of Year of the Earth Serpent Changing Colors)—whom Chia depicts as a “Wokeist” before his time. And he reflects on the reasons why he became a pro-democracy, pro-environment, and anti-nuclear dissident.

In Paris, Chia eventually finds work with the Foundation for Human Values Forever (HVF), directed by the charismatic feminist Bereft LaPlante. He meets dissidents much like himself, reporters, and whistleblowers who have suffered for their political views and gender.

As a French citizen, Chia participates in Hong Kong protests, and takes part in a conference on the “Future of China” in Washington, DC. In June 2020, he witnesses the threat of President Trump (nicknamed Donald “Secret Agent Orange Jee-Zus!!!” Drumpf) calling in American G.I. Joes to repress domestic protests in Washington, D.C., against the killing of George Floyd and against Trump’s corrupt, militarist, plutocratic, and anti-ecological domestic and foreign policies.

Chia Pao-yu is outraged to hear an American President extoll the virtues of China’s “President-for-Life” Xi “Winnie the Pooh” Jinping and his totalitarian powers that Chia had thought were part of the American DNA to oppose and that Chia himself had risked his own neck to oppose by helping to organize the pro-Democracy and anti-corruption movement in China in April-June 1989. And much as Chia Pao-yu himself had predicted the rise of “new authoritarianism” in China in 1989, just prior to the Tiananmen Square repression, he now sees that the Land of the Free and the French Land of Liberty are both being confronted with the real possibility of dictatorship.

In the case of American politics (and much as I argued in my non-fiction book World War Trump, Prometheus Books, 2018), it is incredible how the public media personality of Secret Agent Orange Jee-Zus!!!’ appears to mimic that of Berzelius “Buzz” Windrip in Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here (1935). In that novel, Windrip takes over the American presidency backed by armed Minute Men militias, much like Il Duce Benito Mussolini took over Italy in 1922 after his March on Rome.

In Chia’s view, President Drumpf’s call in June 2020, with Bible in hand, for a military crackdown1 on peaceful American protestors, whom Drumpf had dubbed “Maoists,” “Wokeists” and “Anarchists,” among other monikers, ironically raised almost exactly the same quandary as to the relationship between the Executive Branch and the Pentagon as had been the case when then Chinese leader, Deng “Little Bottle” Xiaoping, had called upon the People’s Liberation Army (PLA)—that just like the American military did not want to be dragged into domestic politics—to crack down on the Chinese democracy movement on June 4th 1989 in a very violent action that challenged the very beliefs and values of the Communist Party and the PLA itself.

The parallel between Drumpf and Deng appeared plausible in Chia’s mind—even if Drumpf’s orders to crack down on protesters were ultimately not executed as threatened. And the parallel becomes even more relevant just a few months later, in January 2021, when President Drumpf’s violent “March on the Capitol” shook the very foundations of American democracy, which claims that Congressional compromise is the way to make governmental reforms—even if the complex American system of “checks and (un)balances” does not always make it possible to reform very easily.

Back in Paris, Chia accidentally learns during a fund-raiser that the HVF Foundation finances questionable activities not always related to humanitarian causes and quits after a drunken LaPlante, accused of anti-Semitism, attempts to seduce him.

The secretive Society for the Exploration of Cosmic Consciousness (SECC) then hires Chia and publishes his “Planetary Manifesto,” that is heavily redacted by Artificial Intelligence. His warning gets lost in the babble of Social Media: if America, Europe, China, and the World cannot soon move toward a new humanized planet where Ken’s and Barbie’s can live in mutual respect, then there is a real danger that a martial world where multicultural versions of Ken’s “action figure” rival, “G.I. Joe,” will take over.

Chia fears that Homo Geopoliticus et Economica are entering the latter martial world that pits the American “Arsenal of Democracy” and its Christian Jee-Zus!!! Freak neo-Conservatives, in alliance with the anti-Red China “Blue Team,”2 plus Rabbi Dr. Geyer’s anti-Palestinian, anti-Iranian, messianic movement3 against the Benevolent Big Brother Benefactors and their mercenaries led by the Chinese Red Dragon and Russian Double Headed Eagle.

“Can the Balding Eagle and Red Dragon, plus the Russian Double-Headed Eagle, eventually reach out for some form of geopolitical compromise despite their divergent concerns of power, interests, influence, as well norms and values?” are some of the questions that plague him.

Just after starting work for the SECC, Chia mysteriously disappears in a suspected trade-off for a Western spy held by Beijing—at least that is the “official” news story.

Reference

1 Drumpf’s actions were in technical violation of the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act that was passed when white supremacists had returned to power in both southern states and Congress after Reconstruction. The Act was intended to prevent the intervention of northern Federal troops in the affairs of southern states. See Joseph Nunn. Then, as now, Trump’s actions raise questions as to who should have the power to “enforce the peace”? The U.S. Federal government? The State? The Locality? Ironically, Trump was claiming the right of the Federal government, while his supporters advocate States’ rights. The 12 riders of the Posse Comitatus becomes a theme of this novel… and possibly the next!
2 The Congressional Blue Team swore that the Chi-Com “Red Tide,” if not stopped at Hong Kong and Taiwan, would soon spread across the Silk Road through Eurasia, the Middle East, and Africa up into Europe through the Balkans and into the Greek Achilles Heel of Europe and across the Pacific to Latin and Central America and up into Mexico—which Beijing would use as a base to invest in North America under the free trade pact between Mexico, Canada, and the U.S.
3 In his novel, Old-New Land, by the founder of Zionism, Theodore Herzl, Rabbi Dr. Geyer (which means ‘vulture’ in German) was the leader of a messianic political party who opposed Herzl’s vision that Arabs would be equal to Jews in Herzl’s proposed “co-operatist” and “mutualist” society of the Holy Lands.

This article is the synopsis of my forthcoming novel, Year of the Horseshoe Bat—in Exile (or the Legend of JV), the sequel to my previous novel, Year of the Earth Serpent Changing Colors.