US bans intimacy with Chinese citizens for government staff

The US government has just banned ¹ its employees from having sex with Chinese citizens in China!

In what appears to be a return to the Cold War mentality, if not a return to previous epochs in the very sad history of Western-Chinese relations, the US government has banned American government personnel in China, plus family members and contractors with security clearances, from any “romantic” or “sexual relationships” with Chinese citizens.

Section 1

Sex in China is just one of the themes of my first novel, Year of the Earth Serpent Changing Colors ².

The novel’s time frame is from September 1988 to January 1990—during the rise of the non-violent Chinese democracy movement that hoped to reform the corrupt Communist Party leadership—but that ended in a violent crackdown in Beijing and throughout the country on June 4th and after. The April 15th to June 4th, 1989, democracy protests that began on Tiananmen Square are still an issue that is forbidden to discuss in China to this day.

In the novel, Mylex H. Galvin, an American true believer in Maoism who has been teaching English as a foreign language in Beijing since September 1988, finally begins to realize that no one in China really believes in Mao anymore (“Mao is Dead! Long Live Mao!”).

While Galvin does begin to realize that Beijing has changed its ideological perspective since Mao’s death, he has no idea how suspicious and paranoid the Chinese government is. Galvin has no idea that his “girlfriend,” Mo Li, is a Chinese spy who is trying to find dirt on US citizens living in China and on journalists who could be US “spies” or who could, in some way, prove helpful for the Communist regime…. Not only that, but by hanging out with Chinese students, Mo Li, a grad student herself, is also seeking information on leaders of the Chinese democracy movement.

Section 2

The democracy and freedom protests began 36 years ago, when Hu Yaobang ³, the former General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, died on April 15, 1989. Hu was one of the few members of the Party who advocated major political reforms and was forced to step down as General Secretary in 1987 because of his criticism. Before long, protests urged the government to rehabilitate and legitimize Hu’s reformist political legacy. Soon, an estimated hundred thousand students marched on Tiananmen Square. By June 4th, however, instead of meeting with the protesters in an effort to reach a compromise, Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping demanded that his henchman, Li Peng, crack down.

In urging Chinese intellectuals to criticize Communist Party dogma, Hu had publicly recognized that communism could not solve "all of mankind's problems." He encouraged open debate on controversial subjects, including democratic reforms, the nature of human rights, and the possibility of introducing legal limits to the Chinese Communist Party's power.

Hu made sincere efforts to patch up Sino-Japanese relations but was criticized for doing so. He also alienated generals in the People's Liberation Army when he suggested that the Chinese defense spending should be reduced. He made even more enemies when he and Zhao Ziyang ⁴ initiated a major anti-corruption campaign that permitted the investigations of the behavior of the children, the new princelings, of high-ranking Party members.

Demanding that the Party recognize that Hu Yaobang's views on democracy and freedom were correct was the first of 7 demands made by the student protesters. Many of whom gave their lives to the cause of reform.

As I observed in the novel, Hu’s death resulted in a general strike of all university classes throughout the country, even if not many believed that Hu Yaobang had not been strong enough to implement necessary reforms. Nevertheless, Hu ended up helping to alter the course of China’s history, more because of his fortuitous death than because of his actual life activities.

Ironically, Deng Xiaoping and later Chinese leaders, including Xi Jinping, will later steal the neoliberal aspects of Hu’s reforms—but not its democratic and legal dimensions.

Section 3

From my novel, "Year of the Earth Serpent Changing Colors" ⁵:

The Democracy and Freedom movement… lay dormant for a decade after Wei Jingsheng’s imprisonment in March 1979—until the death of Communist Party reformer Hu Yaobang on April 15, 1989, once again fired it up…

With Tao interpreting by his side, G/G watched the students as they marched solemnly with black banners of mourning unfurled in the mist, as if it were the actual funeral procession. Wreaths were planted. Buddhist monks with shaven heads and faded orange robes paraded through the streets. Before the gathering crowd, a short man stood up to give the oratory. Unlike the militant Celtic IRA warrior whom Galvin had heard speak in Malcolm X Park just before coming to the PRC, this speaker appeared nervous. His speech was short, inaudible, and almost impossible for Tao to decipher. Then again, much like the anti-apartheid protest in Washington, D.C., everyone looked around nervously, trying to locate the unseen—those invisible spooks in not-so-white sheets in the crowd.

It was not long before all left the staged ceremony in silence.

The next day the campus Democracy Wall was entombed. The Dà Zì Bào—that had been posted by the students themselves on that wall—was trashed by Communist Mandarins immediately after Hu Yaobang’s death and replaced by a huge, disingenuous epigraph in bright red Chinese characters. The purpose was to show the government’s praise of the fearless reformer’s valiant struggle to achieve democracy—obvious propaganda. The grounds attendant then assured all students who passed that no one should engage in further sacrilege by placing any more freelance work on top of such sincere calligraphy.

So dearly departed! May his soul rest in peace!

Contrary to its intent, the party’s newfound support for Hu Yaobang—combined with its obvious efforts to co-opt the democracy movement—provoked the very opposite effect than had been expected. Instead of calming the student movement, the party’s miscalculations inadvertently emboldened and revitalized the Democracy and Freedom protest against the pretenses and lies of the leaders of China’s socialist spiritual civilization….

Seven demands:

Affirm Hu Yaobang's views on democracy and freedom as correct.
Admit that the campaigns against spiritual pollution and bourgeois liberalization had been wrong.
Publish information on the income of state leaders and their family members.
Allow privately run newspapers to publish and stop press censorship.
Increase funding for education and raise the pay of intellectuals.
End restrictions on demonstrations in Beijing.
Provide objective coverage of the student movement in official media.

In response to these demands, the party upped the ante against the students. The official People's Daily published an ominous editorial on April 26, 1989, “It is Necessary to Take a Clear-Cut Stand against Disturbances.” The editorial accused the demonstrators of engaging in “premeditated and organized turmoil with anti-Party and anti-socialist motives.”

Yet instead of scaring students back to the classes and frightening the people back to their jobs, the inflammatory accusations of the editorial that had chosen to use the same words that had once been used to oppose the Cultural Revolution—“turmoil,” “chaos,” and “riot”—sparked an even more active non-violent protest throughout all the major cities of China—and not just in Beijing alone.

Galvin found it all very confusing. He was also elated. No more class preparation! No more students running after him to make excuses for being late. No more dealing with petty questions of syntax, phonetics, etymology, or dialectology. No more of those prying questions that magnified into cosmic issues of semiological, theosophical, and even eschatological importance.

Section 4

Sex—or really having no sex while living outside of China—is one of the many themes of the novel’s sequel: Year of the Horseshoe Bat This second novel is set in Paris during the Covid pandemic.

The protagonist of Year of the Horseshoe Bat is Chia Pao-yu—a Chinese dissident who believes that Beijing should have engaged in reforms similar to those urged by Hu Yaobang. After leading protests on Tiananmen Square, Chia was rumored to have been captured and executed in China. Yet the rumors are a mere smokescreen. Chia was able to escape to Paris with the help of US and French secret services, religious groups, Chinese triads (mafias), and human rights NGOs, in particular, one group called the Foundation for Human Values Forever that would hire Chia to work in Paris…

Chia now lives in another world; he can only regard his beloved China from afar. Believe it or not, he remembers the 1980s as a time when only Communist Party bigwig cadres rode limos in Shanghai and Beijing; the people drove only bicycles… All power to the people!

Ironically, now that he is living alone in Paris, he sees plenty of bicycles cruising the streets—but only learns through the media that there are no longer so many bikes in Shanghai! Only bumper-to-bumper auto traffic!

During Chia’s life in exile, he watches from a distance as US-China tensions heat up over trade imbalances, currency manipulation, arms and missile sales, China’s threats to Taiwan vs. US threats to support Taiwan’s independence, and US-China disputes over human rights and lifestyle.

Even during the Covid pandemic, Chia experiences the No. 1 geopolitical reality of Spy vs. Spy vs. Spy vs. Spy—US spies vs. Chinese spies vs. Russian spies vs. European spies. Evidently, the Cold War is over. Long live the Cold War!

Chia Pao-yu fears that the threat of war between China and the United States over Taiwan is just looming over the horizon—that is, if saner minds do not soon prevail in the quest to pursue peace and reconciliation despite the odds!

Section 5

April 15, 2025, is the 36th anniversary of the rise of China’s democracy and anti-corruption movement in China after Hu Yaobang’s death.

On March 30, 2025, the son of Hu Yaobang, Hu Dehua ⁶, who was born in 1948 on a coal truck in the middle of an evacuation during the Chinese civil war, died of a heart attack. Hu Dehua, a businessman, is also remembered as an outspoken proponent of political reform, press freedom, and the rule of law. Like father, like son, he was a rare bird among China’s Communist “princelings,” who warned of the return of Maoist ideology in the form of “new authoritarianism”—a theme of both my novels, Year of the Earth Serpent Changing Colors and Year of the Horseshoe Bat in Exile ⁷.

In April 1989, the death of Hu Yaobang brought with it massive protests throughout China. In April 2025, the death of Hu Yaobang’s son, Hu Dehua, was immediately met with censorship so as to nip in the bud the very possibility of protest.

Beijing still sees the democracy and anti-corruption movement as an internal “threat” to the Communist monopoly on power, along with the external “threat” of the tightening of US defense ties with the UK, Australia, Japan, and maybe with India. For Beijing, US political support for Chinese democracy movements and Taiwanese independence represents a declaration of war—policies meant to overturn the Communist Party.

For its part, Washington opposes Beijing’s ongoing threats to Taiwan as well as the Russia-China “no limits” (but with some limits!) strategic partnership. In essence, the US fears the challenge of China’s Belt and Road initiative to US regional hegemony in the Indo-Pacific, if not US global hegemony—as Beijing builds its political, economic, and military influence abroad by way of isolating Taiwan.

There must be a way to find a diplomatic compromise!

Section 6

And yes, there is a third novel presently gestating that would form a trilogy: Year One over Zero (1/0). The book is a pre-apocalyptic vision, a dystopic contemporary reality, that seeks to synthesize the major themes of the first two novels—the quest to establish at least a social and ideological modus vivendi between East and West in the ultimate hope that a truly long-term positive and sustainable regional and global peace can be established.

Yet the future publication of Year One over Zero (1/0) presumes that World War Trump’s rival editors and national cyber-communications control staffs—whether they call themselves “America First,” “Russia First,” “Europe First,” “India First,” “Japan First” “India First,” "Israel First," “Iran First” "Turkey First," or “China First,” etc.—do not soon opt to spread a vicious pandemic of computer viruses in multiple preemptive attacks throughout the social media before snapping all undersea internet cables with nuclear submarines and then censoring all global communications satellite systems by means of electromagnetic pulse bombs—whether nuclear or non-nuclear!