Matthew Reilly: The Great Zoo of China

Na said, ‘That is correct, Mr Wolfe. Crater Lake was created by a nickel meteorite that hit here about 300 million years ago.’

Wolfe said, ‘Make no mistake, people, with its natural wonders and its industrial centres, southern China is a commercial juggernaut, the engine room of the entire country. The two mega-cities of this area, Guangzhou and Dongguan, are home to 60 million people. But fly a short way inland and the cities vanish and you essentially travel back in time to landscapes like this. Out here, you’ll find only small communities of rice farmers.’

Three Chinese officials were waiting for them near the exit.

They were all men.

The first was dressed in a bright red blazer with a yellow tie. He had slicked-down hair and a pencil moustache and Na introduced him as Zhang, the deputy director of the zoo. CJ noted that he had a peculiar nervous tic: he kept smoothing his tie, as if it had a crease he couldn’t flatten out.

The second man wore a military uniform. The stars on his shoulders indicated that he was a colonel. He had no nervous tics. He stood with the firm, feet-apart stance of a commander who was used to being obeyed.

Na introduced him as Colonel Bao, and when he shook CJ’s hand, he said in English, ‘Dr Cassandra Cameron? You are Dr Bill Lynch’s protégée, are you not? He actually visited our zoo. I was most saddened by his death.’

‘So was I,’ CJ said.

The last Chinese man was easily the youngest. He was a lean, handsome fellow of about forty-five. He wore a stylish navy suit and a dark tie: the standard attire of a Communist Party member. He also had one singular physical feature: just above his right eye, he had a sharply-defined patch of pure white hair on his otherwise black-haired head, a condition known as poliosis. CJ had known a few people in her life who’d had poliosis and they’d dyed the offending patch of snow-white hair, making it disappear. This man had not done that: in an otherwise entirely black-haired country, his white forelock made him distinctive and he was evidently quite happy about that.

‘Why, hello!’ he said brightly to them all in English. ‘I am Hu Tang.’

As Hu moved down the line of visitors, Seymour Wolfe whispered to CJ: ‘Don’t be fooled by his age. Mr Hu Tang is the most senior man here. Youngest ever member of the Politburo. He’s what they call a “princeling” of the Communist Party, a member of the Red Aristocracy, those Party members who trace their ancestry to great revolutionaries like Mao. Educated at Harvard, Hu Tang is part of the new wave. He supervised the construction of the Great Firewall of China, the system that censors the Internet here. Now he’s the head of the Department of Propaganda and a member of the all-powerful Standing Committee of the Politburo.’

‘They have a department of propaganda?’ Hamish said in disbelief.

CJ ignored him. ‘The US Ambassador and a Chinese heavy hitter? What kind of zoo is this?’

‘I’m wondering the same thing,’ Wolfe replied.

Hu Tang spread his hands wide. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, welcome. Welcome to the most incredible place on Earth.’

A short walk to a beautiful—and also brand-new—glass-enclosed train station followed. It was a gigantic space with a curved glass-and-steel roof.

Four state-of-the-art maglev trains were parked at parallel platforms underneath the high soaring roof. The bullet-shaped trains looked very fast and very, very powerful.

A huge red sign above the space blazed in English and Mandarin:

WELCOME TO THE GREAT ZOO OF CHINA!

Within a minute, CJ and her VIP party were aboard one of the trains and zooming through a tunnel at four hundred kilometres per hour, heading for the mysterious zoo.

As the train shot through the tunnel, Hu Tang and Deputy Director Zhang spoke with the US Ambassador and his aide.

Even in a group such as this, CJ saw, a subtle hierarchy still existed, and a good host always spoke to his most important guests first.

CJ and Hamish sat with the two New York Times journalists further down the carriage. The lights of the tunnel outside whizzed by like laser bolts in a science-fiction movie.

Wolfe said: ‘This region of China is the perfect place for a new tourist attraction. The weather is better than in the north and the region is already buzzing with business and tourist activity.

‘Hong Kong is the party town, all glitz and glamour. Macau is Vegas, keeping the casino crowd entertained. Mission Hills golf resort isn’t far from here— eighteen golf courses designed by the likes of Jack Nicklaus, Greg Norman, Nick Faldo and Annika Sorenstam. Biggest golf complex in the world. But then, that’s what China does better than anyone else.’

‘What’s that?’ Hamish asked.

‘Big,’ Wolfe said. ‘China does big better than any other country, including America. Mission Hills is the perfect example. How do you build eighteen golf courses— courses —in the rainforests of Guangdong? Easy. You pay the best golf-course designers in the world whatever price they ask and then you bring in an army of labourers and a whole lot of dynamite and you shape the landscape to your needs. Then you build hotels adjoining those golf courses and provide a superfast ferry to convey golfers there from Hong Kong and— voilà! —your mega-resort is ready to go.’

‘Do you think that’s what they’ve done here with this zoo?’ CJ asked.

Wolfe shrugged. ‘There have been whispers of a major project in these parts for a long time. There are rumours that a special no-fly zone has been imposed on this region for some time and since all the local airlines are government-owned, it’s easy to enforce.’

‘Sounds expensive,’ Hamish said.

‘In a world of debt, young man, China is a net creditor ,’ Wolfe said. ‘They have the largest cash reserves in the world: $3.7 trillion at last count. And that’s not including the $1.4 trillion that America owes them!

‘When they built the Three Gorges Dam—the biggest dam in history—they didn’t have to issue a single bond. They paid for it out of national savings. In the last ten years, China has built over two thousand kilometres of maglev bullet-train tracks like the ones we are travelling on now, without borrowing a cent.

‘Cost is no issue. China has a limitless supply of cheap human labour to build this kind of infrastructure. The world has not seen such a concerted effort in national infrastructure-building like this since Britain built its railways in the nineteenth century.’

The Twitter guy, Aaron Perry, looked over at that, emerging from his splendid isolation. He had been writing notes on his otherwise useless phone till then. ‘And as far as the Chinese people are concerned, led by the ever-fabulous Communist Party, China leaps from one great achievement to the next. The state news agency, Xinhua, is a mouthpiece for the Party and would never question any announcement from it. Take the great media fraud that is China’s GDP figures.’

‘Aren’t they supposed to be amazing?’ CJ said.

‘They are amazing,’ Perry said. ‘A little too amazing. It takes Western nations about three months to ascertain their Gross Domestic Product figures. In China, it takes one week. One week. It’s as if the central government is telling each region what numbers to present.

‘And no-one in the Chinese media questions it. But, then, who would dare? Never forget, the Communist Party of China is perhaps the most successful authoritarian regime in history. It is ruthlessly repressive. China smiles and plays nice for the world, but it is still a very dangerous place to be a dissenter.