Born the eldest son of a Chinese warlord, Wei Ho enjoyed the vast wealth of his clan. The Wei clan had ruled Jiangsu province from the time of his greatgrandfather, a puppet for the British invaders of China. After the English introduced opium and addiction to millions of Chinese, the Wei controlled the drug trade in their region. They reaped an unending harvest of gold. The family maintained an army of mercenaries to enslave the people of the province, enforcing their sovereignty through assassination and atrocity.
The first-born son knew only palaces, European tutors and luxury. After an education in the finest English prep schools and universities, Wei Ho traveled the capitals of Europe, tasting the life and vices of royalty and the very wealthy before returning to China to assume control of his clan's drug trade in Shanghai.
Modern, designed by Europeans wanting a city of boulevards and lights, Shanghai represented a door to the hundreds of millions of the Chinese nation. There, English and French and Portuguese exacted the wealth of the vast but weak nation through "concessions" imposed by military threat. The European masters erected ornate offices and regal homes, built opera houses and theaters for their own entertainment. Chinese police excluded Chinese from the European sections where the foreigners promenaded on jacaranda-shaded boulevards in the finest Paris fashions.
As China entered the twentieth century, the adventurous and radical among the nation's youth sought the freedom and the Western ideas of Shanghai. Actors, writers, poets crowded the ghettoes. Young girls sought careers denied by their traditions. Idealists read Marx and Engels and Lenin, dreamed of a workers' paradise in China.
This became Wei Ho's world. His playboy life-style and underworld connections endeared him to the decadent rich. The artists enjoyed his patronage. The beautiful young men and women enjoyed his exotic drugs — the finest opium, cocaine from far-off Bolivia, red hashish from Beirut, kif from North Africa. The radicals appreciated his education in philosophy, endlessly discussing their plans of political and cultural revolution in cafes and bookstores as Wei Ho, in his tailored English suits, smoking English cigarettes, smiled at their fantasies.
One night, not in a bookstore or coffee shop or lecture hall, he saw Lan Pin. The girl who would later rule the destinies of a billion Chinese ran from the stage of a cabaret theater, sequins in her bobbed and curled hair, sweat streaking her makeup. When the young Chinese playboy, dressed like a European prince, caught up with her and simply smiled to her, the actress invited him back to her tiny dressing room. They chatted of art and beauty, she thanked him for his roses and champagne. The cabaret's owner interrupted. The fat old man with a blind eye took the beautiful young Lan Pin away to his apartment.
Wei Ho felt no jealousy. He knew of the young girl's relationship with the old man. He knew every detail of her flighty career. Riding in limousines to the nightclubs where Chinese youth affected the fads of Europe and America, dancing to jazz and drinking gin, Lan Pin presented herself as an actress. But she played her best roles in the beds of theater promoters and playwrights, musical directors and matinee idols. Her favors won her small roles in minor productions, but never the notice of the critics, nor the adoration of the audience, never stardom. Wei Ho courted her to offer a different sort of stardom, in roles where the ambitious, amoral young girl would excel.
He soon took her to the Persian splendor of his apartment and introduced her to opium. Sprawled on the soft carpets, she traveled the fantasy worlds of his drugs. She listened to his tight dictatorial voice attempt whispers. She felt his cold hands undress her. He offered her pleasure and wealth if she accepted a role...to become his mistress.
Lan Pin accepted instantly. As his lover, she knew she would enjoy the best circles of Shanghai society. She would enjoy his wealth.
Wei Ho demanded total subservience. He took her as mistress and student, training her in conversation, the social arts, how to subtly manipulate. He hired aging courtesans to instruct the girl in the erotic arts.
She had misunderstood the role he offered. When she finally had the talents of a high-priced prostitute, he dispatched her to his father.
In the old man's bed, she spied for Wei Ho. Learning of an important conference of warlords, Wei Ho arranged his father's assassination, and the taking of his empire.
Wei Ho rose to dominate the drug gangs of pre-Revolutionary China through the use of assassins and young girls. Wei Ho rewarded his star spy with a feature role in a film production. Lan Pin finally gained the wealth and stardom she desired.
Soon she desired more, much more. She had seen her mentor's rise to power. Exploiting her sudden fame when her movie became a box-office smash, she sought introductions to politicians, outspoken army officers, Communist Party leaders.
Wei Ho felt no jealousy. Famine and war stalked China in the 1930s. He knew the value of a woman in government.
As an actress in cabarets and theaters, she knew the thrill of an audience. She loved the sensation of standing on a stage before hundreds of adoring watchers. But the small audiences of theaters no longer satisfied her. She dreamed of greater adoration. One warm night, after miles in a car crowded with Communist leaders, she followed her friends upstairs, found herself looking out over a sea of faces, thousands upon thousands into the distance.
After that night, she lusted for power — the greater power of life or death over the common people, the masses. Wei Ho guided her. He selected her lovers.
Lan Pin's intellectual lovers taught her the rhetoric of revolution. Her wealthy patrons talked of capitalism. The young men of the Communist Party talked of a People's War.
She watched Mao Tse-Tung gathering support. She saw him as the emerging leader of an overwhelming popular movement. Though he had already married a peasant girl, the beautiful actress, perfumed and demure in her silk gowns, speaking the approved Marxist cliches, recognized no bourgeois vows. She flattered and charmed the revolutionary, parroting his dogma, marveling at the beauty and philosophy of his poetry. Finally, the awkward young idealist succumbed to her charms.
She drove away Mao's pregnant wife, and she married him. She abandoned her stage name of Lan Pin, took the name Jiang Qing. She told Mao her change of names symbolized her change from frivolous actress to a cadre worker devoted to the Revolution. The change in names also severed her links with her many other lovers. Through Mao Tse-Tung, Jiang Qing would later dictate every detail of Communist life in a mad drive for total power through continuous revolution — staging operas, writing billboards, appointing generals, executing teachers, destroying universities. The promoters and agents who had exploited the vulnerable young Lan Pin received death sentences signed by a mysterious Jiang Qing.
Wei Ho remained her friend and confidant throughout her rise to power in the next decades. The two of them supplied drugs and prostitutes — young girls and boys — to the leaders of the proletariat. They gathered information on forbidden pleasures. In the times of starvation and hardship, they smuggled European delicacies and luxuries to those who could pay — the People's Army generals and the Communist Party cadres.
Compiling a history of secret crimes against the People, the two conspirators blackmailed concessions from the Party leadership. They threatened the ideologues with the ax of the truth. Wei Ho and Jiang Qing created a clique of power within the Communist Party.
In the 1960s, Mao Tse-Tung lost day-to-day control of the Party to his wife and her clique. Jiang Qing screened the chairman's visitors, denying appointments to whomever displeased her. She rewrote her husband's political statements. She appointed commissars and provincial officials. In a secret coup d'etat, her Gang of Four seized China.
As the mentor of the empress of the People's Republic of China, Wei Ho ruled a billion Chinese. Yet he knew his power to be fragile. Enemies surrounded China: the Soviet Union to the north, India to the west, the United States to the east. And within China, two decades of suffering and unending labor had sapped the revolutionary spirit of the people. Impatient with the promises of a future Marxist Utopia, they wanted the benefits of the revolution immediately. Village councils defied the Central Committee, reinstituted bourgeois crimes such as private gardens, neighborhood vegetable markets, tradesmen shops and vendors. Worker committees wanted better workers to receive more pay. These small occurrences of individual enterprise presented greater threats to the Dictatorship of the Proletariat than any foreign army.
The Gang of Four declared the Cultural Revolution, marshaling the forces of the nation's delinquent and discontented youth. Mobs destroyed every vestige of the counterrevolution, burning universities, beating teachers to death, hanging merchants, dragging the critics of the Party leadership through the streets until only bones and ragged meat remained. Chaos and murder swept China for years.
But Wei Ho and the Gang of Four could not challenge their foreign enemies with mobs. The Peoples' Army, equipped with captured Japanese weapons and castoff Russian rifles, posed no threat to any modern army. Though the physicists of China had designed and assembled an atomic bomb, China lacked the aircraft or missiles to strike a target. The regime remained vulnerable to any world power willing to mount an invasion.
Local conflict in Vietnam provided the inspiration for development and use of weapons for global conflict. Wei Ho studied the war of attrition waged between the United States and the Communists. He read the reports of action, defeats, atrocities published in America and Europe. He watched tapes of television specials condemning the American efforts to defend the Republic of South Vietnam. Nowhere did the media mention the Communist methods of control over the people. He saw photos of children killed by American air strikes, but not of village chiefs impaled on poles, no photos of village defenders' children disemboweled and beheaded, no photos of young girls with their lips cut away for smiling at American soldiers. Wei Ho discovered the peculiar Western neurosis of self-flagellation and self-deception. Americans and Europeans denied the fact of Communist atrocities, and if confronted with proof in color backed with sworn witnesses, actually believed themselves guilty for Communist murders and mutilations. This neurosis became the central concept of the conspiracy he outlined to the Gang of Four.
Communism could not hope to gain world dominance through economic force, he explained. All Communist states went bankrupt shortly after their revolutions. Slave labor by millions of political prisoners succeeded in maintaining a facade of progress, but executions and mass death soon depleted the legions of slaves. China and Vietnam had followed Stalin's methods of economic advancement and met with the same inevitable collapse.
But terror promised easy victory over the bourgeois democracies of the West. Europeans and Americans lacked the will to endure the slightest inconvenience. If an elected president or prime minister failed to maintain an ever-rising standard of living, the voters found another face and voice to speak from their televisions. If a war conflicted with the hedonism of the youth, millions marched on the capitals, demanding an end to their nations' involvement, regardless of the consequences. How would these same 'citizens respond to a war without frontiers? A war threatening every citizen with death at any moment? How many casualties would they suffer before they demanded peace at any price? Before they accepted any government? Any regime?
The weapons of this war would be compact atomic bombs. If small enough to be concealed in an automobile, Chinese — or American or European — fanatics could place the weapon in the center of any city. The Gang of Four could extend their rule to all the decadent societies of the West. The Gang of Four commanded their scientists to produce the necessary bombs.
After Mao's death, as Wei Ho prepared to attack the world's democracies, popular forces in the Communist Party, enraged by the chaos of the Cultural Revolution, attacked the Gang of Four. Jiang Qing and her clique disappeared into prison. Thousands of their obsequious followers faced firing squads. Pragmatists purged the fanatics, redirected the resources of China to improving the lives of its people. The Peoples' Paradise professed Marxism, yet practiced socialism heavily laced with private enterprise.
Endless interrogation and torture broke the Gang of Four. Before following their lackeys to the execution wall, the members of the clique dictated thousand-page confessions, exposing the shadowy Wei Ho to the light of People's Justice.
Wei Ho fled China with a freight train of gold. He took sanctuary first in Cambodia as the Communist Khmer Rouge decimated their population in their drive to create a Marxist fantasy land. That horror brought economic collapse and nationwide starvation. Seeing the opportunity for quick conquest, the Vietnamese invaded. Wei Ho fled again. With a personal guard of Cambodian mercenaries, he escaped through Laos to northern Thailand, then to Burma.
He did not forget his plans for world power. In the years of his pupil's marriage to Mao Tse-Tung, when Wei Ho had ruled China through Jiang Qing, his power over the nation had been subtle yet absolute. The old warlord of drugs and prostitution lost the chance to be Emperor of the World only by a factional clash within the Communist Party.
From the mountains of Burma, with tons of gold and a mercenary army, he again plotted nuclear terrorism. His researchers found an unmined and unprotected deposit of uranium in the Andes mountains of Bolivia. His spies in the Free World's atomic industries learned of a brilliant nuclear physicist who suffered from narcotic addiction. Wei Ho's gold bought technicians who would go anywhere, serve any employer. International terrorist groups received word of opportunities for trained, disciplined soldiers.
The Empire of Wei Ho rose from the Amazon.