China is a gold mine for thriller authors looking for a bad guy. Wow. How….. predictable.

For novelists, China’s rise is pure gold. The Communist Party’s opacity and its passion to control China’s image have had the opposite effect: they feed Western fears of China’s intentions, and dare Western thriller writers to invent disaster.

Never mind that so far the Chinese have not projected military power outside of East Asia, that they prefer to compete mainly by accumulating dollars by the trillion. Military power grows from economic strength, and military analysts do not doubt that the People’s Republic could one day become a full-bore competitor to the United States, offering its protection to all manner of governments throughout the Persian Gulf and Africa.

For journalists, couldis a blank page. But novelists exist to fill that space.