Book excerpt: There is great social tension in the aftermath of ‘Tiananmen Square’, uncertainty about political and economic policy and the constant burden of over-population. Serious flooding of the Yellow River adds more than a hundred million to the ‘floating population’ of destitute and semi-destitute peasant refugees. In addition, the rapid development of the market economy, and other reforms, have led to the prosperity of some but not in all provinces. The bastion of conservative opposition to reform remains in the Army, especially among the old revolutionaries. An ambitious Lieutenant-General (Wang Feng), backed by the highest-ranking officer of the Army, now retired, who still wields immense, informal power, arranges for the assassination of the reformist Secretary General of the Communist Party who is also President of China. Seven of the rich southern provinces subsequently declare independence because the anti-reform, anti-commercial new government threatens their prosperity... Taiwan sees this as an opportunity to ‘re-conquer the mainland’, but Wang Feng orders a pre-emptive nuclear attack on Taipei... Members of the Taiwanese army then capture a nuclear missile base in south China and fire a missile at Beijing, which lands in Russia by mistake...