Book Review: A Drop of Chinese Blood – James Church
Ford, G. (2013) A Drop of Chinese Blood by James Church, Asian Review of Books, 28 January.
A Drop of Chinese Blood is the fifth foray into print for our pseudonymous author “James Church” and his North Korean detective Inspector O since he first appeared in A Corpse in the Koryo seven years ago. Inspector O has grown up a lot since then with the plots becoming more intricate and international. Here we discover that O has retired and left the North under under a cloud for Northeast China where he now resides with his half-Chinese nephew Bing Zong-yuan in Yanji, adjacent to the North Korean border. Bing is the head of Ministry of State Security’s ribbon of territory stretching from there along the border to Russia.
The framework within which the plot plays out is Beijing’s real-life desire for control of, and access to, resources and power in the region. Mongolia has vast quantities of newly discovered coal, gold and rare earths for exploitation as does—to a significantly lesser extent—North Korea. China has been using its virtual monopoly of current rare earth production to leverage influence with Japan and the West. The last thing Beijing wants are alternative sources of supply appearing. Mongolia, in contrast, is looking to escape from China’s suffocating embrace that enveloped it after the collapse of the Soviet Union. With the West indifferent to Mongolian wooing, Ulan Bator is looking to the Korean Peninsula for help.
Mongolia sees North Korea as a fellow victim but lacking its resources; Mongolia actually subsidises Pyongyang’s Embassy in Ulan Bator. It also tries to find ways to help the North’s economy with ideas for joint-venture mining operations and diluting the overwhelming preponderance of Chinese investors in the North’s Special Economic Zone at Rason, adjacent to the Sino-Russian border. It is, in Rason, that the new post-Kim Jong Il leadership sees the possibility of kick-starting the country’s stagnating industrial economy.
In turn, Seoul and South Korea are equally keen to guarantee future resource supply of these key minerals and wants to sign its own deals with Mongolia.
The plot of A Drop of Chinese Blood revolves around Beijing’s attempts to stymie all these efforts by showing Ulan Bator that Seoul is not to be trusted and that it doesn’t pay to get involved with the convoluted and intractable politics of the Peninsula.
Church—for the first time—takes the story telling away from O and puts it in the voice of nephew Bing. He cannot fathom his Uncle. Despite being seemingly obsessed by his carpentry to the exclusion of all else, O is in constant demand by an eclectic cast of characters who are convinced he is, in spite of his exile, still in touch with the authorities in the North. The elements of the story involve seals present and absent: recordings of seals barking and a missing counterfeit State Seal, an attempt by Bing’s predecessor—who defected to Pyongyang seven years earlier—and his attempt to re-defect back, a dismembered body and the mysterious beauty Fang Mei-lin who seems to know O far too well, all covered by layer upon layer of watchers and betrayers within Bing’s office and compacted by pressure from Beijing for the seal and its secrets to be found … and quickly.
Bing is sent on a mission to Mongolia to locate, hopefully, both the seal and his re-defecting predecessor. O is forced to accompany him on this quest. The Mongolian authorities are less than favourably impressed when, immediately after Bing finds his predecessor, he is mysteriously poisoned. O dismisses the importance of identifying the murderer saying “there were a hundred arrows in the air from people trying to get him, meaning it didn’t really matter which one hit home.” The two of them are deported back to China where, when back in Yanji, Bing and his Deputy are abducted by gangsters. When the Deputy is murdered the pieces of the puzzle finally begin to fall in place.
As always Church writes in a sparse witty style that makes for easy reading. If one wanted to be critical one could say that, while the book stands alone, the first-time reader might have benefitted from a little more backstory. The author knows his Northeast Asia sufficiently well that there is scarcely a disjointed paragraph in the book. A Drop of Chinese Blood takes O—and Bing—into new fertile territory. I’m sure this new partnership will be back soon, and I have a suspicion that they might well be joined from time to time by Tuya, the stunningly attractive Mongolian security official and contortionist who makes her debut here.