It should be no revelation to note how China has become America’s Public Enemy #1 since the fall of the USSR. Bad enough that China is Communist (still a big no-no even in a post-Cold War era), but America has long mistrusted and misunderstood China, as a society, throughout 400 years of strained relations between the proverbial East and West.

This has obviously bled into the world of politics — Wen He Lee being the most recent recipient of racist paranoia courtesy of the US federal government. But also, as you might expect, it’s bled over into popular culture too. Images of menacing and sinister Chinese date back to the earliest days of Hollywood when Fu Manchu came into being, but it’s questionable how much has changed with a recent film like Wesley Snipes’ "The Art Of War" raising the same fears around Chinese infiltration and treachery.

Author Tom Clancy raises the stakes another notch with his new "The Bear and the Dragon" where an economically starved China (the dragon) eyes Russia’s (the bear) natural resources hungrily. When China decides to invade Siberia, it’s up to the US to step in and kick some Asian ass, not unlike how Clancy drew out a very similar plot in his "Debt of Honor" when Japan was the enemy. Again.

Honestly, I’ve admired Clancy as a storyteller even when I found his right-wing politics and unabashed jingoism to be off-putting. But for most of his career, he’s shown the ability to write tightly scripted narratives that don’t sacrifice character development for techno-military mumbo jumbo — a flaw many of his peers commit. But "The Bear and the Dragon" is not only his most boring book that I’ve ever read (and I’ve read them all), it’s also the most flat in its plot and character arcs and none are more mono-dimensional than the Chinese.

This is, of course, nothing at all new. Clancy’s portrayal of the Chinese is not much different from, say, "The Art of War" or any of the many other Hollywood films that have flattened the one billion-plus Chinese into a singular mind set, usually set on destroying the world ("Fu Manchu") when they’re not busy starving to death ("The Good Earth"). Clancy gets contemporary in his new analogies though, as his characters repeatedly refer to the Chinese as "Klingons", as a way of describing how alien their culture and society seem to be. That being said, it’s hardly as if Clancy is the most egregious culture maker out there who takes a shot at making China the new, all-inclusive enemy (Red Menace meets Yellow Peril).

In fact, Clancy even has an Asian American hero in his book — Chet Nomura, a CIA agent who goes under cover in China and then gets under the covers with a Chinese secretary who unwittingly helps him steal the country’s internal secrets. Nomura gets to play the 007 role with some horribly scripted sex scenes that Clancy should have left well alone. I guess even Clancy thinks Asian guys are hot — his female character refers to Nomura as "Japanese sausage." The mind reels.

So while Asian Americans might have something to cheer about in Clancy’s new book — some positive Asian male representation, woo hoo! — there’s a more subtle, but also more disturbing angle to Clancy’s new book as well. America never went to war with the USSR — or any other Western nation - in Clancy’s previous books, despite their Cold War tensions, but in "Debt of Honor", America and Japan exchange major blows. In "Executive Orders", it’s the Gulf War Round Two as Iran/Iraq square off with the US and now China feels the lethal might of the US military in "The Bear and the Dragon." I just find it incredibly interesting that when it comes time for Clancy to finally start slaughtering people in the thousands, it’s people of color who are at the other end of the cannon barrel.

If you want to talk about one of the most unstable regions in the world, where "ethnic cleansing" is not just fiction but government/military policy, you can’t ignore atrocities committed in Serbia and Bosnia over the last half-decade. But Clancy doesn’t choose to pose his drama in Eastern Europe and I think it would be inconceivable to him — as well as his readers — to have America cause the death of 4,000 Europeans in bloody warfare. But Chinese can die by the thousands and it seems more palatable. After all, if they’re all Klingons, they’re not really supposed to be human anyway, right?

I mean, this is nothing to go out and protest over — Clancy’s book deserves to be trashed more because it’s just poorly written (recycled plot, anemic script, etc.) than anything else and I’m suggesting that Clancy is advocating for the wholesale slaughter of Chinese. I do think, however, that his mindset speaks to that of many Americans — seeing Chinese as an undifferentiated mass, rather than as individuals with complexity and importantly, humanity. And as we celebrate (an odd word to use in the situation) the release of Wen Ho Lee, I think we need to be wary that fictional imaginations can become realized in the flesh with alarming quickness and ferocity. God forbid war ever do break out between the US and China and let’s hope Clancy’s vision of Asians as statistics — rather than people — stays purely in the fictional.