Scorpio on the Dragon's Demise

"China is a sleeping Dragon - let her sleep" is a saying attributed to the ever prescient Napoleon, though one cannot find the saying amongst the Emperor's judgments. True or not the dragon is now certainly awake and China, vast, mysterious and potentially all-powerful is the background to Scorpio's most recent adventure. Essentially this is the story of how he located two relatives living in an obscure village in the extreme south of China and managed to bring them safely to Malaysia despite all the difficulties and dangers of an epic escape. But as background of the story is his impressions of a China exhausted by the charmingly named 'Cultural Revolution' in the course of which two million people were butchered by the barbaric Red Guards and a total of twenty million died due to the virtual collapse of the economy and the disease and famine that spread across the country. It was a world almost beyond the imagination of western civilized man. Only in China could these ghastly events have occurred and only China could have recovered as comparatively quickly as it did. During and after the Cultural Revolution Scorpio had been promoted to Senior Assistant Commissioner and was in charge of the Communist Affairs division at Federal Special Branch Headquarters. His duties include organizing the briefing and debriefing of visitors to China and when he learned that a Malaysian Trade Mission was to pay an extended visit to China he managed to get himself included in it, suitably dusguised as an official in the Ministry of Primary Industries. Before leaving he was asked by his father to trace his relatives in South China and a Commonwealth liaison officer asked him to try and find a 'mole' with whom his Embassy in Beijing had lost contact.