Literature / The Bear and the Dragon

The Bear and the Dragon is a thriller novel by Tom Clancy, featuring the character Jack Ryan.

China, facing an economic and political crisis, decides to invade Russia. The U.S. must cement a friendship with its once-greatest foe to fight off the aggressor.

This novel contains examples of:

• A Father to His Men: Part of the reason President Ryan remains in Washington despite an inbound Chinese nuclear missile. He can't live with leaving the 'expendable' members of the White House staff behind.
• Ambadassador: Monsignor Franz Schepke, the deputy head of the Vatican embassy in Beijing, is described as being a spy of sorts as well as a diplomat, and nearly wrestles a gun away from a policeman who pistol-whips his supervisor during a protest over a forced abortion per China's single-child policy.
  He was a priest. He couldn't use deadly force. He couldn't attack. But he could defend.
• Artistic License – Economics: The reason for the trade dispute with China is primarily due to a "trade deficit" that the US faces, where the US imports more from China than it exports to China, with the stated desire of the US being that the trade deficit is reduced or eliminated entirely. While the explanation for why this is wrong is about as dry as economic arguments can get^note Suffice to say, most economists reject the concept that "trade deficits" are a bad thing at all., the other fact of the matter is that government has very little control over imports and exports beyond tariffs and other restrictions: imports and exports are controlled by the companies that import and export, and they're going to do what is most economically beneficial. Demanding that China lower the trade deficit is functionally an impossible task. Even worse, later in the book, the characters point out that they can't control trade, when companies stop doing business with China!
• Artistic License – Geography: The invasion of Russia makes absolutely no sense, naming places seemingly at random in the associated area. Harbin and Bei'an are mentioned as launching points for the invasion due to their train terminals, but both of those locations are hundreds of kilometers from the Russian border. The attack is said to cross the Amur River, which is the eastern part of the China/Russia border, but Russian and American reinforcements are deployed from Chita, which is to the west; while this is acceptable and intended to show the difficulties of logisitics in theater, when the American forces deploy, they are told to go east to cut the Chinese logistics lines. The only problem is that there's a few hundred kilometers of Chinese territory between Chita and the Amur River!
• Artistic License – Law: The book depicts China's then One Child Policy as more draconian than it was, with cops willing to kill a foreign diplomat to enforce it, although In-Universe said cops didn't fully understand the situation and get in a lot of trouble when what happened comes out. In reality, couples caught breaking the law generally faced fines, and the government had collected billions from such fines. While forced abortions did occur, they mostly happen in rural regions where residents were too poor to pay the fine and the rule of law is weak, and rarely in major cities like the book due to the greater chance of public backlash. In fact, one forced abortion case in 2012 brought such negative publicity that it contributed to the scrapping of the policy in 2015.
• Artistic License – Linguistics: The book claims that Chinese characters are stored as image files inside computers, rather than digital standards such as Unicode.
• Artistic License – Military:
  • The Chinese military is depicted to be more backwards than it was during the time the book was written. For instance, the book states that they have no unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) or airborne early warning and control systems (AWACS), when in reality, the Chinese have used military drones since the 1960s.
  • The Russian military is also depicted to be backwards than real life, fielding WWII tanks.
• Artistic License – Politics:
  • By the time the book was written (2000), China had spent years adopting market reforms and turning gradually into a capitalist system plugged into the globalized economy, all done at the behest of and under the supervision of its government. The portrayal of the Chinese Politburo as dominated by Marxist ideologues who have no idea how capitalism works is at least a decade out of date, if not two.
  • The book portrays Russia as becoming a NATO member essentially overnight. To put it mildly, this would be extremely unlikely to happen in real life. Joining NATO is a lengthy process even when everybody involved would like the country involved to become a member, for purely administrative, diplomatic, and military reasons if nothing else (weapons standardization to ensure that the new allies' armies are compatible, for one example). In this case, the process would be made much more complicated by the fact that the nation trying to join is Russia; even if the original members of the alliance accepted the "Russia isn't the Soviet Union anymore" argument, many of the newer members (such as Poland and the Baltic states) are formerly occupied nations that retain huge security concerns about Russia to this day.^note An example can be seen in Sweden and Finland's attempts to join NATO following Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Turkey, a NATO member, deliberately blocked their ascension for political leverage, such as demanding the countries extradite Turkish dissidents purported to be terrorists. As of late March-early April 2023, however, Turkey has finally approved Finland's accession to NATO, and though it and Hungary dragged out Sweden's application, it too ultimately joined the alliance in 2024.
• Author Tract: While all the books feature Clancy's right-wing politics to a greater or lesser degree, The Bear and the Dragon is notable for featuring nearly every intellectual, economic and political cause celebre of the modern American right, with a large amount of time particularly dedicated to abortion rights in the US. How effective this is depends on one's own political orientation.
• Badass Army:
  • The Russian Army. While they rely heavily on the US for military support and they have an army of conscripts (half of whom did not show up when called into emergency active duty), their tactics are better than the Chinese that have been training for literally years, and they utterly obliterate an entire Chinese army group (about 1,000 tanks and 200,000 soldiers) with brilliant tactics, excellent intelligence and tanks from World War 2. The Chinese head general getting bagged by a sniper right off the bat didn't help.
  • The U.S. Armed Forces, as well. While the bulk of the fighting is done by the Russians, the U.S. do contribute some armored divisions to the ground war in Siberia. Their biggest contributions are elsewhere, however: their Dark Star drones allow total real time coverage of the battlefield and make surprise by the Chinese effectively impossible, their stealth aircraft are able to hit targets inside China with impunity, their fighters and pilots are far superior to the Chinese and achieve air superiority early on, and their smart munitions allow them to wreak enormous havoc on Chinese armored corps even with a limited number of airplanes.
• Call-Back: The scientist who assists the US Navy in converting a AEGIS cruiser into a ballistic missile defense platform is Al Gregory, a character who was last seen working on a ballistic missile defense project in The Cardinal of the Kremlin.
• Can't Stop the Signal: Near the end of the book, the CIA decides to start streaming live drone footage of the war in Siberia. The footage quickly goes viral all over the world, and it shows that the Chinese are losing the war badly. This leads to a large scale protest from Chinese college students who realize that their government has been lying to them. When the protesters learn that their government nearly started a nuclear war with the United States, they storm the Council of Ministers building.
• The Chessmaster: Zhang Han San not only instigates conflicts between the United States and various other countries without putting China in direct confrontation in Debt of Honor and Executive Orders, but is also the puppeteer behind Premier Xu in The Bear and the Dragon. He's too smart for his own good, though, as his machinations, while not explicitly discovered until The Bear and the Dragon, are mostly inferred, and China is punished for it.
• China Takes Over the World: The People's Republic of China becomes a significant threat to world peace, and is willing to wage war against its neighbor Russia.
• Christianity is Catholic: Averted, with the cooperation and friendship between a Baptist minister in China, and the new ambassador from the Vatican receiving a fair amount of attention, and both of their churches sharing the reaction when they die trying to stop a forced abortion.
• Cold Sniper: Pavel Petrovich Gogol. He even still has his WWII-vintage Mosin-Nagant sniper rifle...complete with notches cut in the stock for each German officer he killed with it.
• Commie Land: The People's Republic of China gets a good bit of focus, as the main antagonists of the book.
• The Consigliere: The closest thing to a job description for Zhang Han San and Fang Gan. Their official title is Minister Without Portfolio, i.e. cabinet ministers who aren't in charge of any actual department, and so can shape policy without being tied down by any official duties. While they started out as the eyes and ears of their national leaders, both have accumulated a fair amount of power and influence over the years, which Zhang has used to become The Man Behind the Man while Fang tries to remain an Honest Advisor.
• Dated History: The climax of the book makes sense from the standpoint of a late 80's China, where they had limited strategic nuclear weapons (12 intercontinental ballistic missiles and one missile submarine, in the book). Modern day China has many more.^note Possibly justified as Alternate History: in the Jack Ryan universe, Russia, America, Britain, and France all eliminated their intercontinental missiles and nuclear missile submarines after the end of the Cold War. Therefore, in-universe, the Chinese may not have felt the need to develop any more strategic nuclear weapons, since they were the only ones left who had any. Additionally, the Chinese conventional forces are significantly stronger these days, with hypersonic warheads that could cause a serious threat to a US carrier group in the Pacific. Russia has also significantly modernized its own forces; while it still relies on conscripts, it also possesses hypersonic warheads and definitely isn't fielding World War 2 tanks anymore.
• Death from Above: The Joint Stand-Off Weapon "Smart Pig," as the Chinese 29th Type A Group Army find out to their misfortune.
• Defeat Means Friendship: One of the rare examples of this trope occurring on a national level, as the post-Cold War period eventually ends up with America's foremost strategic partner being Russia.
• Dirty Old Man: Fang Gan, who likes to fool around with his younger secretaries.
• Dramatic Ammo Depletion: SORGE just revealed that the Chinese are considering launching their ICBMs. And since the entire supply of the penetrator bombs that could destroy the silos was just used against the rail bridges, the only option to prevent the missile launches is a joint Spetznaz/RAINBOW assault on the missile fields.
• Foil: Sergey Golovko and Zhang Han San. Both of them grew up in one of the world's two foremost communist superpowers, went into public service, and have ended up the chief foreign policy advisers of their respective national leaders. However, Golovko is an Honest Advisor who has no political ambitions of his own, while Zhang is The Man Behind the Man and in many ways de facto ruler of his country. Golovko is also a realist who accepted the failure of the communist system long ago and rolled with his country's transition to market democracy, while Zhang is an ideologue who effectively refuses to accept any information about the world that doesn't conform to his worldview. Finally, Golovko, like his leader, is more interested in helping his country to grow its economy and resolve its domestic problems, while Zhang is an expansionist whose idea of solving his country's problems is to steal somebody else's resources.
• Four-Star Badass: Gennady Bondarenko. He's officially given his fourth star when given command of the Far East Military District.
• Frontline General: PLA General Peng decides to ride with his forward recon unit when it's about to reach the gold mine. It gets him killed.
• Happily Ever Before: The book ends with a reform movement having overthrown the government of Red China and American and a now-democratic Russia on friendly terms, but in his later novels, Clancy would controversially Retcon this in order to reflect the contemporary political landscape by having it mentioned that the new Chinese government quickly fell and the communists took charge again, while a Vladimir Putin Expy has taken over Russia and turned it into a dictatorship again.
• IKEA Erotica: This novel features Clancy's first fullblown description; it's mediocre, and that's being charitable.
• In Its Hour of Need: President Ryan chooses to stay in Washington, DC rather than flee to safety after the Chinese launch their one remaining nuclear missile at the city. He points out that this is really, really stupid, while he's doing it, and gets incredibly drunk afterwards to try to forget the horror.
• The Mafiya:
  • The novel's plot is kicked off by what may have been the murder of a Moscow Mafiya kingpin by another... or may have been a failed assassination attempt on Russia's chief spymaster, Sergey Golovko (who drives exactly the same kind of car and was going through the same part of the city at the time of the hit). It's the latter, and the Mafiya hitmen were part of a larger organization contracted by the Chinese government.
  • The novel also dwells a little bit on how the plight of post-Soviet Russia led to the rise of the modern Mafiya, with the fall of the Soviet Union leaving a ton of well-trained Former Regime Personnel unemployed and thus prone to turning From Camouflage to Criminal, while the Corrupt Bureaucrats who used to run the Soviet economy now have unimaginable opportunities for profit. The local FBI liaison, Mike Reilly, sympathetically notes that American organized crime has nothing of this magnitude, and the Moscow Militia is drastically under-resourced to deal with the threat.
• The Man Behind the Man: Zhang Han San is this to Premier Xu. This appears to be something of a way of life for him, as his previous actions in Debt of Honor and Executive Orders similarly consisted of encouraging the main villains of these novels (a cabal of Japanese Corrupt Corporate Executives and the dictator of Iran, respectively) into starting wars while he (and his country) remained in the shadows and provided only limited and indirect assistance. The looming economic crisis in this book, however, forces him to adopt less subtle measures.
• My Secret Pregnancy: An occurrence of this due to Chinese family planning laws sets off the principal conflict.
• I Need a Freaking Drink: After Ryan and the USS Gettysburg shoot down a nuclear missile about to hit Washington, DC, Ryan announces that he is going to go get a drink, and if any of the crew want to join him, he is waiving Navy regulations regarding alcohol consumption for twenty-four hours.
• Karma Houdini Warranty: After being the silent but enthusiastic partner in the anti-American axis of several previous books, Zhang Han San finally gets in too deep to escape consequences.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed:
  • The WWII veteran Russian sniper Pavel Petrovich Gogol is a possible expy of historical sniper Vasily Zaytsev (whose life story was also fictionalized in the movie Enemy at the Gates). Like him, he's a rural Russian whose childhood skill at shooting wolves translated to a performance as a legendary sniper in World War II.
  • Xu Kun Piao for Jiang Zemin, a Chinese head of state with nowhere near the power of his predecessors Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping, leading some at the time to speculate that the real power in the government was elsewhere. ("Elsewhere," in the novel, means Zhang Han San).
  • Possibly averted with the British Prime Minister, who's only referred to as "Tony." (The Prime Minister at the time the book was written was Tony Blair).
• Only Sane Man:
  • As Minister of Finance, this is essentially Qian Kun's thankless job, the only member of the Politburo who understands trade and economics and frequently has to try to explain it to his colleagues despite their ideology leaving them hostile right off the bat to what he's trying to teach them. He's also the first to spot the dangers associated with the Siberian war and the most frequent skeptic of the Premier, the Defense Minister, and Zhang Han San's optimistic reports.
  • Fang Gan gradually grows into this role, partly because he's the only other member of the Politburo willing to listen to Qian. He suspects early on that the diplomatic incident that killed the Vatican ambassador will backfire if the Chinese don't manage it, and is a voice of caution in the lead-up to the war repeatedly warning his peers of the consequences if it should go badly. It works out well for him by the end of the novel, if not subsequent novels that ultimately bowed to the real-world status quo; he ends up the new leader of a provisional Chinese democratic government.
• Politically Incorrect Villain: Zhang Han San is an unapologetic racist who considers anybody who isn't Chinese to be a barbarian.
• Pretext for War: When China is preparing to invade Russia, the Chinese Defense Minister suggests that they shoot down a Russian recon plane, and then claim that it had invaded Chinese airspace as a justification for the invasion.
• Rank Up: Robby Jackson is now Vice President of the United States.
• Retired Badass: Pavel Petrovich Gogol, an elderly man who was a Soviet sniper in World War II who killed dozens of German officers. Near the end of the book, he shoots and killed the Chinese general tasked with seizing the Siberian gold mine.
• Ripped from the Headlines: The book ends with a group of student protesters in Beijing occupying Tiananmen Square. Only this time, they successfully storm a government meeting and allow the reformist Fang Gan to take power.
• Russia Is Western: The US and Russia cement a friendship after the Cold War, and join forces to confront China.
• Russian Bear: The title is a reference to the animal stereotypes of the two focus nation, with the bear representing Russia.
• Stupid Evil: Chinese Politburo member Zhang Han San's racism prevents him from ever apologizing and so the Politburo launch a self-destructive war. Even more, while some of the other ministers speak out against the coming war, and try to pursue a more realistic course of action, when the time comes to vote on starting the war, they all vote for it, despite only three of them actually wanting it, out of fear of not voting for it and therefore standing out.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom: A Chinese couple wants to have a baby despite their country's draconian One-Child Policy, and the hospital decides to induce an abortion against their wishes. Because the couple are Christians, their minister is one of the people they call to the hospital to try and argue their case... where he and one of his friends, a Catholic cardinal, are executed by the police for preventing the abortion from being carried out. Because the cardinal was also the Vatican's ambassador to China, the event turns into a full-blown diplomatic incident, which is immediately aggravated by the Chinese government's refusal to apologize and its heavy-handed crackdown against the protests that follow. Because of the diplomatic incident and China's growing unpopularity, more and more companies disassociate themselves from the Chinese market while more and more Western governments pass protectionist measures targeting Chinese goods. Because of this, China soon finds itself facing a major economic crisis, which the Politburo fears may lead to much more serious political unrest. To stave off the crisis, the Politburo decides to invade Russia in an attempt to take over the region's vast oil and mineral wealth, counting on this to forestall the crisis. Because Russia is now friendly (and eventually officially allied) with the United States and Western Europe, this leads China into a full-blown war with essentially every other major military power in the world. Yes, if not for one Chinese couple trying to have a baby and one cop trying to enforce his country's one-child policy, all of that would never have happened.
• War for Fun and Profit: The Chinese Politburo plot to invade and conquer Siberia in order to take over the region's enormous natural resources in oil, gas, timber, and minerals. While the invasion is ostensibly caused by a looming economic crisis the Chinese are trying to avert, seizing Siberia had already been a long-term goal for them in two previous novels.
• World War III: China on one side, NATO (with Russia as its newest member) on the other. A fairly small-scale example, with the theater of war being limited to Siberia and a few military targets within China; however, it nearly devolves into a full-blown nuclear war when the U.S. attempt to destroy China's ICBMs results in one of them being launched. It's shot down before it has a chance to explode over Washington DC.
• Wrong Genre Savvy: The bad guys suffer badly from this.
  • Zhang Han San, despite supposedly being one of his country's leading foreign policy experts, repeatedly and badly misreads American intentions throughout the book. Per Marxist ideology, he insists on seeing the U.S. government as being profit-maximizing capitalists Only in It for the Money, who will accept China's conquest of Siberia because once it inherits all of the region's oil and gold, China will be too rich not to trade with. Not only does it not occur to him that the Americans might have other motives, it doesn't even occur to him that their capitalist motives might lead them to oppose his invasion. He even invokes The Gulf War as an example ("why did they intervene in the Kuwait affair? Oil") but completely misses what it implies for him - the Americans intervened to help Kuwait, preferring to see its oil resources remain in the hands of a friendly government rather than seized by a hostile, expansionist, and more powerful nation.
  • The Chinese Politburo more generally is, with a couple exceptions, completely ignorant of the world and to a large degree even their own country, assuming that all of it works as described in their understanding of Marx and Mao. They don't understand the extent to which their country's wealth (and therefore political stability) depends on foreign trade, they badly misread Western and Russian public opinion and government reaction to their actions, they massively overestimate their own military capabilities and underestimate Russia and the West's, and they assume that they'll be able to prevent information about the course of the war from reaching their own people despite the proliferation of modern computers and communications.
• Yellow Peril: China invades Russia. Several characters also use outright racist terms to described their Chinese opponents.
• Zerg Rush: Effectively the Chinese way of war. The book portrays them as being severely lacking in the kind of high-tech weaponry that their American enemies are equipped with; however, their manpower is enormous, as is their number of tanks and other armored vehicles, to a degree that the Russians alone would never be able to repel.

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