Lowering the Temperature

I have decided to send an olive branch to my business rivals by personally presenting all of them with seasonal gifts of moon cakes. This gesture is strategic and in my view necessary….all warfare after all is based on deception. Besides they have suffered so many rounds of defeat and have been outwitted so many times despite being numerical superior, better networked and having a bigger war chest…round after round of trying to fix me and failing on every occasion is bound to take a toll of them… I sense some of them starting to feel very uneasy and nervous about me….my gut feel tells them…I must feign weakness to convince them all of this relentless intrigue had also taken a toll on me. If I don’t at least make a believable effort to come across as weak…some of them may do something stupid and escalate the conflict to where I and many others don’t want to go….it’s getting very dangerous….just like sudden death.

————————————————————-

‘I will pretend to be complaint, Kwai Kwai (cooperative),harmless and above all frivolous to my business rivals. This is very easy. All I have to do is hire a couple of big tit China tiger beer aunties and stage a scene where I am cavorting with them. Once my business rivals see this, they will be convinced….they will look at each other gleefully and say, ‘See! Success has all gone to his head…it’s downhill from this point.’ This is all it takes for them to set aside their suspicions (real and imagined) and they will feel reassured that I no longer harbor further imperialist ambitions to grab land – I will wait for all this to sink in. I will create a spectacle of myself and when their defenses are lowest…I will execute a swift U turn and begin hammering them again.

I will work secretly by night to improve the Western roads and continue the decoy of improving the Eastern roads to give them all the impression this is how I plan to transport my fruit during the rainy season…meanwhile my men will train, train and train to transport fruit thru the treacherous Western route…this is key!

After that I will commence trade talks.

In the past it was all too easy to convince them that I am down and out and had bitten off more than I can chew. All I had to do was amble around the village in the dead of midnight with a bottle of Johnny Walker filled with Jia Jia Liang Teh and sing vulgar Hokkien folk songs at the top of my voice…Lamentations of a defeated man who had foolishly put all his chips on one number and lost it all…..but this time, the deception has to be more elaborate.

The deception this time round has to be seamless as they have been deceived in the past so many times. This time round their defenses are bristling with layers and layers of filters – I need to spread rumors that I am going bankrupt…I will also need to hire and acting troupe to act as bailiffs, lawyers and creditors foreclosing on my business.

Once rumors spread….it will gather momentum…I will wait a while then strike like cobra again….it gives me no pleasure to do all this. It seems I have been fighting so long that I know no other way and this a profound source of sadness for me.’