Ghost Fleet: A Novel of the Next World War

China, ruled by a joint military-civilian elite called the Directorate, finds vast energy reserves deep below the Pacific Ocean in the Mariana Trench, waters claimed by the United States under its Exclusive Economic Zone. Chinese Vice-Admiral Wang Xiaoqian, invoking Sun-Tzu and 19th-century American naval strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan, urges the Directorate to make war against the U.S. so that China can assume its proper role in the world.