421: Chapter 421 Stripping His Grandpa Underwear

"They've changed their wording," Li Lanzhi said. "It's no longer 'must take action.' It's changed to 'reserves the right to take all measures.'"

Zhang Cheng didn't look away, his voice kept very low, as if assessing the weather: "A right—that's just something you keep emphasizing you have the right to do when you have no intention of actually doing it."

He closed the White House statement and pulled up the low-light night vision feed from the control tower aimed at the incoming oil tankers. "How much time left on the shipping countdown?"

"Nine o'clock sharp. The first one is a comprehensive supply ship from the Dragon Nation Offshore Oil."

"It's not carrying natural gas," Zhang Cheng said. "They sent a supply ship. A supply ship doesn't need to wait for return cargo, doesn't need to calculate cargo space. They are here to be first in line."

Li Lanzhi was silent for a moment. She knew what this meant—not cooperation, not trade, but taking a stand.

Outside the control tower, the morning light of Ranong Bay was spreading from the eastern edge of the Andaman Sea.

On the steel breakwater at the canal entrance, the flag of the Federation of Myanmar, the flag of the Dragon Nation, the flag of the Kingdom of Thailand, the flag of the Kingdom of Cambodia, and the flag of the Mozambique People's Defense Zone—five flags unfurled in the wind at the same height.

On the cornerstone beneath the flagpoles were three lines of Burmese inscriptions, written by Zhang Cheng himself on the day the canal construction began.

Lens slowly zoomed in on those three lines—The ships are setting sail. We have already pulled away the ladder.

Lawrence Wong stood on the podium at the Bloomberg New Economy Forum, with the massive floor-to-ceiling glass curtain wall of Marina Bay in Singapore behind him—reflecting the hazy shipping lanes of the Strait of Malacca.

He adjusted his gold-rimmed glasses, tapped his right index finger on his speech three times, then looked up at the more than two hundred global financial leaders and media representatives in the audience, and said a sentence that was simultaneously recorded by all the voice recorders in the room:

"Certain countries—if we can call them countries—are using military means to destroy the international legal order.

They use missiles to intimidate neighbors, use digital totalitarianism to kidnap the ASEAN economy, and use the so-called 'canal' to tear apart existing shipping rules."

He paused for two seconds, letting all the Lens in the audience focus on his face, before adding those two words: "Warlord."

"The ruler of the Federation of Myanmar is not an elected leader, but a warlord who uses drones and combat robots to massacre villages.

He has an army, chips, and missiles—but lacks legitimacy."

Lawrence Wong turned a page of his speech, his finger sliding across the manuscript, "He built the Kra Canal, bypassing the Strait of Malacca, not for the economy, but to monopolize every ton of freight from the South China Sea to the Indian Ocean.

He signed the Asian digital currency agreement, not for financial innovation, but to lock the monetary sovereignty of all participating countries with blockchain handcuffs.

He dispatched warships through the Mozambique Channel, not for freedom of navigation—but to measure the next piece of land that can be planted with his Baobab flag."

The whispers in the audience were like the tides of the Strait of Malacca hitting the shore.

The reporter from Japan's Sankei Shimbun had already started typing the keyword "applicability of the Senkaku Islands rules" on Twitter;

The first headline popped up in the real-time comment section of Bloomberg— "Singapore Prime Minister compares Myanmar President to a warlord, calls on the international community to jointly sanction the Kra Canal."

Lawrence Wong saw the scrolling comments on the side of the big screen.

His voice rose by half a tone, and he added, following the wording previously discussed with White House National Security Advisor Sullivan: "Singapore. As a coastal state of the Strait of Malacca, we have an obligation to coordinate with the international community—" He deliberately emphasized the four words "international community" heavily, "—to safeguard freedom of navigation in this critical waterway.

We call on the UN Security Council to immediately review the legitimacy of the Kra Canal and urge all ASEAN member states—to resist Myanmar's digital hegemony."

When he closed his manuscript, applause erupted from the front row.

U.S. Secretary of Commerce Raimondo clapped three times in the audience, and Japan's Minister of Economy, Trade and Industry Yasutoshi Nishimura followed with four claps.

In the seating area of the Singapore delegation, Temasek Holdings board member Li Chenghui clapped vigorously, his palms turning bright red.

This 22-minute and 17-second speech was retweeted by the official White House Twitter account within 12 minutes with the caption: "We stand with Singapore."

The Tokyo Prime Minister's Office account simultaneously liked it and added a sentence in the comment section: "Freedom of flight in the airspace around the Senkaku Islands is also inviolable."

47 minutes later, Li Lanzhi projected the video onto the holographic wall of the Presidential Palace in Naypyidaw.

She stood in front of Zhang Cheng's desk, holding no folder in her hand—she didn't need one anymore.

All the information was in her head.

Zhang Cheng leaned back in his chair, watching Lawrence Wong's speech from beginning to end.

No fast-forwarding, no pausing, not even saying a single word.

After the video finished playing, he pressed a deep red button on the desk.

15 seconds later, Night Owl pushed the door open and entered.

He did not sit down, but stood and glanced at the frozen broadcast screen of the Bloomberg Forum on the wall—Lawrence Wong's finger, extended in mid-air, was frozen in the last frame, like an iron nail driven into a wall but bent crooked.

"He is using 'Senkaku Islands,' not 'Diaoyu Islands,'" Night Owl spoke, his voice sounding like a dagger being drawn from its leather sheath. "This is not a translation issue.

In 1981, the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs submitted a revised draft of the 'Japan-Singapore Security Coordination Memorandum' to the Singapore Cabinet, and Lee Kuan Yew wrote eight characters in the margin—'Do not use the Japanese terminology standard.'

Lawrence Wong certainly knows this. He used this term, not for the Japanese to hear—but to tell us that he no longer intends to leave himself a way out."

Zhang Cheng closed the video and pulled up a document.

The cover of the document was labeled "Lion City Dossier"—this was what Night Owl's intelligence department had pieced together page by page over the past three years from old archives of the Tokyo Ministry of Foreign Affairs, oral history materials from the Imperial War Museum in London, interrogation records from Singapore's "Internal Security Act," and declassified CIA documents.

"Since he won't leave himself a way out, we will help him strip off his grandfather's underwear too."

Zhang Cheng opened the dossier. The first page was a scanned copy of the personnel file of Lawrence Wong's grandfather, Huang Yafu, who served as a translator for the Japanese Kempeitai in Singapore in 1943—during the Syonan-to period, Huang Yafu was responsible for translating the interrogation testimonies of British prisoners of war into Japanese, and his handwritten signature was prominently left in the signature column at the end of every page.

Three days before Japan's surrender on August 15, 1945 (Showa 20), Huang Yafu submitted an application to withdraw with the army back to the Japanese mainland, which was not approved.

The second document was the "Operation Spectrum" emergency detention authorization order personally signed by Lee Kuan Yew in the early hours of May 21, 1987.

Targets: 16 left-wing lawyers, activists, and Catholic social action figures.

Charge: "Participating in a Marxist conspiracy to subvert the state."

Detention period: Up to 24 months without trial.

Also co-signed by the then Minister of Law, Barker.

Attached below the document was the original text of the petition written to the Queen of England by British human rights lawyer Duncan McLaren after meeting the detainees in Changi Prison that year: "They were hung upside down from the ceiling for over eighteen hours. The dripping sound that the plumber next to the interrogation room mistook for a leak—was actually blood."

"Take these—" Zhang Cheng's finger tapped on the dossier, "and edit them into a ten-minute documentary.

No narration needed, no commentary needed.

Put the scanned copies of the original files frame by frame, accompanied by time, names, and signatures.

Let the whole world see—Lawrence Wong's grandfather standing on the streets of Singapore wearing the uniform of the Japanese Kempeitai, the signature of Lawrence Wong's Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew on the 'Internal Security Act' detention order, and Lawrence Wong himself talking about 'international legal order' at the Bloomberg Forum today.

At the end of the film, put up a line of text: Your family's 'international legal order'—written with whose blood?"