Asymmetric Warfare: The Content of Their Character - Hardcover

Lee Chang was a smart, hardworking young boy with an inquisitive mind. Unfortunately, as the son of a poor dock worker in a busy port in China, his future was limited. But his patriotic instincts were triggered by China's frantic reports of the imminent capitalistic threat to their homeland following the Tiananmen Square riots, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the breakup of the Soviet Union. This fueled his high school essay to use martial arts principles for China to defend itself from economically superior foes. His paper, called Asymmetric Warfare, caught the attention of Chinese intelligence services, who supported his university and graduate education.

But while at university Lee was inspired by Dr. Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" vision, Lee's PhD research developed a method to objectively identify people of strong character to improve personnel choices in business and government. But his sponsors saw this as the key to exploit character weaknesses in American citizens to use them as pawns to undermine their own society.

At first, Lee was flattered that his work was being taken seriously by his government. It took years for Lee to fully understand the extent of their misuse of his academic work. By then, he had fallen in love with an Italian medical doctor, Anna Valenti, who worked with him on a multi-year international effort to combat the COVID-19 pandemic. Disenchanted by his situation in China, Lee proposed to Anna with a plan to leave his work in China and start a family with Anna in Italy.

Unfortunately, he found that starting a new life would not be as easy as he thought.

Blending espionage, psychology, international politics, love and redemption, Asymmetric Warfare is a timely geopolitical thriller about character, power, and the invisible wars fought before a single shot is fired.