Chimerica is a neologism coined by the right-wing intellectual Niall Ferguson. It mixes China and America to produce an excellent echo of the word chimerical, which means to be like the hybrid, fire-breathing monster, Chimera, of Greek Mythology. What Ferguson was trying to capture with this new word of his is the economic state of the new world we live in, a world dominated by the superpowers China and America. One produces, the other consumes. One exports, the other imports. But China and America are not on very friendly terms. They are in fact in a very unsual situation. Each is in competition with the other but can’t live without the other. This is Chimerica. This is how things are now, and so it is not a suprise to see that in Mr. Robot, the science-fiction TV show about our science fictional times, the DDoS attack on the huge E Bank, which is based in the financial capital of the world, Manhattan, was coordinated by hackers in the US and China.
The attack on the bank, which liberated millions upon millions of people from trillions of dollars of financial debt, is called 5/9 (in much the same way the terrorist action on the Twin Towers is called 9/11), could not have succeeded if fsociety (based in New York) hadn’t colluded with the Dark Army, which is based in Beijing. Elliot (Rami Malek) leads fsociety and White Rose (B.D. Wong) leads the Dark Army. Before 5/9, the former hacker worked as a cybersecurity engineer for Allsafe Cybersecurity, a company hired by E Corp to protect its data from cyberattacks. In the fifth episode of season two, we finally get a fuller picture of Elliot’s counterpart.
(Spoiler Alert) On the surface, White Rose turns out to be much like Elliot. He is a hacker who works from deep within the system he is trying to destroy (White Rose the minister for Chinese state security). When he is working for the state, he is a cosmopolitan man, a collector of clocks; when working for the White Army, White Rose is a mesmerizing transgender woman. But as the end of season two revealed after the closing titles, there is even another and more elusive level to this character. He appears to be pals (or in a secret club) with the CEO of E Corp, Phillip Price (Michael Cristofer). As the plot thickens, we begin to sense that B.D. Wong might be the real star of season two.
We learn all about White Rose because the FBI, lead by Dominique “Dom” DiPierro (Grace Gummer), has some good leads on how 5/9 went down. They know fsociety was involved, they also suspect the Dark Army’s participation. The FBI visits Bejing to gather more information on the latter. And not long after arriving, they unknowingly have the leader of the Dark Army right under their noses. The show ends in a blast of bullets. It is the first gunfight of the series.
The show also ends with Elliot getting the shit beaten out of him by criminals who run a website that provides services to the ugliest side of humanity. Elliot is using their computers to hack the FBI and destroy what ever info they’ve collected on him and his associotes. Last night, the Mr. Robot we loved in the first season finally made its return.
