Main Article:2019: Shanghai Crash
The 2019 Shanghai Crash was the collapse of the entire Chinese financial system, secretly orchestrated by the Cartel. The following crisis halted China's status as an emerging superpower, and it plunged the whole world into an economic recession.
Chinese Premier Deng Tao claimed that the crash was the work of Western foreign agents sabotaging the Chinese economy. As a result, Tao plans on imposing economic sanctions against American, Japanese and European interests in China.
Tao's claims were dismissed by the West and Russia as a cover-up for China's own problems with corruption, but they were still willing to investigate the true cause of the crash. The United Nations, already growing suspicious, would later activate the Chimera Protocol, forming a multinational task force to investigate the crash, eventually revealing the cryptic non-state actor Cartel as the culprit pulling the strings.