On the morning of September 11, 2001 commercial airplanes hijacked by terrorists struck the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. The theory put forward in this book, written expertly by Gordon Thomas, is that China was behind the attacks. "A substantial portion of the money to achieve this comes out of China," Thomas says at the end of Seeds of Fire. "Only sustained American leadership and matching amounts of foreign aid can in the end combat this. But even then there is no certainty. This is the grim forecast as this book goes to print."

Seeds of Fire was published after the terrorist events. The author is a well-known journalist and writer who has worked in different parts of the world, including China, and has written fiction and non-fiction as well as screenplays. To put together a book like Seeds of Fire, Thomas conducted numerous extensive interviews and pored over confidential documents to back his claim that China was behind the September 11 attacks. It is a fact that Chinese officials were in Afghanistan conducting talks with Taliban authorities before the September 11 events, presumably to work out a deal that would end the Taliban's support of Islamic rebels in the northwest provinces of China. Thomas claims also that Osama bin Laden visited China on several occasions, but the murky details of those visits are hard to substantiate. The only hard fact is that bin Laden's Al Qaeda organization has spawned armies of future terrorists the world will have to deal with in the coming years if not decades.

Seeds of Fire reads like a thriller, or a spy novel, in which intelligence services from the United States and Israel are constantly working to deter the threats coming from countries like China. The seeds that set off the fire are fully explored in this book, including China's production of missiles in preparation for a potential attack on the US, or its sale of missiles and nuclear materials to other countries with the ultimate goal of striking the US and displacing its super power status. Stories about the seeds of future conflicts have been written before, including one that claimed that in the 1930s, New York City dismantled its Sixth Avenue elevated railroad and sold the steel to Japan. Those stories claim that Japan used the steel to make bombs and bullets Japanese troops used against the US during World War II.

The author writes extensively on the Chinese leaders and their activities before, during and after the massacre of the pro-democracy student demonstrations in Tianamen Square in Beijing in 1989. He bases his argument on reporting he did himself and on materials he obtained from governments and media representatives. He writes about the intelligence machinery working in Washington before and during the massacre with details that are hard to reject because there have never been any official denials of Thomas' claims. It is an undeniable fact that a major function of the US intelligence service is to spy on China and a chapter in the book dealing with that activity, aptly titled Seeds of Fire, explains that fighting among the aging Chinese leaders, some of them survivors of the 1934 Long March, resulted in the Tianamen Square events.

Thomas reveals that some nondescript federal buildings in Washington house the most secret operations that are part of America's strategic defense network, one of which is the National Photographic Interpretation Center. The center's computers can analyze all of the images obtained by US satellites circling the earth and inform the government of every unusual movement of people or construction anywhere in the world.

But in Beijing's Zhongnanhai compound, where the group of elderly Chinese leaders and the veterans of the Communist regime live and work, similar complexes have been built as the "most fortified enclaves on earth" to perform the same kind of intelligence gathering and to provide an environment for the leaders to make the highest and most critical political decisions for the country.

To go back to the fateful morning of September 11, 2001, the author says a Chinese aircraft landed in Kabul on that same day carrying a high-ranking delegation of Chinese officials who came to sign contracts to provide the Taliban authorities with state-of-the-art electronic defense equipment. It is not known whether those equipment was delivered because in October 2001 the US launched a massive military strike against Afghanistan, which overthrew the Taliban and sent Osama bin Laden and his soldiers into hiding.