The Ministry for the Future

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  100

  She took an overnight train to Montpellier, slept the sleep of the blessed. Her ship left that evening, so that day she wandered the city’s big old plaza, then the line of new Doric columns running from the plaza toward the harbor. Then onto an ocean clipper, sleek, seven-masted, looking like a cross between a schooner and a rocket ship laid on its side. On board to sleep again.

  When she woke they were at sea. Every surface of this ship was photovoltaic or piezoelectric or both. Its passage through the waves, its very existence in the sun, generated power which got sent to the props. With a good wind filling the big sails, and the kites pulling from far overhead, tethered to the bow, they could fly on the thing’s hydroplanes. A hundred kilometers an hour felt really fast.

  Next morning they surged through the Pillars of Hercules and out into the Atlantic. Some vague memory of Tennyson’s poem “Ulysses,” a kind of Victorian-Homeric ode to retirement: To live, to fight, to strive, to something, and not to yield. Brit love of heroic death; charge of the Light Brigade, Scott in Antarctica, World War One. A sentimentalism very far from Irish, although the Irish had their own sentimentalities, God knew. Into the open sea, leave behind the sight of land.

  The blue plate of the ocean. Sea and sky, clouds. Pink at dawn, orange at sunset. Winds pushing and pulling them, the sun, the waves. The glorious glide, crest to trough, trough to crest, long rollers of mid-ocean. How had they forgotten this? She recalled her last flight from London to San Francisco, passing over Greenland at midday, no clouds below them, the great ice expanse as alien as Callisto or Titan, and everyone with their window shades pulled down so they could watch their movies. She had looked out her window and then around at her fellow passengers, feeling they were doomed. They were too stupid to live. Darwin Prize, grand winner. The road to dusty death.

  Here, now, she stood at the taffrail of a seven-masted schooner, a craft that could maybe be sailed solo, or by the ship’s AI. AI-assisted design was continuously working up better ships, as with everything, and solutions were sometimes as counterintuitive as could be (kites? masts curving forward?), but of course human intuition was so often wrong. Foxing their own cognitive errors might be one of the greatest accomplishments of contemporary science, if they could really do it. As with everything, if they could get through this tight spot, they might sail right off into something grand.

  A stop at Havana, handsome seaside city. Beautiful monument to the communist idea. Then to Panama, through the canal and up the sunny Pacific to San Francisco. They sailed under the Golden Gate Bridge on a cold cloudy day, the marine layer so low that the orange bridge was invisible, like a return to the bridgeless time. Then into their appointed wharf and onto land again, feeling its unsteady steadiness. Walking in hilly San Francisco, the most beautiful city in the world. Time for a last bit of work.

  She had agreed to Badim’s request to represent them one last time at the CCCB. They met again at the top of the Big Tower, and again Mary was distracted by the city below, and Mount Tamalpais, and the Farallons poking blackly over the western horizon.

  Most of the same people were there, including the Chinese finance minister. Again Mary found her cheerful and articulate. One of the most powerful people in China. Hoping, she said when introduced, to find more that could be done to crank the Great Turn. Dynastic succession for the whole world, she suggested with a smile.

  Jane Yablonski asked her what she had in mind.

  Chan spoke of equity, getting better in China and the world, but still far from achieved. She spoke of income floors and ceilings, of land taxes and habitat corridors. Of the world as a commons, one ecosphere, one planet, a living thing they were all part of. Looking at the central bankers listening attentively to her, Mary saw it again; these people were as close to rulers of the world as existed. If they were now using their power to protect the biosphere and increase equity, the world could very well tack onto a new heading and take a good course. Bankers! It was enough to make her laugh, or cry. And yet by their own criteria, so pinched and narrow, they were doing the necessary things. They were securing money’s value, they still told themselves; which in this moment of history required that the world get saved.

  She had to smile, she couldn’t help it. Saved by fucking bankers. Of course the whole world was making them do it. Now they were discussing other new ideas, experiments beyond anything she had ever dreamed of. Minister Chan was now smiling, sweetly but slyly— it seemed because she had looked over at Mary and seen Mary’s little smile. The two of them were complicit in their amusement; both were amused that Chan herself would be taking the helm here, and heading off in new directions. It was so amusing that when someone asked Mary what she and her ministry might think of all these new ideas for reform that Madame Chan was proposing to them, Mary stood to extend her hand toward the young Chinese woman, and smile at her, and say, I yield the floor, I pass the torch, I like all of these ideas. I say, be as bold as you can dare to be!

  101

  What did we teach Beijing, you ask? We taught them a police state doesn’t work! They thought it could, and they tried for fifty years to bring Hong Kong to heel, using every tool that came along— buying people, using CCTV cameras and facial recognition, propaganda, phalanxes of police and army, drone surveillance, drone strikes— and all of that just made the people of Hong Kong more resolute to keep what we had.

  — Why do you say that! Of course what we had was real, because hegemony is real. That’s a feeling, and feelings are something your culture explains to you. We in Hong Kong have a very particular culture and feeling. We lived as servants of the British, and we know very well what it felt like to be subaltern to a hegemonic power. That only lasted a few generations, but it set a particular feeling here, right in people’s hearts: never again.

  So when the British turned us over to Beijing, fine. We are Chinese, Beijing is Chinese. But we are also Hong Kong. It creates a kind of dual loyalty. Part of that is we speak Cantonese while Beijing speaks putonghua, Mandarin to some Westerners, although that’s actually an elite or written version of putonghua, but never mind, we were different. We speak Cantonese, we are Hong Kong.

  — Yes, of course there were Hong Kong people in favor of joining Beijing completely! These people often got money from Beijing, but I’m sure it was a genuine feeling for some of them. But most of us were for one country two systems, just as the saying had it. Our system, many of us call it rule of law. Laws in Hong Kong were written and passed by the legislature, enforced by the police, and ruled on by the courts. That’s why the world trusted us with their money! Beijing didn’t have that. They only had the Party. What got decided behind the closed doors of their standing committee became their equivalent of the law, but it was a rule only, rule without law, and it couldn’t be challenged. It was arbitrary. That’s why when Beijing tried to build Shanghai as their own finance center, to counter us, it didn’t work. The world didn’t trust Shanghai the way they trusted Hong Kong. So we in Hong Kong fought for it, we fought for the rule of law. All through the years between 1997 and 2047 we fought.

  — Why 2047? The deal was that on July 1, 2047, we were to be folded entirely into the Republic of China. That was the British kicking the can down the road. They were not the worst empire by any means, but they were definitely an empire, and all empires are bad. So they struck that deal with Beijing, which had it that for fifty years we were to be one country two systems. And during those fifty years we in Hong Kong got used to fighting for our rights. Part of that meant going out into the streets and demonstrating. Over the years we saw what worked and refined our methods. Violence didn’t work. Numbers did. That’s the secret, in case you are looking for the secret to resisting an imperial power, which was what we were doing through those years. Non-violent resistance of the total population, or as much of it as you can get. That’s what works.

  — Yes, of course Beijing could have crushed us! They could have killed every person in Hong Kong, and repopulated the ci
ty with people from mainland China who didn’t know any better, and would have been happy to take over such a nice infrastructure. Not that they would have known how to operate it! Still, this joke that a Western acquaintance once told me, about the government dismissing the people and electing another one, that was no joke to us. Because Beijing could have done that. It’s kind of what they did to Tibet.

  But there were constraints on Beijing too. For one thing they were always trying to entice Taiwan back into the fold. One part of that effort was to say to Taiwan, you’ll be fine if you join us— we’ll treat you just like we treat Hong Kong! One country two systems, and if you come back to us, three systems! Let a hundred flowers bloom! But that argument would only work if they were indeed treating Hong Kong well.

  — Yes, there were other reasons that weren’t so convincing to Taiwan, of course. There are always multiple causes, always. In this case there was always June 4. Tiananmen Square, 1989. Now known also as May 35th, or April 66th, or all the way around the calendar, although the joke gets old, and even hard to calculate, and besides every one of those dates is now blocked on the mainland internet, of course. Because Beijing wants to erase that day from history. And though it seems like that can’t really happen, in fact it is more possible than you might think. At least on the mainland. The world remembers it for China, and Beijing definitely did not want another such incident in the twenty-first century, when the whole thing would have been recorded by every phone and broadcast worldwide. No. Murdering the citizens of Hong Kong was not an option.

  — Sure, the billion’s occupation of Beijing helped us. No doubt about it! That was huge, and of course part of why that happened was that the mainland’s illegal internal migrant population saw how we did it in Hong Kong, and decided to do it themselves, right in Beijing. And of course the Party was terrified, how could they not be? The people without proper hukou, without residency papers for where they lived, did all the dirty work in China, and there were about four hundred million of them when the occupation happened. That’s a lot of people without any feeling of representation or belonging. So yes, the Party had to deal with that, or lose everything. In that struggle Hong Kong became a smaller matter and had some wiggle room, you might say. Which we used very smartly. It was never about independence, you must understand that. It was only for one country two systems. For the rule of law that we had here to persist past 2047.

  — Yes, of course Beijing had other big problems. And as I said, they couldn’t just kill us off. That left only talk. The discursive battle. And happily, we people of Hong Kong recognized this, and banded together. Solidarity— there’s no feeling like it. People talk about it, they use the word, they write about it, they try to invoke it. Naturally. But to really feel it? You have to be part of a wave in history. You can’t get it just by wanting it, you can’t call for it and make it come. You can’t choose it— it chooses you! It arrives like a wave picking you up! It’s a feeling— how can I say it? It’s as if everyone in your city becomes a family member, known to you as such even when you have never seen their face before and never will again. Mass action, yes, but the mass is suddenly family, they are all on the same side, doing something important.

  — How did that play out in reality? What, didn’t you see? Have you forgotten? We took to the streets every Saturday for thirty straight years!

  — Of course sometimes it was more intense and other times less so. Often we let the young people do it, the idealism of youth is very good at persisting in such things, young people want something to believe in, of course! Everyone does, but the young aren’t yet used to not getting it, so they persist. And they can handle the physical stresses of it better. But whenever push came to shove, we older people would come back out onto the streets also. As July 1 drew ever closer, we got back out onto the streets such that on some Saturdays the entire population of Hong Kong was out there. Those were stupendous events.

  — Yes, there were other things we had to do also. Of course. These were not so exciting, in fact they were often tedious, but they needed to be done. Eventually you have to recognize that many necessary things are boring, but also, quite a few things are both boring and interesting at the same time. So we went to meetings, we joined the neighborhood councils, we went to the HK Legislature and did all the things that being part of a citizenry requires. It wasn’t just the demonstrations, although that was part of it. There was all kinds of work to be done, and we did it. You have to pace yourself for the long haul.

  — No, they didn’t give it to us! Don’t put it that way. Your questions are kind of offensive, I’m not sure if you are aware of that or not, but whatever, I will answer you politely, because I know the difference. So, eventually what I think happened is we just wore them down. They couldn’t beat us; they had not the hegemony to do that. In fact, now some people say we beat them. These are the Tail Wags Dog people, who think our sterling example will eventually transform all mainland China into one big Hong Kong.

  — No, I myself don’t think that’s right. It goes too far. China is too big, and the party elites are too convinced they are right. I’m more in the camp that gets called Tail Wags Dog’s Butt. This is more realistic, even to the image itself; when a dog wags its tail, even when it is most excited, it’s only the butt that also moves with the tail, not the whole dog. That wouldn’t make sense, just in the physical sense. You can see that when you look at any dog, even one in a frenzy of happiness: only the butt wags with the tail. The head and chest stay steady. So, it’s the same with China. The Cantonese-speaking part of China is in the south. It’s Guangdong, a very big and prosperous province in south China, centered on the city Guangzhou, used to be spelled Canton in English, and there are a hundred million of us who speak Cantonese, and it’s an older dialect than Mandarin. And most of the Chinese who live elsewhere in the world speak it, and we in Hong Kong speak it. Also in Shenzhen, the Special Economic Zone where Beijing tried to piggyback on Hong Kong’s success in the world. So Beijing made a big mistake when they tried to suppress Cantonese as a language, which they did for many years, because that meant all of Guangdong didn’t believe in Beijing either— they were more with Hong Kong than with Beijing, even if they never did much to show it. But language is family. Language is the real family.

  — What has been the upshot? Well it’s a work in progress, but since you ask so politely, I will say that since July 1, having agreed to keep one country two systems in Hong Kong, Beijing also has had to grant more and more rights to Guangdong. And they definitely don’t mess with the Cantonese language anymore! Of course they said this change of policy was made just to integrate south China better into the country at large, but really it was done to turn what had been a defeat into a victory, or at least put it to use, which Beijing, it has to be said, is very good at doing. They cross the river by feeling the stones. Still, in this case, the tail wagged so vigorously that it wagged the dog’s butt too, that I will grant. You can see how that works just by telling your dog it’s time to leave the apartment and go for a run!

  102

  Meeting in San Francisco over, retired in full, Mary considered how best to get home to Zurich. There was no hurry. She looked into it online, and to her surprise found that Arthur Nolan, the airship pilot Frank had introduced to her in his co-op, was flying into San Francisco the following week, as part of a voyage around the world. This tour of his was headed to the Arctic, then down over Europe and the east side of Africa to Antarctica.

  Mary contacted him and asked if she could join the trip, and he texted back and said yes, of course. Happy to have her.

  On the airship they called him Captain Art. He met her on a pad on the side of Mount Tamalpais where his craft was tied to a mast, and ushered her up the jetway and along to the craft’s viewing chamber, which was located at the bow of the airship’s living quarters, a long gallery that extended under much of the length of the airship’s body, like a big keel. The gondola, they called it. A little group of passengers
were already in this clear-walled and clear-floored room, eating appetizers and chatting. Nature cruise. Mary tried to keep an open mind about that, tried to remember names as she was introduced. About a dozen people, mostly Scandinavian.

  At the end of the introductions, Captain Art told them they would stop next in a particular Sierra meadow, to see a wolverine that had been spotted, an animal he obviously considered special. They were happy to hear it.

  Shortly thereafter they took off. This felt strange, lofting up over the bay, bouncing a little on the wind, not like a jet, not like a helicopter. Strange but interesting. Dynamic lift; the electric motors, on sidecars up the sides of the bag, could get them to about two hundred kilometers an hour over the land, depending on the winds.

  East over the bay and that part of the city. Then the delta. It reminded Mary of the model of northern California that she had been shown long ago, but this time it was real, and vast. The delta an endless tule marsh below them, cut into patterns by lines of salt-tolerant trees, remnants of the old islands and channels. Blond-tipped green grasses, lines of trees, open water channels, the V wakes of a pair of animals swimming along— beavers, Art told them. The viewing chamber had spotting scopes, and what they showed when one looked through them was that the delta was dense with wildlife. Mostly unvisited by humans now, they were told. Part of California’s contribution to the Half Earth project. Mount Diablo, rising behind them to the southwest, gave them a sense of the size of the delta; it was immense. They could still just see the Farallons marking the sea on the western horizon; to the north stood the little black bump of Mount Shasta; to the south the coastal range walled the central valley on the right, the Sierra Nevada walled it on the left. Huge expanse of land. It looked like California would have an easy time meeting the Half Earth goal.