As if one could refuse.
Oh come on. You wouldn't even if you could. You're always the one leading the way down there, you're always up for a fight.
… I'm tired. I don't know how you persist the way you do. You tire me too. All that hope in the face or calamity. Sometimes I think you should be more marked by it. Sometimes I think I have to take it all on myself.
Come on. You'll be your old self once things get going again. Idelba, Piali, Madam Sururi, are you ready?
We're ready.
Kirana?
… All right then. One more turn.
I. Always China
Bao Xinhua was fourteen years old when he first met Kung Jianguo, in his work unit near the southern edge of Beijing, just outside the Dahongmen, the Big Red Gate. Kung was only a few years older, but he was already head of the revolutionary cell in his work unit next door, quite an accomplishment given that he had been one of the sanwu, the I three withouts' – without family, without work unit, without identity card – when he turned up as a boy at the gate of the police station of the Zhejiang district, just outside the Dahongmen. The police had placed him in his current work unit, but he always remained an outsider there, often called 'an individualist', which is a very deep criticism in China even now, when so much has changed. 'He persisted in his own ways, no matter what others said.' 'He clung obstinately to his own course.' 'He was so lonely he didn't even have a shadow.' This is what they said about him in his work unit, and so naturally he looked outside the unit to the neighbourhood and the city at large, and was a street boy for no one knew how long, not even him. And he was good at it. Then at a young age he became a firebrand in Beijing underground politics, and it was in this capacity that he visited Bao Xinhua's work unit.
'The work unit is the modern equivalent of the Chinese clan compound,' he said to those of them who gathered to listen. 'It is a spiritual and social unit as much as an economic one, trying its best to continue the old ways in the new world. No one really wants to change it, because everyone wants to have a place to come to when they die. Everyone needs a place. But these big walled factories are not like the old family compounds that they imitate. They are prisons, first built to organize our labour for the Long War. Now the Long War has been over for forty years and yet we slave all our lives for it still, as if we worked for China, when really it is only for corrupt military governors. Not even for the Emperor, who disappeared long ago, but for the generals and warlords, who hope we will work and work and never notice how the world has changed.
'We say, "we are of one work unit" as if we were saying, "we are of the same family", or 'Ve are brother and sister", and this is good. But we never see over the wall of our unit, to the world at large.'
Many in his audience nodded. Their work unit was a poor one, made up mostly of immigrants from the south, and they often went hungry. The postwar years in Beijing had seen a lot of changes, and now in the Year 29, as the revolutionaries liked to call it, in conformity with the practice of scientific organizations, things were beginning to fall apart. The Qing dynasty had been overthrown in the middle years of the war, when things had gone so badly; the Emperor himself, aged six or seven at the time, had disappeared, and now most assumed he was dead. The Fifth Assemblage of Military Talent was still in control of the Confucian ureaucracy, its hand still on the wheel of their destiny; but it was a senile old hand, the dead hand of the past, and all over China revolts were breaking out. They were of all sorts: some in the service of foreign ideologies, but most internal insurgencies, organized by Han Chinese hoping to rid themselves once and for all of the Qing and the generals and warlords. Thus the White Lotus, the Monkey Insurgents, the Shanghai Revolutionary Movement and so on. joining these were regional revolts by the various nationalities and ethnic groups in the west and south – the Tibetans, Mongolians, Xinzing and so on, all intent on freeing themselves from the heavy hand of Beijing. There was no question that despite the big army that Beijing could in theory bring to bear, an army still much admired and honoured by the populace for its sacrifices in the Long War, the military command itself was in trouble, and soon to fall. The Great Enterprise had returned again to China: dynastic succession; and the question was, who was going to succeed? And could anyone succeed in bringing China back together again?
Kung spoke to Bao's work unit in favour of the League of All Peoples' School of Revolutionary Change, which had been founded during the last years of the Long War by Zhu Tuanjie kexue ('Unite for Science'), a half-Japanese whose birth name had been Isao. Zhu Isao, as he was usually called, had been a Chinese governor of one of the Japanese provinces before their revolution, and when that revolution came he had negotiated a settlement with the Japanese independence forces. He had ordered the Chinese army occupying Kyushu back to China without loss of life on either side, landing with them in Manchuria and declaring the port city of Tangshan to be an international city of peace, right there in the homeland of the Qing rulers, and in the midst of the Long War. The official Beijing position was that Zhu was a Japanese and a traitor, and that when the appropriate time came his insurgency would be crushed by the Chinese armies he had betrayed. As it turned out, when the war ended and the postwar years marched by in their dreary hungry round, the city of Tangshan was never conquered; on the contrary, similar revolts occurred in many other Chinese cities, particularly the big ports on the coast, all the way down to Canton, and Zhu Isao published an unending stream of theoretical materials defending his movement's actions, and explaining the novel organization of the city of Tangshan, which was run as a communal enterprise belonging equally to all the people who lived within its embattled borders.
Kung talked about these matters with Bao's work unit, describing Zhu's theory of communal creation of value, and what it meant for ordinary Chinese, who had for so long had the fruits of their labour stolen from them. 'Zhu looked at what really happens, and described our economy, politics, and methods of power and accumulation in scientific detail. After that he proposed a new organization of society, which took this knowledge of how things work and applied it to serve all the people in a community and in all China, or any other country.'
During a break for a meal, Kung paused to speak to Bao, and asked his name. Bao's given name was Xinhua, 'New China'; Kung's was Jianguo, 'Construct the Nation' – they knew therefore that they were children of the Fifth Assemblage, who had encouraged patriotic naming to counteract their own moral bankruptcy and the superhuman sacrifices of the people during the postwar famines. Everyone born around twenty years before had names like 'Oppose Islam' (Huidi) or 'Do Battle' (Zhandou) even though at that point the war had been over for twenty years. Girls' names had suffered especially during this fad, as parents attempted to keep some traditional elements of female names incorporated into the whipped up patriotric fervour, so that there were girls their age named 'Fragrant Soldier' or 'Graceful Army' or 'Public Fragrance' or 'Nation loving Orchid' and the like.
Kung and Bao laughed together over some of these examples, and spoke of Bao's parents, and Kung's lack of parents, and Kung fixed Bao with his gaze, and said, 'Yet Bao itself is a very important word or concept, you know. Repayment, retribution, honouring parents and ancestors – holding, and holding on. It's a good name.'
Bao nodded, captured already by the attention of this dark eyed person, so intense and cheerful, so interested in things. There was something about him that drew Bao, drew him so strongly that it seemed to Bao that this meeting was a matter of yuanfen, a 'predestined relation', a thing always meant to be, part of his yuan or fate. Saving him perhaps from a nieyuan, a 'bad fate', for his work unit struck him as smallminded, oppressive, stultifying, a kind of death to the soul, a prison from which he could not escape, in which he was already entombed. Whereas he already felt as if he had known Kung for ever.
So he followed Kung around Beijing like a younger brother, and because of him became a sort of truant from his work unit, or in other words, a revolutionary. Kung took him
to meetings of the revolutionary cells he was part of, and gave him books and pamphlets of Zhu Isao's to read; took charge of his education, in effect, as he had for so many others; and there was nothing Bao's parents or his work unit could do about it. He had a new work unit now, spread out across Beijing and China and all the world – the work unit of those who were going to make things right.
Beijing at the time was a place of most severe deprivations. There were millions who had moved there during the war, who still lived in improvised shantytowns outside the gates. The wartime work units had expanded far to the west, and these still stood like a succession of grey fortresses, looking down on the wide new streets. Every tree in the city had been cut down during the Twelve Hard Years, and even now the city was bare of almost all vegetation; the new trees had been planted with spiked fences protecting them, and watchmen to guard them at night, which did not always work; the poor old guards would wake in the mornings to find the fence there but the tree gone, cut at the ground for firewood or pulled out by the roots for sale somewhere else, and for these lost saplings they would weep inconsolably, or even commit suicide. The bitter winters would sweep down on the city in the autumn, rains full of yellow mud from the dust torn out of the loess to the west, and drizzle down onto a concrete city without a single leaf to fall to the ground. Rooms were kept warm by space heaters, but the qi system often shut down, in blackouts that lasted for weeks, and then everyone suffered, except for the government bureaucrats, whose compounds had their own generating systems. Most people stayed warm then by stuffing their coats with newspaper, so that it was a bulky populace that moved around in their thick brown coats, doing what work they could find, looking as if they were all fat with prosperity; but it wasn't so.
Thus many people were ripe for change. Kung was as lean and hungry as any of them, but full of energy, he didn't seem to need much food or sleep: all he ever did was read and talk, talk and read, and ride his bike from meeting to meeting and exhort groups to unify to join the revolutionary movement spearheaded by Zhu Isao, and change China.
'Listen,' he would say to his audiences urgently, 'it's China we can change, because we are Chinese, and if we change China, then we change the world. Because it always comes back to China, do you understand? There are more of us than all the rest of the people of the Earth combined. And because of the colonialist imperialist years of the Qing, all the wealth of the world has come to us over the years, in particular all the gold and silver. For many dynasties we brought in gold by trade, and then when we conquered the New World we took their gold and silver from them, and all that came back to China too. And none of it has ever left! We are poor not for any material reason, but because of the way we are organized, do you see? We suffered in the Long War the way every nation suffered in the Long War, but the rest of the world is recovering and we are not, even though we won, because of the way we are organized! The gold and silver is hidden in the treasure chests of the corrupt bureaucrats, and people freeze and starve while the bureaucrats hide in their holes, warm and full. And that will never change unless we change it!'
He would go on to explain Zhu's theories of society, how for many long dynasties a system of extortion had ruled China and most of the world, and because the land was fecund and the farmers' taxes supportable, the system had endured. Eventually, however, a crisis had come to this system, wherein the rulers had grown so numerous, and the land so depleted, that the taxes they required could not be grown by the farmers; and when it was a choice of starvation or revolt, the farmers had revolted, as they had often before the Long War. 'They did it for their children's sake. We were taught to honour our ancestors, but the tapestry of the generations runs in both directions, and it was the genius of the people to begin to fight for the generations to come – to give up their lives for their children and their children's children. This is the true way to honour your family! And so we had the revolts of the Ming and the early Qing, and similar uprisings were happening all over the world, and eventually things fell apart, and all fought all. And even China, the richest nation on Earth, was devastated. But the necessary work went on. We have to continue that work, and end the tyranny of the rulers, and establish a new world based on the sharing of the world's wealth among all equally. The gold and silver come from the Earth, and the Earth belongs to all of us, just like the air and the water belong to all of us. There can no longer be hierarchies like those that have oppressed us for so long. The fight has to be carried on, and each defeat is simply a necessary defeat in the long march towards our goal.'
Naturally anyone who spent every hour of every day making such speeches, as Kung did, was quickly going to get in serious trouble with the authorities. Beijing, as the capital and biggest manufacturing city, undamaged in the Long War compared to many other cities, was assigned many divisions of the army police, and the walls of the city made it possible for them to close the gates and conduct quarter by quarter searches. It was, after all, the heart of the empire. They could order an entire quarter razed if they wanted to, and more than once they did; shantytowns and even legally allowed districts were bulldozed flat and rebuilt to the standard work unit compound plan, in the effort to rid the city of malcontents. A firebrand like Kung was marked for trouble. And so in the Year 3 I, when he was around seventeen, and Bao fifteen, he left Beijing for the southern provinces, to take the message to the masses, as Zhu Isao had urged him and all the cadres like him to do.
Bao followed along with him. At the time of his departure he took with him a bag containing a pair of silk socks, a pair of blue wool shoes with leather bottoms, a wadded jacket, an old lined jacket, a pair of lined trousers, a pair of unlined trousers, a hand towel, a pair of bamboo chopsticks, an enamel bowl, a toothbrush, and a copy of Zhu's 'Analysis of Chinese Colonialism'.
The next years flew by, and Bao learned a great deal about life and people, and about his friend Kung Jianguo. The riots of Year 33 evolved into a full revolt against the Fifth Military Assemblage, which became a general civil war. The army attempted to keep control of the cities, the revolutionaries scattered into the villages and fields. There they lived by a series of protocols that made them the favourite of the farmers, taking great pains to protect them and their crops and animals, never expropriating their possessions or their food, preferring starvation to theft from the very people they had pledged themselves to liberate.
Every battle in this strange diffuse war had a macabre quality; it seemed like a huge gathering of murders of civilians in their own clothes, no uniforms or big formal battles about it; men, women and children, farmers in the fields, shopkeepers in their doorways, animals; the army was merciless. And yet it went on.
Kung became a prominent leader at the revolutionary military college in Annan, a college headquartered deep in the gorge of the Brahmaputra, but also spread through every unit of the revolutionary forces, the professors or advisers doing their best to make every encounter with the enemy a kind of education in the field. Soon Kung headed this effort, particularly when it came to the struggle for the urban and coastal work units; he was an endless source of ideas and energy.
The Fifth Military Assemblage eventually abandoned the central government, and fell away into a scattering of warlords. This was a victory, but now each warlord and his little army had to be defeated in turn. The struggle moved unevenly from province to province, an ambush here, a bridge blown up there. Often Kung was the target of assassi nation attempts, and naturally Bao, as his comrade and assistant, was also endangered by these attacks. Bao tended to want vengeance against the attempted assassins, but Kung was imperturbable. 'It doesn't matter,' he would say. 'We all die anyway.' He was much more cheerful about this fact than anyone else Bao ever met.
Only once did Bao see Kung seriously angry, and even that was in a strangely cheerful way, considering the situation. It happened when one of their own officers, one Shi Fandi ('Oppose Imperialism'), was convicted by eyewitnesses of raping and killing a female prisoner in his keeping.
Shi emerged from the jail they had kept him in shouting 'Don't kill me! I've done nothing wrong! My men know I tried to protect them, the bandit that died was one of the most brutal in Sechuan! This judgment is wrong!'
Kung appeared from the storeroom where he had slept that night.
Shi said, 'Commander, have mercy. Don't kill me!'
Kung said, 'Shi Fandi, don't say anything more. When a man does something as wrong as you have, and it's time for him to die, he should shut up and put a good face on it. That's all he can do to prepare himself for his next time around. You raped and killed a prisoner, three eyewitnesses testified to it, and that's one of the worst crimes there is. And there are reports it wasn't the first time. To let you live and do more such things will only make people hate you and our cause, so it would be wrong. Let's have no more talk. I'll make sure your family is taken care of. You be a man of more courage.'
Shi said bitterly, 'More than once I've been offered ten thousand taels to kill you, and I always turned them down.'
Kung waved this away. 'That was only your duty, but you think it makes you special. As if you had to resist your character to do the right thing. But your character is no excuse! I'm sick of your character! I too have an angry soul, but this is China we're fighting for! For humanity! You have to ignore your character, and do what is right!'
And he turned away as Shi Fandi was led off.
Afterwards Kung was in a dark mood, not remorseful about the condemnation of Shi, but depressed. 'It had to be done but it did nothing. Such men as he often come out on top. Presumably they will never die out. And so perhaps China will never escape her fate.' He quoted from Zhu: Vastterritories, abundant resources, a great population – from such an excellent base, will we only ever go in circles, trapped on the wheel of birth and death?"'
The Year of Rice and Salt Page 67
