Beijing Smog

by Ian Williams

  “Is that so?” said the man, like he’d never heard of Mars and cared even less. He leant forward until his face was inches from Wang’s, his breath reeking of stale tobacco.

  “Not Mars, Wang. Here. In Beijing. Maybe on campus.”

  Instinctively, Wang looked towards the window, as did Mrs Jiang, who was now looking very uncomfortable, and seemed keen to avert her gaze from the dreadful man who was clearly in charge. The light was fading, and the smog hung like a blanket outside the window. The view was barely distinguishable from the room’s grubby whitewashed walls.

  The ski jacket just kept looking at Wang.

  “And another thing,” the man said, followed by a long silence.

  “Yes,” said Wang.

  “Online rumour-mongering is expressly forbidden by law.”

  Wang said he understood the need to respect the truth, but sometimes it was difficult to distinguish what was real and what was not, especially online.

  “That’s not for you to decide,” said the man.

  At which point the woman in the black poncho entered from the small adjoining room with the tea. She carried two mugs, each filled with hot water, leaves floating on the surface. She gave one to the man and the other to Mrs Jiang.

  The man took a sip, spitting leaves onto the floor and wiping others from his mouth using the sleeve of his jacket.

  Wang had been there for more than half an hour now. He still didn’t fully understand why, though was increasingly convinced it must be because of the exam. Perhaps this was another ideology test.

  The man lit another cigarette, throwing the empty packet on the table. He was smoking Zhongnanhais.

  “It’s important to respect historical reality, Wang,” the man said.

  And Wang said he was sorry, but what was that exactly.

  “Did you learn nothing in your ideology classes, Wang?” Mrs Jiang said, with no great feeling, perhaps thinking that as his supervisor she needed to participate. “Historical reality is whatever the Party says it is.”

  Wang thanked her and said he’d perhaps overlooked that bit, but would apply to resit the exam just as soon as their meeting was over.

  Then the man took a folded piece of paper from an inside pocket, which he opened and placed on the table in front of Wang. It was a computer printout, a picture of a snowman alongside a picture of the Prime Minister and a caption, “Spot the difference”.

  “Looks familiar?” said the man.

  Wang went to pick up the paper. It wasn’t a great copy and he didn’t immediately recognise it as his posting. He wasn’t sure what to say, wanting a better look, to buy some time, but the ski jacket snatched it back.

  “It should be familiar,” the man said. “You posted it in a university chat room.”

  The man then took a long drag on his cigarette and cleared his throat so loudly that it made Mrs Jiang wince. “You really think they look the same?” he said, but the question trailed away and was engulfed by another lengthy retch. Wang thought the man was beginning to sound a lot like Lily’s malfunctioning espresso machine in The Moment On Time.

  The man took another sip of tea, cleared some more troublesome tea leaves and tried again. “Tell me about it, Wang.”

  Wang was genuinely confused. He posted a mountain of stuff online. It was how he spent most of his day. He needed a better look, but when he leant over the man pulled the piece of paper closer to his chest, like he was protecting a valuable hand of cards.

  Then, ever so slowly, he turned it towards Wang, like he was revealing what he thought was a sure-fire winner.

  Wang said it was a picture of a snowman next to one of the Prime Minister, and the man told him not to be so stupid, that he could see that for himself and that if Wang valued his place at university he should stop giving stupid answers.

  “What does it mean?”

  “What do you mean what does it mean?” said Wang.

  “I mean what does it really mean?” the man said, getting angry.

  Wang said it didn’t mean anything, that if he had posted it, he’d done so as a joke. That it wasn’t meant to be serious.

  “Precisely,” said the man. “You were trying to undermine the credibility of the Government and the Party. Because do you know what, Wang?”

  Wang said he didn’t know what.

  “We should respect our leaders.”

  “It was a joke,” Wang said.

  The man then sat back, looking smug, and nodded slowly. He looked at Mrs Jiang, and she nodded too.

  “I’m really sorry,” Wang said, figuring that at this point it was best just to apologise, even if he still wasn’t entirely sure what for. “It really was just a joke.”

  “Like in your last ideology exam, Wang? Like your pointless enquiries about the meaning of ecological civilisation? A joke like them?” Mrs Jiang said, coming back into the conversation.

  The ski jacket leant forward, blowing smoke laced with tiny pieces of tea leaf into Wang’s face, like he’d been watching too many bad gangster movies.

  “Does it look like I’m laughing, Wang? Is she laughing?”

  Wang looked at the man, then at Mrs Jiang.

  He said no, it didn’t look like they were laughing.

  – 18 –

  The Workshop of the World

  Morgan hardly slept. He was worried sick. He’d rung the airline in Beijing and London and it had told him what it had told his wife: that Robert had been on the flight, and he’d got off the aircraft when it landed in the Chinese capital.

  But Robert had never reached the arrivals hall. He’d not met Cindy Wu. And he wasn’t answering his phones, neither his UK number nor the China one he used whenever he visited.

  Perhaps it was a customs or immigration issue. Morgan was sure his son had the right visa, all the paperwork he needed, but still there might have been some sort of airport mix-up. He tried to be rational. That could happen. He tried ringing the airport, but when the call was eventually answered he could find nobody willing or able to answer his questions. He was passed from one official to another, before they just hung up.

  He’d said to Cindy Wu, “We should call the police, call the embassy. He’s a child. How can he just go missing like this?” And his wife had said to leave it with her, that neither would be useful. She asked him to give her time to work her contacts.

  Morgan knew that made sense, but it didn’t make it any easier.

  He heard nothing more from her until shortly before dawn, and when she phoned her tone had completely changed, saying to Morgan, “Everything’s fine. He’s fine. It was a mix-up like we thought.”

  “What sort of mix-up?” said Morgan, feeling enormous relief, but also confused and angry, wanting a fuller explanation.

  “Nothing. Just some confusion at the airport.”

  Morgan asked what sort of confusion, and she just said, “Don’t worry yourself, Tony, I have sorted it.” She said she was tired since she’d been up half the night and would fill him in later. She asked if he was still going down south that morning.

  He said he’d been planning to cancel the trip, what with Robert going missing, and Cindy Wu said again, “It’s sorted.” She said he should go ahead with the trip.

  Morgan asked to talk to their son, but she said he was asleep, that he was jet-lagged and the whole experience had been exhausting for him.

  Then she said to Morgan, “About the research I’ve been doing, Tony, who’s the client?”

  “Which research?” said Morgan, surprised since she never asked about clients. It was a sort of unwritten rule. The client side of the business belonged to him. That’s how they worked. And she usually preferred not to know more than the generalities.

  “The Colonel, the military guy and his son. I am still digging, looking for the more
recent information you asked for, and it would help to know more about the client.”

  Morgan hesitated before saying, “He’s American. Concerned about investors looking to buy in the US.”

  “You told me that, Tony. What’s his name, and who does he work for?”

  “His name’s Drayton, Chuck Drayton.”

  “Drayton with a y?” she asked.

  “That’s right,” Morgan said.

  That was followed by another long silence before she asked him again, “Who does he work for?”

  “He’s a diplomat, deals with commercial stuff at the US Consulate in Shanghai.”

  “A diplomat?” she said. “So we’re working for the US Government? What have you got us into, Tony?”

  Then she said she had to go and hung up, and when Morgan tried to phone her back her phone was busy. He tried three more times before leaving for the airport, going straight to voicemail on each attempt, before giving up, figuring that she was probably sleeping. He’d try her again when he got to Shenzhen, when he’d get to speak to Robert too and get the fuller story about what happened.

  His wife was stressed. They both were. He understood that, but she’d get over it.

  *

  Morgan’s aircraft left Shanghai three hours late because of the smog. That was annoying enough. But then it turned back an hour into the flight because a passenger had tipped a bowl of scorching noodles over a flight attendant.

  All Morgan had heard from the relative comfort of his first class compartment was a lot of shouting and screaming from beyond the curtain, and when they got back to Shanghai a short, stocky woman with a face redder than the Shanghai Airlines seat covers was offloaded in handcuffs by the police, a male companion in tow.

  While they waited on the ground Morgan tried phoning his wife again. This time the phone rang, but she never picked up. Then he phoned a man called Sam Ching, who was supposed to meet him in Shenzhen, to find that Ching knew more about the air rage incident than he did.

  “The woman didn’t like the noodles,” Ching said.

  “She didn’t like the noodles?”

  “She wanted rice.”

  “And?”

  “The rice was finished.”

  Ching told Morgan the woman pushed over the flight attendant before throwing the noodles in her face.

  “That’s crazy,” said Morgan.

  “I know,” said Ching. “They never carry enough rice.”

  Ching told him it was all over the internet, that perhaps a dozen people had recorded it with their smartphones and uploaded the photos and videos just as soon as the aircraft landed back in Shanghai and they had a signal.

  *

  It was a hazy afternoon in Shenzhen when Morgan’s aircraft landed, but not nearly as bad as the smog Morgan had left behind in Shanghai. He felt more relaxed. Mellowed by several gin and tonics. He tried to telephone Cindy Wu. Her phone rang, but she still didn’t pick up. He tried Robert’s two numbers, but they went straight to voicemail and he left a message on both.

  “Hey Robert, it’s Dad. Sounds like a bit of a pain at the airport. Looking forward to seeing you. Call me when you can.”

  Then he tried to concentrate on the business he needed to sort in Shenzhen. Bud’s gnomes and the deals with Mr Fang.

  He was soon sitting comfortably in the back of Sam Ching’s black Mercedes van, sipping ice cold water, Ching telling him that business wasn’t too great down south.

  Ching was from nearby Hong Kong, but also held a Canadian passport, which he called his insurance policy for when Beijing destroyed Hong Kong, scrapped the freedoms it had promised when the place was handed back to China by the British. He thought that was bound to happen.

  He said Beijing didn’t like anything it couldn’t control.

  He was hard-nosed and practical, and had a Hong Konger’s sense of superiority towards the mainland Chinese, whom he regarded for the most part as crude, uncultured and corrupt.

  Ching was Morgan’s age, but looked ten years younger. He was medium height with a full head of greying hair parted at one side, and he was well built. He was wearing dark jeans and a beige padded sleeveless jacket over a dark blue shirt.

  His face seemed to have fixed on it a permanent smile, or perhaps a smirk.

  Morgan had been working with Ching for almost ten years. He was his eyes and ears in the south, where he owned a string of factories, and acted as a broker for many more. If Morgan needed something, Ching could usually make it happen.

  Between gin and tonics, Morgan had spent most of the flight south doodling on a Shanghai Airlines sick bag, which he now had in front of him, looking like a deranged game of snakes and ladders. At the top, underlined three times, was the title, “Still the Workshop of the World”.

  It was an outline of the next edition of the MB China Report, which he’d seen as a kind of travelogue across the area where the China Miracle began, and where it would continue, or so he’d tell his readers. He knew those statistics by heart too: three quarters of the world’s toys, umbrellas and mobile phones, more than half its shoes and electrical appliances, all produced here.

  Now bold new industries were emerging, like drones, robots and 3D printing. Sure there was a bit of a downturn, but the future looked good. Shenzhen was now leading China’s latest economic transformation. At least that’s how he’d tell it to readers of his report.

  But as they drove north, the shuttered shops and lifeless factories told another story.

  “It’s bad,” Ching said.

  Ching had been doing business in Shenzhen since well before the handover of Hong Kong. He’d been a pioneer when China first opened up, and Shenzhen had been the first of China’s Special Economic Zones.

  He still had the pictures in his office of the area when it was rice paddies and swamplands. Now Shenzhen was a city of ten million with a sprawling hinterland of tens of thousands of factories from which just about anything could be sourced.

  Ching regarded himself as a decent man working in a corrupt system. He would tell Morgan that he never paid a bribe or cut corners unless it was entirely necessary. Which gave him a lot of leeway, and anyway Morgan preferred not to know those details.

  Ching said he’d not known things this bad in a long time, and as they drove he pointed out the shells of factories that had closed, places that had made shoes, toys and light fittings. At one, the gate was blackened, the nearby guardhouse burned down.

  “The owner just closed the place, locked the gate and left,” he said. “From Taiwan I think. Workers broke back in, angry, demanding to be paid. But the guy had taken all the money with him.”

  He said there’d been a lot of unrest, strikes and stuff, and the police had arrested a whole bunch of labour rights activists. Rounded them all up. Not that Ching was a big fan of labour rights, which he saw as a contradiction in terms. But he liked the Communist Party even less.

  He said the local government was in denial.

  “They keep saying it’s all part of a plan to get out of low-end manufacturing and into high tech, like robots. But I don’t see no robots. Just a lot of empty factories that can’t sell anything anymore.”

  He told Morgan that one of his companies had made a small loss over the last financial year, but when he went to file the accounts with the tax office they told him a loss wasn’t acceptable.

  “So we changed it to a small profit. That’s how they do their statistics here,” he said. “It’s about what’s politically acceptable, not what’s real.”

  And Morgan made a mental note to post that thought later to

  @Beijing_smog. He crumpled up the sick bag. He’d need to rethink that as well. At least a bit.

  Their van then turned onto another wider road lined with factories, through a gate and parked in a small claustrophobic courtyar
d surrounded by tall, grey and mostly windowless buildings.

  They left the van and took a battered service lift, which clanked, jolted and shuddered as it scraped its way up the lift shaft. Every floor had its own factory, and the sliding metal door opened first at a manufacturer of dental equipment. A high-pitched whine made Morgan cringe and involuntarily he ran his tongue along his teeth to make sure they were still there.

  Ching’s factory, one of several he owned, was on the eighth floor, the lift opening onto a corridor of white, scuffed walls. A woman sat painting her nails behind a reception desk, alongside an empty, stained fish tank. There was a worn leather sofa and a small coffee table on which sat an old cracked teapot and three dirty cups.

  A tall glass cabinet with sliding doors displayed a selection of the factory’s products: phone cases, tripods, selfie sticks and other simple electronic accessories. There was a map of China, a white board that was no longer so white and a battered projector.

  They sat at the coffee table, and it was then that Morgan told Ching that he had a client from Alabama who was looking to shift production to China, wanting to make a bunch of garden gnomes from a good quality polyresin.

  “You know, smiling old guys with white beards, to stick in the garden,” said Morgan, showing him a picture.

  “Wow. Pretty ugly. Pretty scary,” Ching said.

  Morgan told him they were meant to be comforting, and were very popular.

  “Look pretty scary to me,” Ching said.

  Ching looked at the pictures and sketches and said that wouldn’t be a problem, that he’d get some quotes. Nothing was ever a problem for Sam Ching.

  He led Morgan down another dark corridor lined with sparsely furnished offices with signs saying Marketing, Sales, Engineering and Finance. They were mostly empty.

  Then onto the vast and harshly lit factory floor, where several hundred mostly young women, wearing yellow polo-shirts, jeans and sneakers were bent over long tables, with a conveyor belt running alongside each table, assembling selfie sticks, extendable arms for taking smartphone photos.