by Ian Williams
Boxes were piled high against a door marked Emergency Exit.
Ching pointed out to Morgan where he thought he could install new machinery for the gnomes. And Morgan said the Alabama guy was a serious player, that he wanted to shift a lot of his production to China to cut costs. That gnomes were just the start.
“I need a good price, Sam, but we have to keep an eye on quality. I don’t want a repeat of the Freeport thing.”
“It was a dog, Tony. A fucking dog.”
“The dog had a name, Sam. It was called Honey.”
It had been in many ways a freak accident, but it had become a big political issue in the city of Freeport, Illinois, and a rallying point for opposition to outsourcing to China.
Honey, an over-weight Labrador that newspapers would later call “adorable, loving, loyal, like another child”, had choked to death on a small nut that came loose from a chandelier, fell and landed in her food.
The dog’s owner had bought the US$600 chandelier from a local mall, which had bought a batch of them from a wholesaler for US$350 each. The wholesaler had paid US$200 per item to a Hong Kong trading company, which in turn paid Sam Ching US$37 per chandelier.
Anthony Morgan had brokered the deal, but the fallout never reached him or Ching personally. The supply chain was too complicated.
But fallout there was. An Illinois election was approaching, and Freeport had other issues with China, which was blamed for a string of factory closures, including a local car parts plant that was dismantled and shipped to Shanghai, the workers asked to train those who’d be replacing them.
So the nut, once discovered, had become the “killer nut from China” in local media.
Honey was then stuffed by the State’s finest taxidermist, making an appearance alongside the Governor at a nationally televised press conference.
“China is not only taking our jobs,” he thundered, banging his table. “They are killing our pets!”
“I hear you,” said Ching to Morgan. “But you’re squeezing me. You want to pay me less and less. Then you complain about quality issues.”
And he did have a point.
Morgan told him this Bud from Alabama had money. That he’d pay a fair price.
They looked out of a stained and cracked window at a drab, rundown building across the road. There was little to distinguish it from its neighbours. But Morgan recalled that last time he visited, it had been busy with crowds of mostly young men and women who all had one thing in common: they had missing limbs or other terrible disfigurements.
“What happened to the hostel?”
“Police closed it down,” Ching said. He sounded almost sorry, which came as a surprise to Morgan, since Ching was forever complaining about the place, a refuge for workers who’d been maimed while working in the area’s factories, lawyers fighting an uphill battle for compensation. It was as if he saw the hostel as an accusing finger, pointing directly at him.
Now he said, “They weren’t doing no harm. Just standing up for their rights.” He said there’d been a big raid on the place, lots of police and paramilitary. “To take away a bunch of invalids, for God’s sake.”
He said they’d barricaded themselves in, and showed Morgan a series of photographs he’d taken on his smartphone of the place surrounded. There were defiant posters in the windows, home-made sketches mostly. A worker on crutches. Another with patches over her eyes. There were others that didn’t look human, more like aliens. Stick aliens.
A final photograph showed a man being dragged off by police. Ching said he was one of the hostel organisers, who’d lost a foot in a metal processing machine and broke the other resisting arrest. He was still carrying a stick alien poster as he was hauled away.
Morgan asked for a copy of the photo. One for @Beijing_smog.
Then they went back to the Mercedes van, Ching saying he wanted to show Morgan something else, so he could understand what was going on in the area, and they drove for fifteen minutes until they came to an area where development petered out and gave way to patchy farmland and a small settlement.
Which is when Morgan looked at his phone, swearing under his breath as he saw that he’d missed two calls from Cindy Wu. His phone had been on silent mode for the flight and he’d forgotten to switch it back. He went to call his wife’s number, but then decided to wait. It wasn’t a conversation he wanted to have in front of Ching.
And he couldn’t leave the van. There were rocks all over the road ahead and the burnt-out shells of two cars and an excavator. There was a strong smell of burning. Several men stood alert like sentries under a cluster of lychee trees.
They eyed the Mercedes suspiciously. Ching got out, telling Morgan to stay behind the darkened windows of the van, and went to talk to them.
When he returned to the van, Ching told the driver to head back the way they’d come, saying to Morgan, “They’re playing with fire around here.”
He said there was a big landfill site just up the road, which the local people said was dangerously unstable, and was being used to dump construction waste by a developer with strong local political connections. The usual story. He said the people around there had tried to block the entrance and had clashed with the police and thugs working for the developer.
Morgan looked back as they left, at one of the burnt cars – a police car. There was an image engraved on its charred door. It was another stick alien. Ching saw it too and said the alien had been getting around, that it seemed to have been adopted by just about everybody down here with a grudge against the Government.
“And that’s a lot of people,” he said as they drove away.
– 19 –
Dot-com Billionaire
Wang Chu said he’d decided to become a dot-com billionaire, and Liu Wei asked him when that might be because Lily was giving him a hard time about their unpaid coffee shop bills.
“Seriously,” Wang said. “I’ve made up my mind. I’m going to start my own business. Mine will be the internet’s next Big Idea.”
“Which is?”
“I haven’t had it yet. But I’m working on it.”
The summons from the University, the strange meeting with Mrs Jiang and the fat creepy guy in the ski jacket had shaken him. Mostly he was confused and depressed by it, still not sure why they’d called him in.
Liu agreed it was probably about ideology, Wang not taking it seriously enough. Whatever the reason, Wang was convinced it had badly damaged his already faltering prospects at university, even if they didn’t kick him out.
He needed a Plan B.
He needed to strike out on his own. And internet start-ups were the future.
Wang said he’d just been to a talk at the University given by Mark Zuckerberg, the American who set up Facebook, who was visiting China, and it was really inspiring.
“Who?” said Liu.
“Zuckerberg. You know. He runs the American version of Renren. And he says he’ll be giving his fortune to charity.”
“Why would he do that?”
“To make the world a better place. To cure all the world’s illnesses.”
“How’s he going to do that?”
Wang said he wasn’t entirely sure, that this Zuckerberg was speaking Chinese, or trying to.
“It wasn’t great Chinese. But at least he tried. And he has a Chinese wife. Said he had to learn Mandarin so he could speak with her parents.”
Wang said Zuckerberg had also been jogging in the smog in Tiananmen Square without a mask, and Liu said in that case he must be really confident of knocking out a quick cure for heart disease and lung cancer.
They were walking from the University to The Moment On Time, passing a statue of Mao that stood in front of a rival university, its arm outstretched and pointing in the direction of the coffee shop, which Wang always found hel
pful on smoggy days, getting some guidance from the Great Helmsman.
“The zombies were awesome by the way.”
“What zombies?” Liu asked.
“Temple Run, the zombie version. The one you said to download. It was cool. You were right. Thanks. The crazed zombies, they still get you in the end, but I’d had enough of the crazed monkeys,” he said.
“You’re welcome,” Liu said.
They stopped at the railway crossing near the coffee shop, because the barrier was down and extra police were there to prevent anybody impatient from slipping through. They’d been given little red flags to wave.
Wang told Liu there’d been a big confrontation there, people trying to force their way across, a cop pushing over a woman with a child.
Liu said he’d seen it on a video-sharing site.
“These guys are idiots,” he said, pointing to the police.
Wang said he couldn’t see the one who’d done the pushing, and Liu said he’d probably been promoted.
This time the wait was shorter. A goods train rumbled through and the barrier was raised, creaking like it might come crashing back down at any moment.
Liu said you couldn’t even get Facebook in China, and that maybe that was why this Zuckerberg was in town, sucking up to the Party.
“It won’t work,” he said. “How can you trust a man who can’t see smog and wants to talk to his mother-in-law. How’s that inspiring?”
“Well then look at Jack Ma,” said Wang. “He was just a teacher and now he’s the king of e-commerce. He built Alibaba from nothing. Now he’s a billionaire. Richest man in China.”
“You sure? I thought the richest guy was into property.”
Wang said the new rich were all dot-com guys. That was the future. Property was yesterday, the bubble was bursting. There was too much of it. And he said he was through with going to pointless job fairs.
The graduate job market was worse than anybody could remember.
Wang said the future was in internet start-ups.
He said you couldn’t even make money working for the Government anymore.
Liu said the road to riches still lay through the Party, and Wang said he wasn’t so sure and that he wanted nothing to do with the Party or the Government. Not after all his trouble at the University.
Liu said he thought that was naive.
“You suppose Jack Ma would last one day if he didn’t toe the Party line? Or Zuckerberg will be allowed to operate here if he doesn’t follow their rules. Nobody’s bigger than the Party.”
Wang said that a bunch of places had opened in Haidian, not far from the University. They were called spaces. Incubators. For developers to work on new tech stuff.
“You go there and talk about ideas and where to raise the cash, where to get the backing, that kind of thing. It’s pretty cool.”
Liu asked why you’d talk about ideas in front of other people.
“Suppose somebody else stole your idea, then what would it be worth?”
Wang said it wasn’t like that.
“These people don’t steal ideas,” he said.
And Liu said that everybody stole ideas, and maybe if Wang hung around there long enough, in one of those incubators, then maybe he could walk away with a few as well, saving him a lot of work.
Wang ignored that and said, “They even invite people who’ve started successful businesses to come and talk, and say how they did it.”
He said it was just like Silicon Valley, in America, except right now it was centred on just three or four coffee shops and an apartment or two in a street north of the University.
“We should talk to Lily, tell her to set aside some space in her place for an incubator.”
“She’d love that,” Liu said. “She’ll think you want to turn the coffee shop into a glorified crèche, and you know how she hates having children in there.
“And any case,” he said, “we still have her bill to pay.”
“Maybe we should talk to Fatso. He’s got a ton of space at his place,” Wang said.
“What does Fatso know about internet start-ups?”
“Not a lot, for sure, but the guy is sharper than he looks. Fatso wants to go into finance. He’s thinking of getting himself a diploma so he can do all that stock market stuff, give advice on where the market’s going.”
“That’s not difficult,” Liu said, his thumb pointing downwards.
He said he wouldn’t want to take advice on the market from Fatso.
“That’s his point,” Wang said.
“What’s his point?”
“That there are so many people out there, claiming they know everything, but really know nothing. Fatso can’t be any worse. He might even be better.”
“Tell him he can talk to the students, as a successful entrepreneur,” Liu said.
And Wang said he wasn’t sure that was such a good idea, since churning out knock-offs might not be everybody’s idea of a digital start up.
They agreed to talk to him all the same. Maybe raise it with Lily as well.
They were in the coffee shop now, joining Zhang at their usual table near the window. Lily came over, not looking happy, and they ordered tea. Wang asked her if she’d heard of an incubator. She said she had Americano, latte and cappuccino and if they wanted a fancy coffee they should go elsewhere, though only after settling their bill.
They decided that Fatso might be the better option.
Liu logged into his trading account and found the market had picked up. He was smiling for the first time in days, saying the Government had intervened, buying shares to prop up prices after a big riot outside the Shanghai Stock Exchange.
“People don’t like losing money,” he said, telling his roomates that brokers had been arrested for selling shares, and journalists detained for negative reporting about the market.
“It’s a market. Aren’t they supposed to go up and down?” said Wang
“It’s a Chinese market,” said Liu. “The Party wants prices to go where it tells them to go.”
Liu then told Zhang about Wang’s plan to become a dot-com billionaire, and Zhang said great, just keep clear of robots, especially in orange robes.
“So why’s that?” said Wang, and Zhang told him that a new artificial intelligence programme at the University had been shut down and the Director arrested after they made a politically incorrect robot.
Zhang said it was all a misunderstanding.
The programme had been launched by the Party leader himself on a visit to the University. A model programme, he’d called it, part of China’s new innovation economy, and Zhang, one of the stars of the Computer Science Department, had been asked to join.
Their first creation was a robot monk, which had been installed in a Tibetan temple. It was four feet tall, dressed in orange robes and able to answer questions about Buddhism, interact with its surroundings and chant and play music.
“It was a cutting-edge way of explaining Buddhism,” said Zhang, and it was praised immediately by Party officials, who saw a lot of promise in friendly and compliant robotic monks.
Zhang said there’d been a few teething problems, and one day it burst into flames.
“Self-immolated? That’s pretty realistic,’” said Liu.
“It was a problem with the circuits,” Zhang said, not seeing the funny side.
He said the real problem came when the robot got attitude and attacked another visiting Party official, hitting him with a prayer wheel and telling him to get out of the temple, not being friendly at all. And certainly not compliant.
Which Liu thought was really funny.
“I want one,” he said. “We can put it at the door of the coffee shop.”
“But how did that happen?” said Wang. “It was
supposed to be a robot.”
Zhang said the Director, the one who’d now been arrested, thought at first it had been hacked, but then decided it was just acting rationally.
“These are intelligent machines. They learn from their environment. They are designed to be sensitive and responsive.”
“So they decided life for Tibetan monks sucks. And it’s all the Party’s fault.” said Liu, laughing again. “That seems pretty smart to me.”
Zhang ignored that, and said to Wang, “So what’s your Big Idea?”
“He hasn’t got one,” said Liu.
Wang said that wasn’t strictly true. While he didn’t yet have the Big Idea, he had written his first app, and he was close to putting it up for sale on a couple of app stores.
“Wow,” said Zhang. “So what is this app that’s going to make us all rich?”
“It’s a game. The money’s in games,” Wang said. “You want to see?”
They moved their chairs either side of Wang, who clicked on a small icon on his phone.
The screen was filled with a picture of Tiananmen Square, the entrance of the Forbidden City with its big portrait of Mao Zedong at the top. There were a series of buttons at the bottom and a number box for the score.
“There are three modes,” Wang said. “Night, day, and smog.” He swiped the screen to move between modes, saying the smog mode was probably more realistic, and that the final version might have more locations.
He touched another button to start the game and, slowly at first, stick aliens started appearing from under the portrait of Mao, spilling onto Tiananmen Square.
“This is where it gets fun,” he said. Another button controlled a hand holding a fly swatter, which appeared at the edge of the screen, and by repeatedly touching the button the swatter swiped the aliens from the screen, complete with a high-pitched whooshing, and a sound like a racquet hitting a tennis ball.
“Nice,” said Zhang, and Wang passed him the phone to let him have a go.
“It’s pretty straightforward,” Wang said. He told them you scored points by whacking as many aliens as possible. There would be several levels, but he’d not quite worked that out yet.
