by Ian Williams
He found it tough getting through the crowd. The road was now completely blocked. There must have been tens of thousands of people, stretching for at least a mile. Drayton couldn’t see where the crowd started or ended. There were a lot of police, but they seemed frozen, unsure of what to do. This wasn’t the sort of crowd you could easily bully.
But what was most striking for Drayton was the mood. It wasn’t anger. It certainly wasn’t confrontational or violent. They just stood there in silence, holding drawings and pictures high in the air above them.
Some were hand-drawn and some were printed.
All were of a stick alien.
– 39 –
The Alien Revolution
It was only after Wang Chu got back to Beijing that he learned what had happened to his parents. The teacher rang him, the one who worked with his mother, and who he’d met at the ice festival guiding her kids around the sculptures. She said the police had come to the school and taken his mother away two days before Wang had turned up, and that she was so sorry she’d not told him when they met. It had all been such a shock. She’d not known what to say.
She said she thought it was because of his mother’s work with the church.
“What work with the church?” Wang asked, remembering the bible on the floor of his parents’ apartment, but not knowing his mother was religious. But the teacher had said as much as she wanted to, and told him she couldn’t really explain right now, saying again that she was sorry before hanging up.
Then a little later, Wang’s mother herself rang, and much to his surprise she sounded happier than he’d heard her in a long time and hardly allowed him to get a word in. She said the police were raiding what she called house churches, unofficial churches, removing and destroying crosses and even demolishing some of the buildings.
She said she’d been at a service at one of those informal churches when the police arrived with what she described as a bunch of thugs. She said she’d helped block their way, pushing them back, singing and defending the cross.
The following day the police had come to the school and arrested her, accusing her of picking quarrels and provoking trouble. They’d released her after three days, though only after she’d signed a confession and a promise not to attend any more religious meetings.
“So you can’t go to church anymore?” Wang asked, and she replied that promises to those people meant nothing.
Then she began to praise his father, saying she was so proud of him. She said he’d quit his job at the Party School in protest at the treatment of his wife, saying he could no longer work for an organisation that violated its own laws and constitution.
“So he’s quit, he’s really quit?” Wang said, finding that more shocking than news of his mother’s faith. Communists violating their own laws were nothing new and would hardly come as a great surprise to his father. But he guessed it was because the abstract had just become very personal.
His mother said that wasn’t all. That Christians had gathered in the square beside Saint Sophia, the old Russian Orthodox Cathedral in Harbin, to protest against the raids. The police had tried to clear them, but then hundreds more people began to arrive, to support the Christians. And those hundreds became thousands. She said the square was now packed, that the protest had spilled into the streets nearby.
She said she was there now, and so was his father, that she would send a photograph. Then she hung up promising to phone again soon. Only then did Wang realise that he’d forgotten to tell her he’d been expelled from university.
It no longer seemed to matter.
A message with the photograph arrived within a minute and showed the packed square, filled with people standing in silent protest.
Some were holding crosses. Mostly they were holding drawings and pictures of a stick alien.
He shared it online. Though The Gasping Dragon had been shut down, he’d opened another account, this time in his own name. His mother was right, promises made to those people meant nothing. He was back online, in the world he understood best.
He was standing near the train crossing, the one close to the coffee shop. The barrier was down, but there were no police supervising it, so it was being ignored by pedestrians and cyclists going around, over and even under it. An elderly woman selling headphones nearby had appointed herself lookout and shouted a warning when she saw a train coming.
Wang shared more photos and videos from Harbin. And also from Shanghai, where another big protest was happening, this one supporting parents who’d lost kids when a ferry sank on the Yangtze. It was big online. The crowd looked huge. And again there were the pictures of the alien, held high in the air. The crowd just standing, silently.
Moments later the train rattled by, after which the barrier was raised and cars began to move across the railway line. Wang almost bumped into a red-faced Fatso heading in the other direction, totally absorbed in an angry conversation on his phone, yelling and waving one arm around.
“Hey,” said Wang.
Fatso stopped, but only briefly, saying, “They think they can steal people’s money. They’ll pay for this.”
Then he stormed away and resumed the angry tirade. Wang noticed he was carrying a poster mounted on a board. It appeared to be a very rough drawing of a stick alien. Art had never been one of Fatso’s stronger points.
Wang found his roommates Liu and Zhang at their usual table in the coffee shop, which to his surprise had reopened. Liu said Fatso had sunk a ton of money into an investment fund promising big returns. But it turned out to be a scam with no real investments other than cars and property for the owners, who had disappeared, along with Fatso’s money. And a lot of other people’s money too.
Liu said the office of the company was being besieged by angry investors, including Fatso, though their real anger was at the Government, which was refusing to bail them out. He said the owners were rumoured to have links with the Party.
“But the Government always bails these things out, don’t they?” said Wang.
Liu said that’s what everybody expected. But there were now so many of these funds going under that the money was huge. Billions.
Liu said his father had told him there was a massive industry in what he called shadow banking and it was creaking under a mountain of bad debt. He said schemes like the one Fatso was involved in were just the tip of the iceberg, and that the Government could no longer afford to bail them all out.
“He’s okay, your dad?” asked Wang.
“Seems okay.”
He said his father wasn’t his usual self, seemed very quiet, but at least he was now back in Beijing. He wouldn’t reveal where he’d been for two weeks, just that he’d had no choice but to go away for a while. At one point he’d said he’d been “held” outside the capital, but then corrected himself, saying he’d been “staying” at a Party facility. He’d also said, “Things are changing”, though without ever explaining what that meant.
There were online reports that trading had been suspended on the Shanghai and Shenzhen stock exchanges, which had collapsed even more dramatically than usual. Wang shared photographs of investors rioting in several cities.
The rioting had been particularly bad in Shenzhen, from where reports said the police had just stood by and let it happen. There were online rumours that the local police chief had been too busy liquidating his own investments to crack down on the protests. Others said it was part of a power struggle within the Party, Beijing having targeted the leadership in the southern boom areas, who’d responded by allowing the protests to happen.
At which point Lily came to the table, smiling for once, back in business and proud of her own little act of defiance. She said the police had ordered the coffee shop closed, giving no real reason. She said they’d sealed the door and put up a big notice saying it was shut down for the foreseeable future for
violating unspecified hygiene regulations.
They’d parked a pair of vans just up the road, watching. But the cars left abruptly after two days and she quickly stripped their seal from the door, pasted over the police notice with a picture of the alien and reopened. She said the place had never been busier.
And a strange thing had happened. Though most of Lily’s customers quickly logged in to the world beyond their screens, conversations were breaking out, many political, on subjects that had been treated before with caution or kept online and cryptic. The far corner of the coffee shop had become a little workshop, turning out posters and banners of stick aliens.
Zhang said it was hard to tell what was going on at the University. That there’d been protests there too. For more protection against the smog. Against the new rules on patriotic education. In support of the parents of The Girl In The Corner. For the reinstatement of Professor Huang. A whole bunch of things.
Zhang said the university authorities seemed paralysed, which had encouraged the protesters. He said they’d tried to deflect the anger by laying on buses to carry students to a spontaneous anti-Japan protest, followed by a spontaneous anti-American one, handing out banners saying, “Keep out of the South China Sea” and “Alcatraz belongs to China”.
But Zhang said most students didn’t even bother to leave the campus on the buses to the Japanese and US Embassies, and the official slogans had been overdrawn with images of the stick alien.
That, and pictures of a smashed red Ferrari with a caption, “Where’s the Justice?” Liu said the crash in Shanghai had made people really angry, especially when the driver turned out to be the son of a high-ranking military official.
He said there’d been a news blackout, and censors had blocked the words ‘Ferrari’, ‘red’, ‘crash’ and ‘naked’, the last one referring to one of two girls in the car. The other one died.
Zhang said that initially he’d been really busy with the University’s Opinion Guidance Unit, since there were an awful lot of opinions that needed guiding. But those running the Unit began to suspect that the opinion guiders were not taking their task seriously enough.
Especially after a mix-up with party slogans.
One slogan, “We must firmly uphold the unity of the people,” was posted by Zhang as “We must firmly upload the unity of the people.”
He told his supervisor it was a genuine mistake, but that it might sound better to a younger audience.
Soon afterwards it went viral, the first time anybody could remember that happening with a Party slogan. And alongside many of the postings was an image of the stick alien.
Soon after that, Zhang and his fellow opinion guiders where told that the work of their unit was being temporarily suspended.
The University then announced a two-week closure, for what it called urgent repairs to the main buildings.
Elsewhere the online censors were busy but inconsistent. The sheer volume of pictures and videos from protests now spreading nationwide was a challenge for sure. But their response veered from one extreme to another. One minute leaving the posts, perhaps hoping the anger and ridicule would burn itself out, the next deleting anything about protests and blocking everything that contained the words ‘protest’ or ‘alien’. To this was added ‘Yangtze’, ‘sinking’, ‘compensation’, ‘church’ and ‘investment’. For a while even the words ‘Harbin’ and ‘Shanghai’ were blocked.
Dozens more sites were taken down and there were at least a hundred arrests for malicious rumour-mongering.
In reality it was impossible to turn back the tide of anger without pulling the plug on the digital world completely, though that’s what happened for a while in some areas of Harbin and Shanghai, where the authorities turned off the internet and digital services.
But that merely delayed the uploading of images until protesters found an area with a signal.
As he jumped between social network sites, sharing and commenting, trying to make sense of what was going on, Wang began to feel that he knew everything but nothing. The only constant was that spindly figure with the big pear-shaped head and angled eyes. His stick alien.
– 40 –
Ritan Park
When the Chinese Government abruptly cancelled the President’s visit, it was seen initially as a snub, a reaction to the cyber indictment, though it soon became clear to the Americans that Beijing had bigger things to worry about.
Privately there was relief at the Shanghai consulate. Top-level visits were always a pain. And even the President’s advance team found a silver lining, able to switch their attention to sightseeing. And plenty of crispy prawns from the great takeaway they’d been recommended.
The daily conference calls in the Bubble Room were now dominated by efforts to make sense of the protests sweeping the country. To Drayton the only common thread appeared to be the images of that strange little stick alien, held high by waves of mostly silent and peaceful protesters.
The protests had now crippled a large part of southern China too, across the border from Hong Kong, and China’s industrial heartland, triggered by the collapse of an over-stuffed landfill near the city of Shenzhen. Construction companies building a vast new suburb nearby had used it as a dump, and it had given way after days of heavy rain. A river of mud and rubbish had swept downhill from the site, engulfing villages, two schools and workers’ dormitories, burying hundreds of people, including scores of children.
The authorities called it a natural disaster. But there’d been warnings and small protests for months. Online they were accused of negligence and a cover-up. Images of desperate and distraught families searching for loved ones went viral, as did videos of security agents dragging a crying elderly couple, grandparents of some missing children, from a construction company’s office where they had gone to demand answers.
Thousands took to the streets, but this soon became tens of thousands and then hundreds of thousands.
Across the border in Hong Kong, pro-democracy protests flared up again. They’d been led by lawyers and judges at first, accusing Beijing of eroding the former British colony’s independent legal system. But they were growing bigger by the day.
The only violence appeared to have been at protests by investors, as they watched markets collapse and investment funds go under, and demanded their money back. That was already spooking world markets, and a trusted American financial expert from a leading bank in Shanghai was invited to the Bubble Room to brief them about the mess.
“What is a Ponzi Scheme exactly?” asked a voice from the darkened State Department video screen.
“It’s a fraudulent investment operation where the operator pays returns to its investors from new capital paid to the operators by new investors, rather than from profit earned,” said the expert.
“You what?” said a trio of voices.
“Can we have that in plain English?” said another.
“Basically it’s a scam investment designed to separate investors from their money,” the expert said. “And they do have a tendency to collapse eventually.”
“And remind me, what’s the name of the one that’s giving us most worry right now?” asked a voice from another screen.
“Well,” said the expert, “I’d call it the Chinese economy.”
*
The foreign media had started to call the protests the Alien Revolution or the March of the Aliens, likening the Chinese protests to the “colour revolutions”, the uprisings that had once swept parts of the former Soviet Union and the Balkans.
Diplomats struggled to figure out what it all meant, and the dark silhouettes around conference tables on the Bubble Room video screens demanded answers. Who was behind the uprising? What was the organisation? Because surely there must be one. What did they want? And how should we react?
Mostly it came down to the alien. Who was i
t and what did it represent? This sometime hacker, nationalist, brewer of deadly smog weapons, and now possibly the force behind the uprising.
Drayton came under pressure. The Bubble Room screens wanted answers. And he was the Cyber Guy. He had plenty of reason to doubt that the alien symbol was anything other than that, a symbol, but for the moment kept those thoughts to himself.
The search for the hand behind the uprisings, the conviction that there must be one, was shared by the Party, which saw a dark foreign hand, what it called a conspiracy against the Chinese people, orchestrated by enemies abroad.
For good measure, security agents rounded up hundreds more lawyers, as well as civil and labour rights activists, accusing them of subversion.
In Shenzhen they paraded on television a factory owner called Sam Ching who tearfully confessed to inciting unrest. The police released a photograph that they claimed was Ching meeting villagers near the collapsed landfill. Much was made of Ching’s Canadian passport, and he apologised in a faltering on-camera statement for hurting the feelings of the Chinese people and allowing himself to become a stooge of unnamed foreign enemies of China.
His wife, a feisty woman from Hong Kong, condemned the confession as being forced, calling it a grotesque piece of totalitarian theatre. In a written statement, she said her husband had been wrongly arrested, possibly for counterfeiting goods, and attached a picture of what was later identified by its original Japanese inventor as an automatic sperm extractor.
Most journalists and diplomats following the story didn’t really get the significance of that. It was just plain weird. So they stuck with the line about the grotesque piece of totalitarian theatre. That was a far better sound bite.
When he read the wife’s statement, Drayton did raise an eyebrow of recognition, but decided this wasn’t something he needed immediately to be taking to the Bubble Room. He mentally filed it away, along with the aquarium shark.
