Ta Shu stopped by a man standing by his truck: broad flat face, red cheeks, maybe Tibetan, friendly look. Ta Shu asked what was happening and the man pointed north. Word was that something was going on. Maybe some kind of demonstration. Of course there were demonstrations every day in China, but they were always elsewhere, out in the west or down south. Here in Beijing, and this big? It was strange, even spooky. It was too big to be a demonstration.
Ta Shu stood next to his bike, resting his weight on its handlebars. He interrogated his wristpad like so many others. Traffic maps were very slow to load, they were all stalling out. Finally he got one that showed the city red everywhere, farther to the south than the north. Then an alert appeared on the map, announcing that Tiananmen Square and the area around it was closed. Ta Shu felt a stab of dread. To empty the center of the capital, the heart of China in feng shui terms, scene of so many national moments, from the glory of the declaration of national independence to the horror of July 339th—that was a clear sign that city officials, or more probably the national leadership, thought that something was very wrong. The crowd around him did not seem anything like a terrorist threat, or even a protest—too many people were involved. Although many of them, now that he looked around, did seem headed north. It was true on both sides of the street. To the extent this mass of people was moving at all, it was moving north, toward the city center.
Ta Shu found seams in the crowd and nosed his bike along. Other bicyclists were trying this, and the people stuck with their cars were getting more and more annoyed with them. The empty boxes on his bike’s trailer made it wider than it needed to be, so he untied them and left them on the ground. On he pushed, following lines of walking people he could follow north or east. Slowly the logjam was resolving into eddies of movement in various directions, as some people gave up and turned around, while others pressed on, or headed to the side. Sometimes moving lanes of people crossed each other, taking turns one by one. Everything went slowly, as if they were caught in syrup. People were more and more distant with each other, their harmony impersonal and brittle. Some still shared rumors or sympathy, but mostly they ignored the people around them, withdrawing into themselves. The whole situation was just too disconcerting. There were many, many thousands of people on the streets.
Now Ta Shu was beginning to see groups that seemed to have formed before the gridlock began. These were mostly lines of young people snaking through the crowd, holding banners and following multiperson dragons, as during New Year’s parades, some speaking through megaphones, others chanting or singing. These tuanpai, if they were youth league groups, were singing slogans like The united masses will always be victorious, or The rule of law is the rule of the land. Also: Law yes, corruption no. Also: Law over Party, law over Party.
So maybe it was a protest after all. And the content of these slogans was startling to Ta Shu, as he had been under the impression that young urban people were almost entirely molded by their social media. These netizens usually parroted the Party line, exuding an intense nationalism and rejecting any talk of the rule of law as nothing but baizuo, white left nonsense. The rule of law was self-interested pseudo universalism, they often said, promulgated by the West in its usual imperialist attempt to take over the world. A very convenient opinion from the Party’s point of view, and vigorously reiterated by many supposedly independent voices who were actually in the Party’s pay. But it had also gotten into many people’s heads who did not think of themselves as Party hacks. Even in Hong Kong a youthful attack on “leftards” was common, and to Ta Shu’s way of thinking, a discouraging sign of the mind-wiping conformism of cloudpolitics. Not that Ta Shu was a New Leftist; he was an old leftist. Laozi was his favorite political theorist.
In any case now here they were, long lines of young people snaking through the crowds singing joyfully, intensely, looking eerily like the young faces seen in photos from the time of the Cultural Revolution, or the Communist revolution, or the 1911 national revolution. No doubt if there had been cameras on hand during the White Lotus revolt they would have captured the same look, because it was always the same feeling bursting into the world: the return of the repressed. Or even dynastic succession. Perhaps the wheel had come around again.
Ta Shu hoped not with all his heart. He could not imagine China without the Party in charge. It would surely collapse into the most horrible chaos. If democracy came to China they would end up electing idiots, as in America. Best of a bad situation to let professionals work on these matters, meaning engineers, technicians, bureaucrats. Maybe.
Or maybe not. Now he began to see that many or even most of these lines of young people snaking through the crowd were not urban youth, not the netizen precariat with their wristpads and part-time service jobs. These marchers were workers, looking weather-beaten even though young. They were the hardened and hungry internal migrants, the three withouts, the billion. Many of them had to have come to Beijing from far away, although quite a few looked as if they had arrived directly from work sites. Quite a few looked like they owned little more than the clothes they stood in. Usually one saw such people in one’s peripheral vision, on work sites or through factory windows, or in the subway intent on their own lives. Now that Ta Shu had noticed them, he saw they were a big part of the mix here. They had come to Beijing to do this. A line of young women, slight and stylish, busy as sparrows, slipped forward chanting something. Factory girls, shoving people out of the way in trios or quartets of cheerful minor mayhem, moving in time to their chant, ready to gang up on obstructions. Who would oppose these dangerous young people?
His wristpad vibrated his forearm with its little electrocution, reminding him that he was still shackled to this moment of the world. He had been thinking that the cloud had probably shut down. But his wrist was vibrating insistently, and he checked it. Peng Ling wanted to talk to him.
“Hello, Ling!” he said into his wristpad. “I’m glad you called!”
“I need to see you,” she said peremptorily. The tiny image of her face on his wristpad looked unusually serious. “Can you come to me?”
“I’m caught in traffic on the south side of town,” Ta Shu told her. “Something’s going on down here.”
“It’s going on everywhere!” Peng exclaimed. “Your friend Chan Qi has triggered a march on Beijing.”
“Oh no.”
“Oh yes.”
“Why don’t you tell her to stop it?” Ta Shu asked.
“She’s disappeared. She and her American friend slipped out of Fang Fei’s place on the moon.”
“How did it happen? When?”
“Fang likes to be friendly. I don’t blame him. The whole idea of house arrest is weak to begin with. There were some visitors there who probably smuggled them out. I’ve just heard from Zhou Bao that their rover may have been spotted near Petrov Crater. Chan Qi has to have reached the near side if she’s sending laser messages home, isn’t that right?”
“I don’t know.”
“Can you get over here to talk?”
“I’m not sure. Is Tiananmen Square really closed?”
“Yes.”
“It could be hard to get to the north side.”
“That’s true. How about meeting at that waffle shop?”
“That would be easier. I can try.”
“Meet me there in two hours. That should give us both time to get there.”
“I’ll try.”
Ta Shu walked his bike east, which proved to be somewhat easier than pushing north, as he could skirt the back side of every crush. Geomancy of crowds, feeling the dragon arteries and the tangled knots. Now that this one was confirmed to be some kind of demonstration, Ta Shu could not help but think of May Thirty-fifth, also known as April Sixty-fifth, or any of the other dates that the Great Firewall had created by its ban on any mention of June Fourth, infamous for the deaths that had occurred in Tiananmen Square on that day in 1989. In that crisis some kind of pro-democracy, pro-reformist demonstration had been finally
suppressed and dispersed, on Deng’s orders. They had done it by way of an influx into the city of a huge number of soldiers from all over China, moving them by train into the capital, after which some of them had fired on the crowd of students and their supporters filling the great national square. A disaster in China’s history—nothing much in terms of deaths, compared to the Cultural Revolution or any other of the earlier disasters, but undeniably it had been a moment when Chinese authorities had killed Chinese, with no involvement or incitement from outsiders. In this case it had not even been a civil war against reactionaries, but a case of civil unrest that could have been resolved without violence. The idea could not be avoided that the situation had had better solutions than to order the Chinese army to kill Chinese people. Such an act had no ren, Confucius’s central notion of ruler benevolence. Very little intelligence either. In retrospect it didn’t seem that desperate of a moment for China, or even for the Party. The leadership had probably overreacted to events elsewhere in the world, in particular the ongoing collapse of the Soviet empire. Seeing the trouble in Moscow they had panicked in Beijing, and so a number of idealistic protesters had died.
Now he was caught in a crowd of such people. Workers and urban precariat, the three withouts and the two maybe withouts, some exploited by their hukou status, some by the gig economy, some simply unemployed. The so-called billion, converging on Beijing to support the rule of law, but also, Ta Shu thought, just a decent living. The return of the iron rice bowl, or maybe even the whole work unit system, which had given several generations some stability in China’s constantly shifting economy.
Around Ta Shu people were energetically shouting. There was no way to be sure what had caused all these people to come out. They looked ready and willing to charge at tanks should those appear. But this time it wouldn’t be tanks, he thought. This time it would be drones from the sky, and what would they do then? Fear of this made him lean hard on his bike’s handlebars. But the people around him were not afraid. They had a project, a collective project, and maybe that’s what had caused this to happen, because people craved a project. Chinese history was full of them, and now one had sprung up again. Out of nothing, out of material conditions, out of the cloud—it might be very hard to find out how this had started. Although Peng Ling had all the resources of the government to look into it. But as he jammed his bike into the narrow gaps between people, Ta Shu knew for sure that this was not just one person’s doing. This was mass action, this was what mass action looked like, felt like. Despite his age, he himself had never seen it.
He followed a line of people snaking east toward Tiantan and Longtan, then turned up an alley too narrow to allow a crowd like this one to move in it, so that it was only crowded in the usual way, or a little more so. The alley snaked through its neighborhood like the lines of moving people snaked through the crush on the big streets. Though he still couldn’t ride his bike, he could walk it at a decent speed. Even so, it took more than two hours to make his way to the waffle shop, and near the end of it he felt like he was shoving the bike up a steep hill. He wished he was still wearing a body bra. What if a time came when wearing such a thing was always preferable, or even necessary? Then he would be truly old.
When he got to the waffle shop he found it was closed, but as he stood there, exhausted and stupid, a tap came on the window and one of the owners opened up the door for him and quickly locked it behind him. “She’s not here yet. She’ll be here soon.”
He groaned and handed over his bike to the woman, then hauled himself up by the banister to the upper floor of the shop. He flopped into an armchair, stared up into the constellations of antique chandeliers filling the space. The surreal sight hypnotized him into sleep.
When he woke Peng Ling was sitting on a couch across from him, sipping tea and reading her wrist.
“Sorry,” he said. “I fell asleep.”
“I just got here. You look tired.”
“Yes,” he said. “Sorry. I must smell like the garbage place and the highway both.” He shifted, groaned.
“My sympathies about your mother. I was sorry to hear.”
“She had a good life.”
“Yes. Still, when your mother goes, it changes something inside you.”
“It does. No more umbrella.”
“No more umbrella.”
Peng sipped her tea, watching him. “Maybe it would be a good thing for you to have something to do now. And I need you. This girl on the moon is causing big problems.”
“What do you mean?”
“She’s wrecking my plan!”
Ta Shu shifted in his chair. “Pour me some tea and tell me about this plan.”
Peng gestured at one of her staff to get more hot water brought to them. When it came she poured Ta Shu’s tea and stirred the cup nine times. Ta Shu sipped it and sighed happily at the taste of an oolong, possibly the one called Iron Goddess of Mercy. That would be right for his tiger friend.
“This is a big moment,” Peng Ling said. “The Party congress is in session, and a lot of the Politburo and the standing committee are aged out, including President Shanzhai. He’s trying to stack the new standing committee and get Huyou into the presidency, and then stay in charge from behind. A lot of us don’t want that. At the same time Hong Kong has returned fully to us, and people there are anxious. So as I told you before, I’m trying to slip some reforms in with all this.”
“Your reconciliation of liberal and New Left.”
“Well, at this point it might not rise to that exalted level, but yes. I have plans. But now this hotheaded girl has gotten the youth into the streets. All trains and flights to Beijing have been canceled. You have to prove you’re a resident even to come to the city now. That’s just the start of the disruptions. No one can tell how the crowd out there now will be dispersed. Even if that gets managed successfully, which will take time, that won’t be the end of it. No. It’s a mess.”
Ta Shu sipped his tea and thought it over. “Maybe the mess could help you. You are trying for top-down reform, and the people out there are trying from the bottom up. Ultimately you need both.”
Peng shook her head. “I wish it was true. Maybe you can help make it true with your political feng shui. That’s what I’m asking you to try, I suppose. But from my perspective, much as it helps to have the people behind a cause, if there is civil unrest like this now, bringing bad memories of May Thirty-fifth, and even worse, then this only hurts reform efforts from the top. There will be elements using this unrest to justify opposing anything that smacks of liberal or left reforms, as showing weakness in a time of danger. Lots of powerful people will be urging a crackdown. That will make the Party congress that much less of an opportunity!” Peng Ling shook her head, getting more upset the more she thought about it.
“Maybe,” Ta Shu said, thinking it over. “You know more than I do, of course. Still I think this may make more of an opportunity.”
She shook her head harder. “You don’t know!”
“I know.”
“You don’t know!”
“That’s what I meant,” he said wearily. “I know that I don’t know. You know the situation better. But you are inside it. Right at its center. You might even become the next president, isn’t that right?”
“Don’t say that,” she said, glancing at her aides, who were downstairs and seemed well out of earshot.
“No words, just hopes. My point is, when you are inside something, you can see only parts of it. No one can see all of it. So, I see it from the outside.”
She sipped and thought about it. “I don’t know how much that’s worth. But you can help me. If you were to go to the moon again, you could help to control this young firebrand, and you might also be helpful in dealing with the Americans there. They’ve got their own problems right now, they’re falling apart, and that’s impacting us here. Have you heard what’s happening there?”
“No.”
“It’s kind of like here. The withouts and the yo
ung people have joined together into something called a householders’ union, and now they’re all withdrawing whatever they have in the banks and converting their savings to a cryptocurrency called carboncoin. Basically they’ve started a political run on the banks, and the banks are so overleveraged that they’ve had to close. And that’s caused a general panic. It looks like their federal government will soon nationalize their banks to stabilize their economy.”
“So they’ll become more like us.”
“Sort of. So that may be a good thing, if it works. Because their economy is our economy, and if they could control theirs better, we would benefit. But there’s a pushback to that from their right wing, just like here. As part of that, there are elements of American military and intelligence agencies trying to insert themselves into their moon program, and now they’re seeing our troubles here, and will try even harder. The military here is trying the same things. You have friends there among the Americans, so you could be a go-between.”
“I would be happy to do that,” Ta Shu said. “And I wasn’t done up there anyway.”
“Good. You can go there in Fang Fei’s system again. I don’t know how much I can trust our space agencies right now. For sure the news of you going back up there could spread fast, and my enemies might try to stop you. Fang Fei will be safer for you. He’s been helping me quite a bit lately.”
“That’s good. I’ll do it.”
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