I would do whatever he said because he’d saved me and Miaomiao and our cats and dogs. I also said to myself, “You must never forget that you are a stray that Miaomiao took in, and Miaomiao treats you better than anybody else.”
Wei Guo’s autobiography
I’m Wei Guo, twenty-four years old.
I have not kept a diary for a long time, but today this diary has to be written down as a historical record.
Today, I made a great stride toward my life goal because today I became an official member of the SS Study Group. I feel so proud, because I am its youngest member. The SS Study Group brings together political and business circles. Its formal members include government officials of vice-ministerial rank, army officers of major-general rank, directors of major state-owned enterprises, chairmen of sovereign funds, and leaders of China’s top-100 private businesses, as well as a few professors and institutional heads from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and key universities. In fact, our network of connections extends all the way up to the Heavenly Court.
We are not ivory-tower bookworms. We study political and legal thought and scholarship concerning statecraft, and how to assist the state in governing the nation. Our motto is “perfect wisdom and courage”—we promote a martial spirit, heroism, and the robust qualities of manliness. We constitute a new generation of superior men with a sense of mission. In this age of mediocrity without any sense of honor, we courageously affirm that we are the genuine spiritual aristocracy of China’s Golden Age of Ascendancy.
Of course, not all our members come from revolutionary families—some of our academic members are from commoner or intellectual families—but most do. My grandfather on my mother’s side was a judge of the Republic and I grew up in a big courtyard full of people from political and legal circles. Still, I could be regarded as the one with the least illustrious background in the Group.
Perhaps I should be thankful to Professors X, Y, & Z—especially to Professor X—because they were the ones who nominated me to be a member-in-waiting a year or so ago. Thus, I was finally able to become an official member today. Professor X brags that he’s the one who spotted me first. I let him think so, but in actual fact when I was studying first-year law, I investigated all my professors to see which one had the best future prospects, and which one would go the furthest in the shortest period of time. And I chose Professor X.
I made the right choice, too. Professors X, Y, & Z are the founders of the SS Study Group. Their position is that ideas and power should be united in order to make China stronger. Because they had already mastered the Western and Chinese classics, they were able to attract to the Group those government officials, army officers, and business executives interested in political thinking. X, Y, & Z want to become state tutors, and they believe that within ten years their ideas will control the fate of the nation. All this is in perfect accord with my own ten-year plan.
Of the three, X controls an important scholarly journal, has the widest circle of connections, and is the most popular with the media. He has the biggest mouth, too, and is rumored in the academic world to have a national security background. Y has the highest academic standing, is the leader in his field, serves as dean of a newly established faculty in a key university in the south, and is quite well-known in overseas academic circles. Z lectures to a research class on national security strategy at the People’s Liberation Army’s National Defense University in Beijing. This research class is made up of civil and military leaders and includes provincial officials as well as high-ranking officers.
Z is the more profound individual, farsighted in his views, and he is the one who understands me best. There were two particular initiatives of mine that I reported only to him, and when he didn’t respond at first, I was afraid that I had been mistaken about him and regretted being too impetuous. It was Z, however, who argued in the Selection Committee that they should ignore their rules and allow me to become an official member of the Group even though I hadn’t finished my studies. X also claimed credit for this, telling me that he and Z argued together on my behalf, otherwise I would have had to remain a member-in-waiting for another three to five years.
Youth is too valuable a commodity, so how could I allow myself to be so easily held back by them? I intend to actively accelerate the achievement of my goals. I discovered that Z was the key to my success, because he has a secret relationship with the one person whom every member of the Group calls big brother, Ban Cuntou. Ban Cuntou is a genuine Red aristocrat. On the surface, he is supposed to be an investor in overseas projects, but in point of fact he is intimately connected with all the legitimate and illegitimate activities of the Party, the government, and the military establishment. He is, as we say, able to “communicate with Heaven itself,” and I believe that he will eventually become one of our nation’s heads of state. Everyone in the Group is well connected, but they all exhibit reverence and fear when talking to big brother Ban Cuntou. Big brother Ban Cuntou and Z are the real souls of the Group—although I don’t believe in the soul. Unfortunately, it is not easy to get close to Ban Cuntou, and so far I have not figured out any way to attract his attention. So I’ll just keep working on Z for the time being.
When I was an undergraduate, I already did a lot of running around for X, Y, & Z. They all have different organizations and they control a great many resources. For example, they can allocate funds for research projects to scholars who are willing to be allied with them; they can obtain the support of wealthy foundations to fund high-level academic conferences, support like-minded people, and set up united fronts; they can organize twice-yearly conferences for outstanding graduate students in the humanities, to train the next generation of the academic elite. All expenses paid for. The food and entertainment are superb, but the mentally intensive brainwashing is also terrific; that’s why the conferences have been dubbed the Devil’s Training Camp, or the New Whampoa Academy.
With so many activities, X, Y, & Z naturally have to divide up the work. For example, only Y and Z lecture at the Devil’s Training Camp, while leaving the organizational work to X. X does not appear up front as the organizer. The nominal organizer is Q, because Q is best at shaking things up and at influencing young people, especially passionately enthusiastic new MA students. Q has a very high opinion of himself, and he also aspires to become a state tutor, but X, Y, & Z look down on him. They say his academic qualifications are insufficient, he’s had no scholarly publications, and his position keeps changing. In private they call Q the Pied Piper—like the Pied Piper of Hamelin in the German fairy tale who played the flute so bewitchingly that he enticed all the children away from home. X, Y, & Z are clearly aware that in an intellectual revolution—and what the SS Study Group is promoting is nothing less than an intellectual revolution in which the contemporary Chinese worldview will triumph—there are many roles to be played, and a Pied Piper to lead away the children is indispensable.
The first time I confided in Z about my activities was about the first time I implemented the Group’s concept that politics is the art of distinguishing between the enemy and ourselves. I told him that from my sophomore year on, I’d organized my classmates to systematically refute reactionary discourse on the Internet, and to denounce reactionary Web sites to the authorities. After that, we moved on to simultaneously observing the virtual world and the real world. We would report to the university president and the Communist Party Secretary any professor in our university who was promoting the Western system of values or liberalism in class. Our working model spread like a virus and was soon being copied in many other colleges and universities. This clearly made known my operational abilities and demonstrated that many university students listened to me and even worshipped me—I am the charismatic leader of today’s youth generation.
After Z listened to all this, he didn’t say much, but I knew that he had taken it all in. That’s because not long after that meeting he nonchalantly asked, “Have you attended any of Professor Gong’s lect
ures at your faculty?” I immediately understood what he wanted, and, after making some inquiries, I learned that Gong had openly criticized the politics of the ancient Confucian Gongyang School in his class. I brought together all the students who had taken Gong’s classes and incited them to denounce him to the university president for slandering traditional Chinese culture. They also launched an online petition demanding that a thorough investigation be carried out and that Gong be fired. This process is not yet complete, but we’ve given Gong so much trouble he can hardly take it anymore. I’m quite certain that Z is very satisfied with my performance.
What I didn’t tell Z was that my yearlong denunciation activities have finally been appreciated by the government. First the Internet Monitoring Department of the State Council Information Office and then the Ministry of State Security formally contacted me—this amounts to saying that I am now an official informer for both Public and State Security units. I didn’t tell Z or the other members of the SS Study Group about this either, so that they would not be on their guard with me. When I report to the authorities that I am now an official insider in the SS Study Group, they will certainly have an even higher regard for me.
My second initiative makes an interesting story. Six months ago, some time after I had become a Group member-in-waiting, I went to listen to Z give a public lecture. The topic was “The Role of Love in China’s Present Age of Prosperity.” In it he said, “Today our society is suffused with ‘love’ and the media are repeatedly promoting great love, universal love, and love of all mankind. For a while everybody feels good, their hearts are full of ‘love,’ they experience a feeling of satisfaction and happiness. The entire nation is harmonious, crimes of violence decrease, even domestic violence decreases. Thus, we can see the power of ‘love.’ ”
Every time he used the word “love,” Z made hand gestures indicating quotation marks around it.
When I was just about bored to death and thinking that Z didn’t have anything new to say, near the end of his lecture he softly came out with the following sentence: “Everybody is busy ‘loving,’ so the martial spirit is not on display, there are no enemies, and hatred cannot emerge.” His words hit me like a bolt of lightning. Z is so profound and he has pondered this topic very deeply, I thought.
I remembered that Y once had said, “The vast majority of the people in the world have not received any rigorous philosophical training and they do not possess the intelligence to understand things clearly. We philosophers cannot tell them the truth, otherwise they would attack us just like they executed Socrates. In a public forum, a philosopher can say only what the masses love to hear and cater to them. Nevertheless, a philosopher may utter a few code words, heeding the difference between insiders and outsiders and permitting the insiders, members of his own party, to grasp his true meaning, as in the traditional phrase ‘subtle words carry profound meanings.’ ”
Z and Y are kindred spirits, and so Z was also employing “subtle words to carry his profound meanings.”
He talked about “love” for the sake of the masses, and they thought he was promoting “love,” or that he believed China’s present Golden Age of Ascendancy needed such “love.” But in his entire lecture, Z only described “love,” he didn’t advocate “love.” He discussed only how “love” was influencing the Chinese people during this age of prosperity, but he never said that the Chinese people should “love” more. That one phrase, “the martial spirit is not on display,” was the key; it was a repudiation of all the so-called love that came before it. This phrase was the code meant for people like me to hear, because I know from the SS Study Group that the martial spirit is the virtue that we admire and advocate above all. Z promotes the martial spirit, and if this martial spirit is positive then anything that prevents the martial spirit from being displayed cannot be positive. And just what, according to Z’s lecture, prevented the martial spirit from being displayed? It was “love.”
Someone like me who has received philosophical training and knows how to read between the lines to find the “profound meaning” understood that Z’s “love,” in quotation marks, referred to the previously mentioned great love, universal love, and love for all mankind. In theory, the martial spirit does not necessarily require hatred or enemies, but enemies and hatred can strengthen people’s martial spirit—enemies and hatred are an aphrodisiac for the martial spirit. The real goal of Z’s lecture, his “subtle words carrying profound meanings,” was to negate the idea that people should “love” even their enemies—to refute the kind of so-called universal values of great love and love for all mankind that fail to distinguish between the enemy and ourselves. His lecture even implied that we must identify our enemies and let our hatred rise against them so that our martial spirit can be fully displayed. This I understood.
I knew this was also the ingenious method I could use later to earn Z’s trust. With his strong idea of the difference between inside and outside forces, he will surely make me a close member of his inner circle. I immediately organized six Peking and Tsing-hua University students who already worshipped me into a group of iron-willed loyal braves and began to practice martial arts with them. I feel that university students today are all lacking in courage and the killing spirit. They’ve all been overinfluenced by society’s general mood of love. They’ve all been feminized and sissified and have lost the lofty male spirit of machismo. Sometimes I’m afraid that even I am too loving, too indecisive, and won’t be able to accomplish anything great. I tried my best to stimulate their killing spirit and told them that they must never forget how to hate, must never forget the distinction between the enemy and ourselves. We watched documentary films on the Nanjing Massacre and the Nazi extermination of the Jews, and I encouraged them to imagine how they would systematically massacre the little Japanese devils. Then on one occasion, when we were camped out on maneuvers, I wanted them to kill a couple of stray dogs in order to build up their courage, but they let the bastards get away. I think university students are all good-for-nothing losers.
Finally, one night, I had the chance to put them through their rite of passage.
Every night in my grandmother’s crummy little Wudaokou restaurant, Five Flavors, there is a folk-music performance. It’s a good place for me to keep watch on our young people’s attitudes and thinking. That night all the iron-willed loyal braves were there, but their morale was pretty low and they were frowning into their drinks. Maybe he had had too much to drink, but one of them, from Tsing-hua University, suddenly pointed at a tall young man onstage playing the guitar and said, “Look at that big shit playing the guitar. One look and you know he comes from the countryside.” That Tsing-hua iron-blooded loyal brave also comes from a peasant family, but he hates peasants more than anyone else. He was always saying that peasants are a vulgar social class lower than anybody and nobody should sympathize with them.
I’ve always known that poor people hate other poor people, peasants despise other peasants, and children love to bully other children. “Look at him and his dark skin! He’s disgusting, isn’t he?” said the Tsing-hua student. “The tall guy plays pretty well, though,” said another brave, but another one disagreed with him. “His body language is so crude and his fingers are as thick as rolling pins. And he still wants to play Spanish guitar? Fuck!” “He’s just a fucking peasant!” said the Tsing-hua guy, with anger rising in his voice. All the iron-blooded braves stared at that tall peasant guitar-player in utter disgust. “Maybe tonight we should …” I suddenly thought out loud. They all understood immediately, and one of them said, “Let’s go pick up our weapons.”
We waited outside the restaurant, growing angrier by the minute while that big jerk was still in there drinking and laughing. When he finally came out, we followed him, not knowing exactly how to have a go at him. After a while we came to a bus stop and that dumb prick actually sat down against a wall in a narrow street across from the bus stop and went to sleep. All my crew went after him at once, beating the crap
out of him with their clubs until the big bum couldn’t move even a muscle. I was standing across the street thinking to myself, This is the real thing. Tonight we’re going to beat that fucker to death. But just then a Jeep Cherokee drove up, and everybody scattered.
I hesitated for a long time trying to decide whether or not to tell Z about this action because the result could have been either extremely good or extremely bad. If X knew about it, he might get scared, and Y might even reprimand me, but Z probably would think more highly of me if he knew. I decided to take a gamble and tell Z. I told him that I had been inspired by his “love” lecture. I had understood the true meaning of his subtle words and put them into practice. Hate is absolutely indispensable if we want to accomplish great things. What I made clear, but didn’t actually say, was that I could carry out important missions for him. Z listened in his usual way without any obvious reaction and then just walked away. I didn’t hear anything from him for quite a few days, but fortunately events proved that I had understood Z correctly. Today I was made an official member of the SS Study Group. I had bet on the right horse.
Now I’m twenty-four. When I was twenty-two, I formulated my ten-year plan, and have been fulfilling it step-by-step, but I must not get too self-satisfied. What was Chairman Mao doing when he was thirty years old? He was one of the five members of the Standing Committee of the Chinese Communist Party Politburo. With this in mind, I know that I have to work much harder.
PS: The “SS” in the SS Study Group refers to two Germans (even though one of them was a Jew) whose last names begin with S. The Group started up by studying their ideas on politics, theology, and philosophy, but later on it was no longer of any importance who they were.
PPS: I suffer from one minor annoyance—unfortunately Little Xi is my “mother.” She’s the one uncertain element in the progress of my project. I have to eliminate this uncertainty. If we were still living under Chairman Mao, she would certainly long since have been condemned as a counterrevolutionary element. But our government has grown much too lenient. I asked my superior in the Ministry of State Security to lock her up in a mental hospital for a long time, but he told me not to worry about her. He said everything was under control; and they wanted to let her move around freely to monitor those she came into contact with. I had no choice.
The Fat Years Page 8