by Paul Mason
Where was this outrage coming from, that was boiling up inside Xiao’s guts? He knew how much human scum the market reforms had brought to the surface; he knew the way they talked - he’d listened to enough surveillance tapes. But out of uniform, and invisible to hoodlums, he suddenly felt like a time-traveller.
He remembered coming home from Tibet in the late 1970s. It had felt like time-travel then, too. He had signed up for the PLA and, right there in basic training, they’d made them chant slogans against Deng Xiao-ping. “Criticise Deng and oppose the rehabilitation of right-leaning elements! “-combined with twenty jumping jacks-had been the sergeant’s favourite.
Within a year, he’d been on the Indian border, freezing his bollocks off at a listening post high in the Himalayas, and a sergeant now himself. Chairman Mao’s funeral had come on the radio and Sergeant Xiao had sat on his bunk bed, sobbing uncontrollably. The “Criticise Deng” campaign had reached a peak and then subsided, and everybody had assumed Deng was a goner.
Then one day the unit commander had come into the mess hut, stamped the snow off his boots and nailed a framed photograph of - what the fuck? - Deng Xiao-ping into the breeze block wall, right next to Mao. And he’d coughed politely and said, in a low voice:
“Would anyone like to criticise any excesses within the party leadership?”
Xiao knew what happened to people who’d fallen for this during the Hundred Flowers Campaign, back in the 1950s, so kept shtum. But gradually - when was it, October ‘77 - sometime in 1977 anyway - they’d actually started denouncing Madame Mao on the radio, and by the time Xiao had been demobbed, a year later, and turned up at Tang Lu in his double-thick snow fatigues and a fur hat in the middle of summer, ribs skinnier than a mountain goat-it was already the Deng Xiao-ping Era.
There’d been a small Democracy Wall set up on the corner of Tang Lu Boulevard back then-just where the Deng Xiao-ping statue is now; there’d been underground journals circulating on street corners; sneaky little business types whose fathers had collaborated with the Japs had gotten themselves party cards.
Xiao had sensed what was happening: a historic shift, not forwards but backwards, towards order and respect. Around the same time, people had quietly begun to burn ancestor money and to buy fireworks again, read horoscopes, perform qi-gong on the streets, even if back then you had to struggle to find your qi amid the smog and squalor.
Xiao, braced against the pitch and roll of the coach along the desert road, felt now like he’d felt then: the shock of new details, the guilty realisation that things are going on that should not be-but nobody cares. The feeling that the world has changed and you have not.
“You come on these buses regular?” Fat Slob nudged Xiao in the ribs.
“No way,” Xiao said. “Crawling with coppers these stations, always on the take, and - look at it! - filthy. Shunted my SUV and I’ve got this urgent deal to do in Ordos, want a fag?”
“Nah,” Fat Slob said, “Trying to cut down. What business you in?”
“Bit o’ this, bit o’that. Lanthanum one day, Neodymium the next, know what I mean? Can’t afford to get too specialist. These cunts,” Xiao lowered his voice, surprising himself with his own fluency in the underworld argot; “these cunts in Ordos are world famous for ripping people off.”
“Hey, you cheeky twat,” Fat Slob chucked Xiao under the chin with a friendly fist, “I am one of the biggest cunts in Ordos and I’ve never ripped anybody off, hey fellas?” He swivelled in his seat. “This guy’s in the Fifty Seven business!” Dropping his own voice, he leant his head towards Xiao’s; “Lots of Fifty Seven on the market right now, mate; Sixty too, if you know who to talk to.”
Xiao summoned a stone-like look of indifference copied from Jean-Paul Belmondo and lit a 555.
“I do, mate, I do.”
~ * ~
4
By this time the Cancer Village Commune had been clearly visible from space for three days.
For twenty-four hours it was even there on Google Earth, until the People’s Internet Police hacked into the servers at Mountain View and replaced the relevant tile with an exact image of how things had been the day before, and indeed how they would be again, once the Commune was crushed. (“Those antisocial elements are messing with one of the world’s most reliable information tools,” the Internet Police commander fumed, “We’re actually doing Sergey and Larry a favour!”)
It had all started with Leon Wu’s middle finger. Scrawny kid with a wide smile, he’d been caught one night fumbling around inside the pants of the day-shift foreman’s seventeen-year-old daughter. As Leon Wu himself was only fifteen, his dad, Big Wu, thought this was a brilliant achievement and shouted so at the security guards, who’d locked Leon Wu inside the company’s piss-fumed cells. If anybody should be charged with molestation, it was the girl herself, Big Wu reasoned.
By then Leon Wu had scrawled two Chinese characters on the wall of the cell with a penknife the guards always left there, just in case somebody felt like committing suicide. One, shaped like a man without a head, said “six”; the other, a box with two panda eyes at the top corners, stood for “four”. Leon Wu had seen a lot of hip-hop graffiti on the Internet and developed a Basquiat-influenced style; the guards had a profoundly conservative attitude to calligraphy. That plus the fact that Six-Four is the symbol for June Fourth, date of the Tiananmen Square massacre, forced the guards to call in the management. While waiting for them to arrive, they beat Leon Wu around the head until blood ran from his ears and nose, and stamped on his fingers.
Shortly afterwards, Big Wu arrived with a delegation of smelters, who freed Leon from the cells using iron crowbars and the weight of numbers.
Then Frank “Lloyd” Wu, who’d led the architecture students to Tiananmen Square back in ‘89, and spent the last twenty years as a smelter’s mate in Cancer Village in recompense, decided to make a point.
He commandeered a Komatsu super-dozer, tracks twice as high as a man and shovel wider than a house, and headed into the barren plateau surrounding the village. Within three hours he had managed to etch the characters “June Fourth” into the desert: each character a kilometre across; each stroke waist-deep into the earth, the whole pictogram perfectly aligned north-south. Frank had bickered constantly with his cousin, Middle Wu, who was operating the GPS and had tried to insist on making the letters in the correct calligraphic stroke order.
They’d finished around dusk and headed for the social club to gently take the piss out of Leon, and his now-slightly-crushed middle finger, over a beer.
It was only when two members of the State Security Police arrived at the smelting plant towards lunchtime the next day that the Cancer Village management office knew anything about Frank’s stunt. The cops had zoomed here in their Honda, stirring up clouds of dust, because of a face-melting phone call from Beijing and a grainy fax showing the June Fourth characters mysteriously apparent on a satellite image, right next to Cancer River, a meandering seasonal tributary to the Yellow River, about thirty kilometres east of Ordos.
As they led the cops into the plant to arrest Big and Frank, the managers were shaking with fear. Big was in favour of going quietly. He’d been in the workers’ tent at Tiananmen in ‘89 and felt, around this time of year, just lucky to be alive: he’d spent one out of every three Tiananmen anniversaries in preventive detention anyway. But Frank stood his ground and gave the cops a mouthful of abuse in the form of an anti-bureaucratic Dadaist poem he’d been composing in his head.
The morning shift, who’d viewed all this as comedy up to now, through a haze of weak beer, went crazy when one of the security cops struck Frank across the face.
“What are you going to do? Jail us? What does it look like here? Freedom?” Frank gestured at the iron landscape of the smelting shed, only the sunlight filtering through cracks in the roof to remind them they were not in hell. Then he ripped his shirt open to display the colostomy bag attached to his side.
“Yeah, Pig! What you gonna do?
Kill us?” It was Middle Wu. He’d done five years in a penal factory after Tiananmen, before finding his way back to Cancer Village; “Feel free! My oesophageal tissue looks like black-bean sauce! You will be doing me a favour.”
“Yeah,” a decrepit iron-puddler removed his hard hat and the bandanna beneath it; “Look at this!” Chemotherapy had turned the few last hairs on his scalp into fluffy wisps.
“You want blood?” a hunch-backed forklift-driver spat, “Take mine. I get a body-full at the clinic every week until the myeloma goes into remission!”
To spare the State Security Police any further embarrassment, the management deployed the security guards. But the guards in Cancer Village have lungs that whistle and bones that are fragile; they move better - like many of the workforce - if they’ve been hooked up to a saline-morphine drip for a couple of hours.
The workers hurled pig-iron pellets at the guards; the guards tasered a couple of workers, whacked a few more with side-handled truncheons, and it was petering out to a draw when a crowd of women wearing protective gloves broke into the factory and pelted the guards with pork dumplings, microwaved to explode like napalm. The guards, the management and the secret police left the village in a convoy of blue-plate Hondas, chased by a pack of melanoma-mottled dogs.
That’s how Leon Wu, with his middle finger, had summoned the Cancer Village Commune into existence. They’d held a mass meeting to formulate demands. It had started out from specifics like conditions in the plant, moved in a syndicalist direction -Frank and Big had been clandestinely reading Antonio Gramsci - and then veered, finally and inevitably, to the place everybody knew it would.
“Immediate rehabilitation for those convicted after the massacre of June Fourth 1989,” said the email they sent to the All-China Federation of Trade Unions. “Plus immediate and free provision of healthcare facilities for those suffering from pollution-related cancers due to the lax standards and *unofficial production activities* at the Glorious Dawn Metallurgy Plant, Cancer Village, Cancer River County.”
Frank reminded the meeting that it was the 138th anniversary of the defeat of the Paris Commune, so they voted to change the name from ‘strike committee’ to ‘Commune’ in its honour. At the same time, they wired the cartel, informing them of an immediate hike in the spot price of all Rare Earth Oxides and assuring them that production targets would be maintained.
At this point there had been a deep-background interchange between Beijing and the State Department, which insisted that Washington had neither knowledge of, nor intent to support, rebellions in Inner Mongolia but - reminding interlocutors of the proximity of the twentieth anniversary of unfortunate events in Beijing - urging leniency in the punishment of any dissent.
By the time Brough watched the Snow Leopards take up their attack position in the desert, using the downstroke of the character “June” as a makeshift trench, the Cancer Village Commune was waking up to its third day. The workers had draped a red banner over the perimeter fence, painted with white letters.
“What’s that banner say?” Brough asked.
Miss Lai peered at it for a moment and scowled.
“Some bad Chinese grammar written by gangsters: ‘First Winter, then Spring.’”
“What does it mean?”
“Dunno. Maybe some kind of veiled threat to adjust the spot price of Rare Earth for seasonal demand. These people are freakin’ illiterates y’know, and gangsters always speak in a kind of code.”
~ * ~
5
After Miss Chi had informed them they were surrounded, and sent a ten-minute speech about social order echoing across the desert, the workers brought up their own stereo system, which began blasting out a scratchy medley of communist marching tunes.
“There’s no persuading ‘em,” Chi shrugged, handing the microphone to a subordinate, “we’ll have to take that fence first and then...”
“Can I have my Blackberry back?” Brough interrupted.
“Yeah sure, so you can post a video on Youtube showing riots in China the week of the twentieth anniversary!”
Her lip curled with Elvis-like disdain.
“I’ll be a witness anyway. If I ever get out of here I can write about it. So why not gimme the mobile back so I can shoot it? Pictures can’t lie. I can go away and write any kind of biased crap about China but the shots won’t lie.”
“That’s just it, Mister Brough,” Chi sneered. “We don’t care about the written word anymore. You write it, we get twenty Chinese netizens denounce you as a fascist, fifty Cantonese émigrés in Los Angeles denounce them as fuckin’ net cops, the BBC runs an online poll in which both sides total about nine hundred and ninety-nine each, for and against. The written truth is relative. Write what the fuck you like.”
She stamped off.
“Don’t be hard on her,” Lai grabbed his arm; “we’re tooling down for this one and Minimum Use Of Force is not really Chi’s forte.”
Brough had been wondering about the sudden disappearance of carbines and the sudden appearance of civil unrest hardware.
“That plant looks massive,” Brough stared at the smokestacks and the ramshackle network of conveyor belts, concrete sheds, furnace pipes towering above the fenceline. “How many d’you think you’re up against?”
“About two thousand if you include the women and kids. The hard core’s the problem. Remove the hard core of gangsters and miscreants, and the whole social-order problem goes away?”
Brough looked at her, quizzically.
“These guys are impeding the operation of market forces. Market forces work properly where man behaves as a rational economic being. These guys are just being irrational.”
“Are you absolutely sure a bunch of fashion models can...” he began, but she’d stood up, binoculars scanning the skyline of a ridge beyond the plant.
“You heard o’ Sun Tzu? Sun Tzu says generally, in battle, use the ordinary force to engage the enemy, the extraordinary force to win?”
He’d heard so much Sun Tzu bullshit thrown around in military drinking joints that he knew large chunks of The Art of War by heart.
“Yeah, well,” Lai handed him the binoculars, “over there, to the right on that ridge, you see ‘em?”
There was a dust-cloud and a swarm of beetle-black motorbikes buzzing and scrambling down the uneven slope. On each bike there was a rider and a passenger, the latter toting what looked like scaffolding bars. There were about a hundred of them, clad in leather, black helmets, goggles and checked bandannas.
“That’s the extraordinary force,” Lai’s voice rose triumphantly.
“You’ve got Hell’s Angels here?”
“China’s Sorrow, Baotou Chapter. Now we’ll see what happens to people who think they can manipulate the spot price for anti-social aims!”
~ * ~
6
The Snow Leopards took the perimeter fence after about an hour, ripping down the banners and trashing a couple of makeshift barricades as they advanced beneath a testudo of aluminium riot shields and a creeping barrage of baton rounds.
He’d filmed a female unit of the FARC once, in the jungle, and made a documentary about a training course for female ratings in the Royal Navy. But there was none of that “we are women” thing going on here. Their body language became like that of tall, studious boys and - he had to stop himself thinking - robotic.
But the hardcore barricading had been done inside the perimeter of Cancer Village: rubble-filled skips, overturned vehicles, steel billets, smelting slag, iron spikes, broken crockery, empty VHS cases and a large amount of office furniture had been piled up, welded, melted and soldered, barring all ways into the plant and leaving the Snow Leopards in control of only the car park and the basketball court, which now looked like a medieval free-fire zone.
As the Leopards’ advance paused, on the other side of the plant Brough could hear the sound of glass smashing and the chirruping of light voices raised in anger - the key signature of a Chinese riot. The Hell�
��s Angels were putting in the main attack.
After a minute’s rest the Leopards began forming up to assault the next line of defences but now, behind the barricades, which were devoid of human life, Brough spotted a mobile crane moving jerkily around as if driven by an amateur. Eventually it stopped and began hoisting what looked like a hookful of used bike leathers, except for two limp, pink heads dangling sideways out of the tops of them. The extraordinary force had run into trouble.