Rare Earth

by Paul Mason

  “Is aged eighty four, is, I keep telling you,” Guo scolded. “Her vocabulary is excellent but she is lazy.”

  He brushed crumbs from an antique wooden chair and made Brough sit on it, offering Chun-li a stool to wobble on while he took his own place in a mangy armchair next to an unlit stove.

  The walls were covered in paper from an era in which minor luxuries had been allowed and printing done by hand. Brough’s eyes were drawn to brown photographs, cracked calligraphy scrolls, old books, a bust of Lenin, a film poster from the 1940s, a framed medal, the framed front cover of Time magazine featuring Zhou En-lai.

  “That screen is Qing dynasty,” Guo gestured with a yellow hand. A wooden screen carved with birds and dragons was all that separated the kitchen from what Brough presumed was a bedroom on the other side.

  “These hutongs are about six hundred years old. Of course, when they were built they were open courtyards. We’ve filled them in over the years with these little hovels. Now they’re trying to knock them down. We resist.”

  “Your English is remarkable, have you lived in Britain?”

  “We learned it from gramophone records. In the Korean War I had the chance to confer with some officers from the Royal Marines.”

  “You’re a general.”

  “I was a general in Chinese military intelligence. They retired me on the day of Hu Yao-bang’s funeral. Hu was a good man...”

  “Hu Yao-bang has state funeral during Tiananmen protest in eighty-nine,” Chun-li interjected.

  “Had, a, state funeral,” Guo tutted.

  “Had, a, state funeral. At which General Guo had, a major argument with line of soldiers attempting to keep students apart from party leadership,” Chun-li chipped back.

  “I have made a move since last we met,” Guo interrupted her.

  His eyes directed hers to the wei-qi board on the kitchen table where a collection of small black and white objects - pieces of tarmac, human teeth, tiny dice, nail-heads, tic-tac mints, crockery shards, washers and what seemed like a whole packet of codeine pills - were arranged across the 19x19 grid where the smooth playing stones should have been. White and black seemed to have followed each other up the left hand side of the board but were now each scattering stones at random in the top right. Chun-li’s shoulders drooped as she saw he had launched an audacious raid into the heart of her corner group.

  “You know about Rare Earth?” Brough said.

  “Arabia has oil, China has Rare Earth - so said Deng Xiaoping in 1992. But nobody took him seriously. Guided missiles were in their infancy and electrically powered cars a fantasy. Wind turbines...” he trailed off.

  “Is it China’s strategy to monopolise Rare Earth?”

  “We already do.”

  “Is that wise? Won’t it enrage the West?”

  “Let me play you something,” Guo reached into the drawer of a dilapidated kitchenette and pulled out a compact disc. “Maybe, Miss Cai, you can load it for me?”

  Chun-li slid the disk into a grease-spattered ghetto-blaster next to the stove. She pressed play and a crackly telephone conversation began:

  “Look, old fellow, I don’t mean to sound like some bloody chink-basher but I seriously think they’re up to something with this stuff. Shouldn’t we at least do a feature on it?”

  “Sorry James, everything’s South Atlantic focused at the moment; no space. Appalling downturn in ad revenue. All I can do to keep them from deploying you to Buenos Aires...”

  Guo hit the pause button:

  “Sunday Chronicle stringer, 1982. Very nice chap. Worked it all out. Nobody interested.”

  “That’s a wire-tap?”

  “I still have good contacts. When I heard about your exploits I ordered up the file. It’s entitled: ‘Rare Earth/Beijing Correspondents/1977-2002; there’s a fair bit in French and German. Lots in Russian of course.” He jabbed the track selector. “This one’s in English, 1996:”

  “But jeez, Bill, I mean the story sounds so hard ta tell,” said a rough-edged Chicago voice.

  “It couldn’t be simpler,” said a late-night, drunken South Carolina voice; “The slants are building a world monopoly of this stuff - cay-nt we even get a camera crew out here to film the Tianjin plant? I mean those are American jobs we’re losin’?”

  “Sorry Bud, the boss lost interest soon’s you faxed that Periodic Table stuff - science scares ‘em shitless and anyways Bill Clinton’s dick is the only story in town right now, gotta go, sorry...”

  “There is more,” Guo chuckled. “Man from the Times gets a whiff of the illegal mining; woman from the Washington Post gets a guided tour of the Bayan Obo mine and has cataleptic vision of the future. The editors always have other priorities. I don’t think yours’ are being especially venal. There is thirty years worth of it on this CD - and of course, all the product gathered under the Hu administration, which is current and therefore unavailable.”

  “You swam with Mao?”

  “He swam a lot. I never got close to him - the Yangtze’s a bit unpredictable. A lot of people actually drowned in those swims you know. Mao was excellent at frog stroke.”

  “Do you regret what’s happened to this country?” This was Brough’s standard question to oldsters in post-Communist states.

  “What do you regret Mr. Brough?”

  “The declining quality of bitter and Sheffield Wednesday, the rise of feral youth, casual genocide, Twitter, the push-up bra, Islam getting hijacked by nutters... the list is endless.”

  “You want to know what I regret?” Guo let the question hang in the moist air:

  “Nothing, Mr. Brough. At least three thousand lost their lives after Tiananmen, yet I regret nothing. What we’ve built, since, is a more or less exact re-creation of the late Qing dynasty. Do you know what I am talking about?”

  “I’ve seen The Last Emperor.”

  “We’ve got a giant army that can never go to war because the officers’ commissions are bought and sold by the sons of businessmen and lumpenproletarian hoodlums pay to join as privates. Pay! Consider that. Whole swathes of China are ungoverned: ruled by mobsters and corrupt officials just like under the Qing. At the centre is a walled palace, only it’s not the Forbidden City, it’s the Zhongncmhai, Communist Party HQ. Did you know that yesterday, in central China, three students were killed trying to save a child from drowning, because local fishermen refused to pull them out of the river? They said: there is no established price for pulling a live body out of the river, only a dead one. We have rebuilt the Qing in its entirety.”

  “It seems fragile.”

  “It is fragile, but it will not fall like the Qing for two reasons. First, the Qing were foreigners-Manchurians; the peasants hated them. Our rulers are Han Chinese - only their money is foreign. Secondly, the Qing allowed freedom of speech, and what speech! Did you know we had anarchism here in 1911, we had feminism, homosexuality? We had a literary movement inspired by Ibsen and Mallarme.”

  “So now you’re ruled by a bunch of people who probably think Ibsen is a Swedish sports car. What is it you don’t regret?”

  “In 1949 I was twenty four years old. For the next forty years I saw irrational purges, babies eaten by dogs in village streets, starvation; floods killed millions of people. After 1989 things calmed down.”

  “At the price of what?”

  “You know the famous Zhou En-lai quote about the French revolution? ‘Too soon to tell’? An excellent quotation, don’t you think? I met Zhou. I am inclined to think we may have to reserve judgement on the year 1989, and for some time.”

  “Everywhere else but here it’s been a liberation,” said Brough.

  “Yes, but, if you step back from it you may discern another pattern.” Guo glanced at the clock. He motioned to Chun-li to re-boil the kettle and make tea.

  “What kind of people have come to the fore in the Eastern Europe since 1989? And the West for that matter?”

  General Guo put the question like a Zen koan, the trick implicit in th
e question.

  “The English vernacular is ‘arseholes’,” said Brough.

  “Now this is exactly what happened also in China, despite the non-disintegration of Communist rule. I would imagine that you, with your experience in Russia, Africa, Latin America, are seeing sociological types in China that are completely recognisable.”

  Brough nodded.

  “So maybe there is very little difference between here and there,” Guo shrugged, pouring the tea ‘almost clear’ into miniature bowls.

  “And you don’t regret it?”

  “It goes beyond this. Can you admit that it may be possible that we have entered an era the exact opposite of that which began in 1789? With the storming of the Bastille humanity enters a long swing to the left, during which the masses become the ideal human type; self-sacrifice and freedom become ideals. And maybe what has happened now is not just some 20-year reactionary period. Are you prepared to consider the possibility that 1989 began the era of the, as you put it, ‘arsehole’: the individualist, the egotist, the businessman, the sexual predator, the human being perpetually separated from society by the self-selected soundtrack on their iPod?”

  “Lasting 200 years?”

  “It would certainly balance historical yin with yang...”

  “You’re winding me up!” Brough shuddered.

  Chun-li slurped her tea and Brough copied her. It smelled of freesias but with overtones of antique wood and junk shops.

  “Whole stories will go untold!” Brough leaned toward Guo: “You have probably had your equivalent of the British miners’ strike, Hurricane Katrina, Watergate, the Watts Riots - you know, epoch-defining stories - just in the last ten years, but they go unreported. The story of the Chinese industrial revolution will never be told; people will never know.”

  It seemed like a new thought to both Guo and Chun-li. He continued:

  “If you can buy army commissions you can probably buy degrees?”

  Guo nodded.

  “So you can never win a Nobel Prize. You can never produce a Mozart. Your culture will just stagnate!”

  “CCP will trade Mozart for 9.9% GDP growth,” muttered Chun-li.

  Guo sat silently, staring into historical time, his eyes for a moment glazed.

  “You and I, Mr. Brough, are maybe forty years different in age, yet we both feel out of place in this modern world. You have seen the collapse of British industrial power, the labour movement, the death of deference...”

  “You know a lot about Britain!”

  “I have Wikipedia,” Guo gestured to a battered laptop wedged next to a pile of books.

  “I have seen rationality, dialectical thinking, historical materialism replaced by this pap: Three Represents, Scientific Development. Anybody who has studied the Analects can identify Chinese Marxism simply as re-hashed Confucianism. Inconsequential truths frozen in time, immured to intellectual challenge, a whole new philosophy handed down from the brains of men whose only training was to be civil engineers and secret policemen.”

  “Brough knows nothing about China,” Chun-li’s sleepy brain was almost on automatic. “Analects are a major work by Confucius.”

  “So why don’t you regret? What’s the upside-cellphones for the masses?”

  “First, the rise of the individual. In China, after 1919 we had enough Marxists but not enough human beings with a sense of individual worth. Marxism works where individual life is possible-where cause and effect operate, where there is history and logic.”

  “I have never seen it work,” Brough felt tiredness begin falling on him like snow.

  “Also,” Guo ploughed on, “it is impossible to regret the rise of your own country. For all the dirt at the top this is a clean country, don’t you think Mr. Brough? It has a glitter and haze to it, like Florence under the Medici. Its people peer into the future and see only brightness. Have you ever seen the sunrise in Tiananmen Square?”

  “I’ve never even seen Tiananmen Square. I’ve only been here half a day. I’ll probably have to ship out tomorrow - I mean today.” Brough glanced at the clock. It was 4am, June fourth.

  “Brough recently been sacked by text message,” Chun-li muttered.

  “Then you must see Tiananmen,” said Guo. “You must see the dawn.”

  ~ * ~

  13

  They glided along the empty streets in a black-window Mercedes: General Guo up front with his chauffeur, Chun-li and Brough slumped together amid plush leather in the back. There were groups of uniformed cops at each intersection, who peered reverentially at the car’s number plate and at the access passes glued to the windscreen.

  “Whole of Tiananmen in lockdown. Shoot on sight for Western journalists,” Chun-li was only half joking. She grabbed the chauffeur’s cap and crammed it down on Brough’s head.

  “Where are we actually going?” Brough pulled the peak down over his eyes and sank lower in the seat. She ignored him.

  At Chang’ An Avenue, after a flurry of saluting and the dragging of barriers aside, the Merc edged across ten deserted lanes of tarmac. The Avenue’s visual signature - clusters of globular street-lights interspersed with trees-was already burned into Brough’s memory from the iconic footage of 1989. There were even still the same kind of hooped, white metal fences that the students in 1989 had pulled across the roads for barricades. He’d seen it all in the grainy orange tape-light from twenty years ago. It was all still there in the hissing halogen of today.

  Soon they reached the entrance to a building site. An enormous neo-classical portico was having a postmodernist concrete slab built onto the back of it.

  The night watchman stumbled toward them, T-shirt rolled to his nipples. He beamed as he saw General Guo, raised his eyebrows at Chun-li and frowned at Brough. Guo bantered with him for a few seconds and made him snigger. Chun-li said:

  “Guo telling nightwatchman you are film director Oliver Stone, about to make hagiographical biopic about Hu Jin-tao following cinematic triumph with Fidel.”

  The air became chilly. The leaves on the trees rustled. Guo led them into the gutted shell of a building and up concrete stairs that reminded Brough of Moscow: clean and sparse, built with 1,000-year confidence and designed to withstand the blast of hydrogen bombs. Four floors up they turned onto a long hall whose roof had been removed and replaced by scaffolding, open to the sky.

  “What is this place?” Brough’s whisper echoed along the raw concrete.

  “National Museum of China,” said Chun-li, picking her way across the fire-hoses and power cables. “Closed for refit during major re-appraisal of Chinese history.”

  “I play an advisory role in curating the wei-qi collection. We have a board here from the third century AD,” the General purred.

  He stopped at a ladder and began pulling himself up it, one rung at a time, with Chun-li nattering precautions behind him.

  Now they were on a concrete parapet. Below was Tiananmen Square: unlit, knots of armed police collected at every angle of the concrete vastness. The yellow light filtering into the sky behind them began to give shape to the sculptures; to outline the size and emptiness of everything.

  Brough stared at it all. He had run out of things to think about China, run out of snap judgements to make.

  “It’s a monument to inhumanity,” Guo chuckled, “but Chinese people have convinced themselves it’s beautiful.”

  Chun-li wrapped her arms tight around herself and shivered.

  “I was only nine,” she said.

  They heard the sound of a platoon marching. It was soldiers coming to start the flag-raising ceremony in the dark. Brough spotted a news crew setting up to film it.

  June Fourth, twenty years on, everything quiet. In London it would still be night time. Brough’s report would be about to go on air.

  He glanced at Chun-li. But she was peering, rapt and serene, into the square. General Guo stood at attention, gazing into the morning twilight.

  “Hey mate, welcome to Tiananmen!”

  I
t was Big Wu, fresh as life, hovering right there next to him in mid-air.

  “Where’s Frank?” Brough whispered, with a glance to see if the General and Chun-li had noticed anything. In fact Chun-li was giving Big Wu a nervous wave with just her fingers while the General moved his head in a half-inch bow.

  “Frank’s down there with the rest,” Big Wu gestured with his chin.

  “The rest of what?”

  “The unquiet dead of course!” A tremor of mirth shook Big Wu’s shoulders.

  “You didn’t think we’d let the twentieth anniversary go past without a demonstration did you? They’ve got the place locked down for the living but they can’t keep the restless spirits out. Look!”