Beijing Smog

by Ian Williams

  – 5 –

  @Beijing_smog

  There were definitely ships on the river below because he could hear their horns, some short and sharp, others a deep-throated growl. And it seemed to Anthony Morgan that they were all sending the same shrill message to clear out of the way as they steamed blindly into the gloom.

  His luxury apartment was on the twenty-fifth floor of a block called the Lucky Bund View, on the banks of the Huangpu River, in Shanghai’s financial district. His floor-to-ceiling windows looked out across the river to the city’s historic Bund, the riverfront sweep of grand colonial era buildings that had been the financial heart of old Shanghai. But that morning it didn’t feel particularly lucky, and as for the view, the river was lost in the smog, and he could barely make out the closest of his towering neighbours.

  He’d moved from Beijing to Shanghai because this was a better base for his business, closer to his clients, but also to escape the smog. But the smog had followed him there.

  His was one of the most prestigious addresses in the city, largely because of that view, a US$13,000-a-month view, a deal-making view, and worth every cent as far as Morgan was concerned. The windows were the focal point of the dinners and receptions he hosted, where he would tell his guests about how that view represented the past and the future of this great city. Indeed, of China. And how every ship along that magnificent river, that throbbing commercial artery, was a building block.

  “You can’t afford not to be part of it,” he’d say, as servers in pristine white jackets refilled champagne glasses. He’d tell his guests how in just twenty-five years the very spot where they were standing, the district of Pudong, had been transformed from swampy farmland to a forest of skyscrapers, on track to become the world’s leading financial centre. And his guests would stand there nodding, enthralled by that view, and charmed by Cindy Wu, his Chinese wife and business partner, looking elegant in a long shimmering black dress, jewellery glistening around her neck.

  Together they ran the China office of MacMaster and Brown, a company with Scottish roots, which had been doing business in China for 135 years. The company started as Hong Kong-based traders, but with the opening of the country had evolved into a sprawling organisation with offices in London, New York, Hong Kong and Tokyo, and offering what its glossy brochures described as “bespoke business and investment services”.

  After thirty years in China, Morgan liked to think of himself as a guiding hand for businesses. And whether it was identifying partners, finding factories for outsourcing production, or providing more discreet financial advice, he was regarded as the finest of Old China Hands.

  Publicly, he was evangelical about the China Miracle, and could reel off the statistics without missing a beat: nearly 700 million people pulled out of poverty in two decades; average annual incomes up from US$200 to US$6,000 in just twenty-five years; the largest number of billionaires in the world. Where else had that ever been achieved in such a short period? And whether it be steel, platinum, cars, champagne or movies, if China wasn’t already the world’s biggest market it soon would be. He’d tell his dinner guests again, “China is the future. You need to be part of it.”

  Most of all, he and his wife were regarded as the best corporate investigators in the business. He had the insight and experience and she had the connections.

  That’s what had brought Bud to them, and Bud had a lot of money to spend. His company was one of the largest employers in Montgomery, Alabama, his products ranging from garden gnomes to light fittings. His production processes were state-of-the-art, and now he was looking to shift a good chunk of that production to China. Morgan and his wife had given him the full Lucky Bund View treatment. They’d found him a partner, but the partner had disappeared and was now rumoured to be caught up in a corruption investigation.

  Bud had every right to be annoyed. He was under pressure at home, facing a lot of hysteria about jobs lost to China. But Morgan felt he was now on top of the Bud problem. The trip to Beijing had gone well. He’d calmed the guy down. They’d take things a step at a time, starting with the gnomes at a factory down south that Morgan trusted well.

  Bud was now busy seeing the sights with his wife in Beijing, chauffeured around in a MacMaster and Brown limo. Morgan had instructed the driver to give regular updates and to pay for everything. And the driver said Bud seemed happy enough, though he shouted a lot. Morgan said Bud always spoke like that.

  He would give Bud the five-star treatment in Shanghai too.

  Morgan walked across his vast dining room, past a heavy teak dining table so big that on smoggy days when he didn’t want to go outside he’d strap on a pedometer and walk round and round it, use its perimeter as an exercise track. He reached a rosewood drinks cabinet with shiny gold handles, which he opened, and poured himself a large Jack Daniels. He closed the cabinet, but then decided the large Jack Daniels wasn’t large enough, and opened it again for an extra splash.

  Several US$1,000 air purifiers hummed quietly but reassuringly in the background, guaranteed, so the American manufacturer claimed, to filter out even the tiniest of toxic particles.

  He lifted a remote from the dining table and turned on his television, a 52-inch, state-of-the-art, ultra-thin Panasonic, which dominated one wall in an adjoining lounge area. He caught the top of the news, CNN leading with the Shanghai smog, the anchor saying that airports and schools were closed, hospital emergency wards overrun with children and the elderly with breathing problems.

  The anchor began to interview a Chinese environmentalist, who was saying something about empty government promises, but never finished because the censors cut the signal and the screen went black.

  Morgan could never understand why they did that. CNN and the BBC, the big news channels, weren’t available outside diplomatic compounds and hotels. Cutting the signal whenever it got interesting about China just irritated people. But then he guessed that might just be the point, so as you didn’t forget who was in charge.

  He quickly flicked through other channels, looking for CNBC, the business network. The censors didn’t have time for the business stuff, not watching too closely, finding it boring maybe, and he wanted to catch a re-run of a chat show he’d been part of, doing what he did best: being reassuring and sounding positive about China’s future.

  By the time he found it, the show had reached the bit where he was telling the anchor how it was important not to overreact to the smog, that there were of course environmental challenges, which the Government understood. And that for investors there would be many opportunities in green energy.

  The discussion moved on to the economy, the jittery markets, the anchor interviewing a New York-based analyst who said China’s accumulation of debt was the fastest in history, that it dwarfed the run-up to the 2008 global economic crisis. He said that China had too many empty homes and factories and that when the music stopped the world economy would come tumbling down.

  Then it was Morgan’s turn again, and he said, “There’s certainly a lot of scaremongering out there. This should not blind us to the long-term strength of the Chinese economy and the ability of the Government to deal with the challenges.” He said that although China’s rate of growth was slowing, it was still the envy of the world.

  He thought he sounded reasonable, measured. The sort of responses that had made him a regular on the business chat shows. And he thought he looked good. A new pair of glasses with tortoiseshell frames, a little designer stubble, the closely cropped hair – at least what was left of it.

  He then sat down at a laptop computer that was open on an antique desk below the window, placing the whisky down beside it. He was putting together a monthly newsletter, the MB China Report, for the 12,000 select subscribers – now including Bud from Alabama – who each paid US$1,700 a year for Morgan’s insights into the Middle Kingdom. He began to write:

  The Chinese economy
and financial system are fundamentally strong. The leadership is committed to reform, to put the economy on a sounder footing. Market volatility is only to be expected.

  He liked that. It was crisp and clear. But he quickly ran out of steam, not sure where to take it next. So he checked his emails, finding a new one from Geraldine MacMaster, the chairman of MacMaster and Brown, and the great-great-granddaughter of its founder.

  She confirmed the date of the company’s annual strategy meeting in Hong Kong, saying she’d be flying in from New York a few days before. She said she was looking forward to hearing his take on the Chinese economy, because she was hearing some pretty scary things, like it was a mess, an accident waiting to happen.

  Morgan emailed her back, saying there was a lot of hysteria about China right now, and he cut and pasted a couple of the more reassuring lines from the MB China Report, saying he’d give a fuller presentation in Hong Kong and that China’s leaders knew what they were doing.

  “The Chinese economy is not about to fall off a cliff!!!” he wrote, sounding confident, emphatic.

  Only he no longer believed it.

  He tapped on an icon on his iPhone, a picture of a badger, and the app opened to show a map with the animated animal, a big stripe on his head, sitting on Shanghai and then burrowing into the ground before popping up in America.

  The app was a VPN, a Virtual Private Network, which gave him an IP address, a digital identity outside China, a disguise, as well as allowing him to access usually blocked sites, like Twitter and Facebook.

  Like the badger, he was tunnelling out of China and beyond the reach of the internet censors.

  In that other world lived Morgan’s alter ego, an anonymous Twitter account under the name of @Beijing_smog. At last count he had 338,439 followers, and he shared with them his private and darker thoughts about the future of China:

  Now China’s financial capital is gasping for breath. Like nuclear winter. They blame weather. What bullshit. Pollution is pollution.

  Then for a while he worked in tandem, jumping between his two worlds. First his newsletter on his laptop:

  Ironically, China’s environmental challenges could provide investors with opportunities in several sectors. There can be no doubt about the Chinese Government’s resolve to tackle the environmental challenges.

  Then back to the phone, tweeting:

  Brief walk outside this morning. Eyes stinging. Hospital emergency rooms reported full. Schools closed. No doubt this toxic air is a killer.

  Then to his laptop again:

  China has embarked on an ambitious multiyear rebalancing of its economy. It’s a positive endeavour that in the long run will be a win-win for everybody.

  And then he was back on @Beijing_smog:

  China miracle is over. Built on shaky foundations. Debt out of control. Leaders hapless. Once motor of world economy, could now bring it down.

  His concentration was broken by another deep and long growl of a ship’s horn, and he thought he made out the distant outline of a dredger sitting impossibly low in the water. A ray of sunlight penetrated the smog, and for a moment it illuminated like a spotlight a row of paintings on his living room wall, colourful characters from Beijing Opera. A large chandelier above his dining table sparkled before the sun disappeared as quickly as it had emerged and a city of twenty-four million people again retreated into silent gloom beneath his windows.

  He picked up a birthday card from his desk. He’d just turned fifty-four. It was from his only son, Robert, fourteen years old and at an elite boarding school in England. It was late, but at least he’d sent one. Cindy Wu had given up a long time ago. Most greetings had arrived by email, the majority from hotel loyalty and frequent flyer programmes.

  Then he picked up a photograph from the top of a Chinese cabinet, a sunset shot from a beach in the Cayman Islands, close to a villa he owned there. There was another on the beach, the three of them, Cindy, Robert and him, taken a couple of years earlier. They looked happy enough, smiling to the camera, but already he and Cindy had been growing apart, and it was shortly after that she’d moved back to Beijing, saying she needed to be closer to her elderly parents. Their relationship was now largely one of business.

  They could still put on a display of the happy couple when they needed to, for Robert or for clients, but that was becoming a harder act too. They’d need to ham it up again for Robert’s next visit to China, fast approaching, which he’d need to discuss with Cindy. Robert was due to stay with her in Beijing first, but they hadn’t discussed plans beyond that. He’d not seen Robert for nearly three months, which he regretted. The boy was growing up fast.

  There were other photographs on the cabinet. Another villa in Phuket, Thailand, the town house in Central London, the ski chalet in Verbier, Switzerland. They were the things that still motivated him. China had been good for them. It had made them rich and it had kept them together, and looking at those photos encouraged him to press on with the MB China Report. But the relentlessly upbeat message was becoming harder to generate.

  He picked up his phone and began to trawl through social media sites on the Chinese version of Twitter. On one he followed, called The Gasping Dragon, he found a video taken by an air passenger of a baggage handler lazily throwing boxes onto a conveyor belt to the aircraft and mostly missing. And another story about a zoo trying to pass off a dog as a lion, which he thought was funny. He shared them both to @Beijing_smog.

  Then he came across another posting on the same site, which took him a while to figure out.

  He thought it was pretty clever. And after a few moments he shared that too.

  “They might as well be aliens,” he said to nobody in particular.

  – 6 –

  The Moment On Time

  Wang Chu waved a teapot at the server, while being chased through a temple by a pack of crazed monkeys that wanted to eat him. The server took the pot out of his left hand, while with his right Wang continued to play the game, working his smartphone, tilting it back and forth and up and down, as he was chased through crumbling doors and around tall pillars until he stumbled over a rock and a monkey sank its teeth into his back.

  That ended the game and he flung his phone onto the table in front of him. Only then, very briefly, did he glance up at the server, who was entering the kitchen, pot in hand, for a refill with hot water.

  “Try the zombies. Awesome,” said Liu Wei.

  “What’s the difference?” Wang said.

  “No real difference. Crazed zombies just make a change from crazed monkeys. They all get to eat you in the end.”

  Wang agreed that was awesome and downloaded the zombies.

  It was mid-morning in The Moment On Time, which called itself a coffee shop, but mostly served tea. Its owner, who called herself Lily, got mad if anybody pointed out the tea thing or tried telling her it should be The Moment In Time. She’d call the place whatever she wanted to call it, and most customers learned quickly that it was best not to get on the wrong side of Lily.

  Wang and his two roommates sat at a table, their table, in the corner of a raised platform near the window and beneath two fading posters. One was for the movie Easy Rider, the other a Cultural Revolution propaganda image of happy workers and soldiers.

  Wang Chu, Liu Wei and Zhang Jun were all computer science students, in their last year at one of Beijing’s most prestigious universities, and The Moment On Time was their home from home. Part classroom, part office and part rest house. Though mostly it was their portal to the online world, somewhere to pass the hours on their smartphones and laptops. Just occasionally they’d order something to drink or a snack, though never often enough for Lily, who patrolled the tables reminding her customers that she ran a coffee shop and not a flophouse.

  The coffee shop was in a busy side street, above a small Haidian clothes store. It was close to a railway
line, and when the smog allowed for it, the coffee shop’s tall windows looked across at the constant flow of packed trains between downtown and this, Beijing’s student heartland.

  There were around twenty wooden tables, and on each was a small lamp, more for effect than any light they provided. Round red lanterns hung from the low ceiling, arranged around two clunky overhead heaters, which were working overtime to keep the temperature bearable.

  Wang decided he’d save the crazed zombies for later and instead began hopping between Twitter-like accounts he followed.

  He shared a picture of a pair of security guards asleep in their chairs at the front door of a bank, and a report about a man who’d pocketed millions of yuan by setting up a fake branch of the China Construction Bank, complete with card readers, passbooks and three teenage girls working at the counter.

  He shared another about an investigator looking for fake goods and collecting fines when he found them. Only the investigator was an imposter.

  “Get this,” he said to Liu, “there’s a story here about a guy hunting fakes who turns out to be a fake.”

  But Liu ignored him. He was sitting at an open laptop computer, updating their online store, adding a range of caps with images from the latest Star Wars movie, which had been a big hit, and removing any last references to the PM2.5 Mega Blocker anti-smog mask, which hadn’t.

  The roommates had decided it was far better for now to stick with what they knew best: knock-off caps, T-shirts and bags. Though they’d yet to make money on any of them.

  Liu Wei was twenty-three, a year older than Wang. He was shorter but broader, with closely cropped hair hidden under a yellow baseball cap with a picture of Daffy Duck on the front. He began browsing other online shops, checking on the competition.