Xin frowned. Something in the way he was standing displeased him. He took a step backwards until he was positioned exactly between two joists, the tips of his shoes at equal distance from where the floor bordered the window.
There, that was better.
Pudong
‘I’ve known Yoyo since the day she was born,’ said Tu. ‘She was just like any normal teenager while she was growing up, her brain full of romantic ideas. Then she experienced something that changed her. Nothing spectacular, but I think it was one of those crossroads in life when you decide who you’re going to be. Have you heard of Mian Mian?’
‘The author?’
‘Yes, that’s the one.’
Jericho thought for a moment. ‘It must be an eternity since I read one of her books. She was a figurehead of the scene, right? Quite popular in Europe. I remember being amazed that she made it past the censorship.’
‘Oh, her books were banned for a long time! But by now she can do whatever she wants. When Shanghai declared itself to be the nightlife and party capital, she represented the area of conflict between glamour and the gutter, because she knew and could speak convincingly about both. Today, she’s a kind of patron saint of the local art scene. In her mid-fifties, established, even the Party uses her as a figurehead. In the summer of 2016 she gave a reading from her new novel, in Guan Di in Fuxing Park shortly before it was torn down, and Yoyo went along. Afterwards, she had the chance to speak with Mian Mian, and they ended up doing a crawl around the clubs and galleries which lasted many hours. After that, it was like she was intoxicated. You have to appreciate the symbolic coincidence, you see. Mian Mian started writing when she was sixteen, as an immediate consequence of her best friend committing suicide, and Yoyo had just turned sixteen.’
‘So she decided to become a writer.’
‘She decided to change the world. To some extent, it was romantically motivated, but she also had an admirably clear take on reality. At around that time my own star was beginning to rise. I knew Chen Hongbing from the nineties and liked him a great deal. He entrusted his daughter to me because he believed she could learn from me. Yoyo had always been very fond of the virtual world; she practically lived on the internet. She was particularly interested in the vanishing dividing lines between the actual world and the artificial one. In 2018 I was elected onto the board of Dao IT, and Yoyo was just getting to grips with her studies at the time. Chen supported her as much as he could, but she placed a lot of importance on earning her own money. When she heard I was taking over the department for Virtual Environments, she pestered me to find a job for her there.’
‘What did she study anyway?’
‘Journalism, politics and psychology. The first to learn how to write, the second to know what to write about, and psychology—’
‘To understand her father.’
‘She wouldn’t put it quite like that. The way she sees it, China is like a patient in constant danger of succumbing to insanity. So she looks for diagnoses for our diseased society. And that, of course, is where Chen Hongbing comes into the picture.’
‘She got her tools from you,’ ruminated Jericho.
‘Tools?’
‘Of course. When did you found Tu Technologies?’
‘2020.’
‘And Yoyo was there from the start?’
‘Of course.’ Tu’s expression seemed to clear. ‘Ah, I see.’
‘She’s been looking over your shoulder for years. You develop programs for everything under the sun.’
‘I already know what role we play in the Guardians, unintentionally of course! But beyond that I can assure you that none of my people would ever dream of technologically arming a dissident.’
‘Chen mentioned that she had already been arrested several times.’
‘It was actually only during her studies that she realised the true extent to which the authorities censor the internet. For someone who views the net as their natural habitat, closed doors can be incredibly frustrating.’
‘So she encountered the Diamond Shield.’
Anyone who tried to accelerate on the Chinese data highway soon found themselves up against virtual roadblocks. At the beginning of the millennium, fearing that the new medium could illuminate explosive topics, the Party had developed a highly armed defence program for net censorship, the Golden Shield, followed in 2020 by the Diamond Shield. With its help, an Internet Police force of over 150,000 rummaged their way though chat-rooms, blogs and forums. While the Golden Shield had been like a tracker dog, snuffling through the most far-flung corners of the web for terms like Tiananmen Massacre, Tibet, student revolts, freedom and human rights, the Diamond Shield was also able to recognise, to a certain extent, contextual meaning in the texts. This was the Party’s reaction to the so-called Bodyguard Programs. Titanium Mouse, for example, had figured out after her release how to put critical texts on the net which didn’t contain a single word that could be pounced on by the Golden Shield. To do this, she made use of a Bodyguard Program which rapped her on the knuckles, so to speak, while she was typing – if she used any incriminating terms, the Bodyguard would delete them, thus protecting her from herself. As a result the Diamond Shield paid less attention to keywords and instead assessed whole texts, connecting sayings and observations, inspecting the entries for double meanings and coding, and then raised the alarm if subversion was suspected.
Ironically, it was thanks to this very Cerberus that epoch-making advances were made in the hacker scene, enabling dissidents to unleash the maximum criticism with the minimum of risk. Of course, the Diamond Shield also blocked search engines and websites of foreign news agencies. The whole world had experienced the assassination of Kim Jong Un and the collapse of North Korea, but in the Chinese net none of it had ever happened. The bloody uprising against the junta in Burma might have taken place on Planet Earth, but not on Planet China. Anyone who tried to bring up the sites of Reuters or CNN could be sure of reprisal. To the same extent that the Wall of China was crumbling, the wall the Diamond Shield had erected around the country became stronger by the day, and yet so did the authorities’ fear. It wasn’t just the community of Chinese hackers who seemed to have sworn a solemn oath to shatter the Diamond Wall into a thousand pieces, but activists all around the world were working away on it too, some in the offices of European, Indian and American companies, Secret Services and government bases. The world was caught up in a cyber war, and, as the foremost aggressor, China was the key target for attack.
‘Compared with what was going on with hackers,’ explained Tu, ‘inside China and outside, Yoyo’s first steps in the net were kids’ stuff. With her big, indignantly wide eyes, she hit out at censorship and signed her name underneath in bold. She pleaded for freedom of opinion and demanded access to the inventories of information provided by Google, Alta Vista and so on. She entered into dialogue with like-minded people who thought chat-rooms could be barricaded against unwanted intruders just as easily as broom cupboards.’
‘Was she really that naïve?’
‘To start with, yes. It’s obvious that she wanted to impress Hongbing. In all seriousness, she really thought she was acting in accordance with his wishes. That he would be proud of his little dissident. But Hongbing was horrified.’
‘He tried to stop her from doing it.’
‘Yoyo was completely dumbfounded. She just couldn’t understand it. Chen became stubborn, and I tell you, he can be as stubborn as a mule! The more Yoyo pushed him to justify his negative reaction, the more he dug his heels in. She argued. She screamed. She cried. But he still wouldn’t talk to her. She realised he was worried for her of course, but it wasn’t like she’d called for the government to be overthrown, she’d just grumbled a bit.’
‘And so she confided in you.’
‘She said she thought her father was just a coward. I certainly didn’t let her get away with that one easily. I explained that I understood Hongbing’s motivations better than she did, which made her bi
tter at first. Naturally, she wanted to know why Hongbing didn’t trust his own daughter. I told her that his silence had nothing to do with lack of trust, but was related to something private. Do you have children, Owen?’
‘No.’
‘Well, they’re little emperors!’
Little Emperors. Jericho stiffened. What an idiot! It was only a few hours since he’d stopped being tormented by the images of that cellar in Shenzhen, and now Tu was starting on about little emperors.
‘They’re just as wonderful as they are demanding,’ Tu continued. ‘Yoyo too. Anyway, I made it clear to her that her father had a right to his own life, and that the mere occasion of her birth didn’t give her the right to trespass into the secret palaces of his soul, as it were. Children don’t understand that. They think their parents are just there to provide a service, existing only to look after them, useful at first, then dumb and ultimately just embarrassing. She defended herself by saying that Hongbing started all of their arguments, that he was trying to control her life, and in that, unfortunately, she was right. Hongbing should have explained to her what it was that had angered him so much.’
‘But he didn’t. So? Did you?’
‘He would never allow me to speak to Yoyo about that. Nor to anyone else, for that matter! So I tried to build a bridge between them. Let her know that her father had once met with a great injustice, and that no one suffered more from his silence than he himself. I asked her to be patient with him. With time, Yoyo began to respect my view, and she became very thoughtful. From that point on she confided in me regularly, which was an honour, although not one I would have actively sought out.’
‘And Hongbing became jealous.’
Tu laughed softly, a strange, sad laugh.
‘He would never admit it. The bond between him and me goes deep, Owen. But of course he didn’t like it. It was inevitable that it would complicate things. Yoyo decided to intensify her tone on the net, to test the authorities’ sensitivity threshold. But then again, she was only writing about everyday things: the scene, music, films and travel, and she also wrote poems and short stories. I don’t think she was that clear about what she wanted to be: a serious journalist, a dissident or just another Shanghai Baby.’
‘Shanghai Baby – wasn’t that a book by—’
‘Mian Mian.’ Tu nodded. ‘At the beginning of the millennium that’s what people called young Shanghai writers. The term has gone out of fashion by now. Well, you’ve seen Yoyo. She made a name for herself in artists’ circles, attracted the interest of the intellectuals, so did that make her an author?’ Tu shook his head. ‘She never wrote one good novel. And yet I would trust her to single-handedly get to the bottom of the death of John F. Kennedy. She’s a brilliant researcher, excellent on the offensive. The censors picked up on that a long time ago. And Hongbing knows it too. That’s why he’s so worried, because Yoyo is someone others follow. She has charisma, she’s believable. All dangerous qualities in the eyes of the Party.’
‘When did she first go on their records?’
‘To start with, nothing happened. The authorities bided their time. Yoyo was practically part of the furniture at my company; she showed a strong interest in holography and lent a hand in the development of some really fun programs, and the Party can’t cope with fun. They just don’t know what to make of it. It unsettles them that the Chinese are starting to value fun for the first time in their cultural development.’
‘Aristotle wrote a book about laughter,’ said Jericho. ‘Did you know that?’
‘I know my Confucius better.’
‘No book ever caused more annoyance to the Church than this one did. They said that he who laughs, laughs also about God, the Pope and the entire clerical apparatus of power.’
‘Or the Party. That’s true, there are some parallels. On the other hand, anyone who’s having fun is less angry and less political. For that reason the Party is on board with fun again, and Yoyo really is a fun-loving character. After a while she shifted her energies to singing and started one of these Mando-prog bands that are springing up everywhere. If Yoyo’s not there, there is no party! If you’re out and about in the scene, it’s very difficult to avoid her. Perhaps back then they thought: The more fun the girl has, the less there’ll be to fear from her. I’m sure that, had they left her in peace, it might even have worked.’
Tu pulled a once-white handkerchief from the depths of his trousers and wiped the sweat from his brow.
‘But then suddenly, one morning five years ago, all of her blogs were blocked and all entries of her name erased from the net. She was arrested that same day and taken to a police station, where they left her to stew. They accused her of being a threat to the security of the State and of having goaded the citizens into subversion. She spent a month there before Hongbing even knew where they were holding her. He nearly lost his mind! The whole thing was fatefully reminiscent of the Titanium Mouse case. No charge, no trial, no verdict, nothing. Even Yoyo herself didn’t know what she was supposed to have done. She was banged up in a cell with two junkies and a woman who had stabbed her husband. The policemen were friendly to her. In the end they told her why she was there. She was alleged to have shown her support for some rock musician, a friend of hers who was in prison for some impudence or other. It was laughable. According to the constitution, the State prosecutor has six weeks to decide whether to go to trial or release someone. In the end they dropped the case due to lack of evidence, Yoyo received a warning and they let her go home.’
‘I guess it goes without saying that Hongbing forbade her to make any more critical comments on the net,’ Jericho surmised.
‘And achieved exactly the opposite. Which means she acted as innocent as a lamb at first, wrote a few articles for internet magazines, even for Party organs. After a few weeks she stumbled across a case about the dumping of illegal toxic waste in the West Lake. A chemical company near Hangzhou, at the time still under State ownership, had carted over their waste and buried it in the lake, and as a result local residents lost their hair and even worse. The director of the company—’
‘—was a cousin of the Minister for Employment and Social Security,’ Jericho blurted out. ‘Of course! Yoyo knew that, and that’s why she wrote about it.’
Tu stared at him in amazement.
‘How do you know that?’
‘I’ve finally remembered where I know Yoyo’s name from!’ He relished the moment as his brain lifted the blockade and released the memory. ‘I never saw a picture of her. But I remember the toxic waste scandal. It was all over the net back then, illegal dumping. They told her she was mistaken. Yoyo told them where they could stick it, and was promptly arrested.’
‘Once Yoyo dug her feet in, it was just a matter of hours before all her entries in the net were erased again. The security police turned up at her door that same evening, and she found herself back in the cell. Yet, once again, they couldn’t accuse her of anything. Her mistake was getting herself tangled up in the web of corruption. The State prosecution demanded to know what was going on. After all, they’d already investigated her the year before and found nothing, but they were put under pressure and had to charge her against their will.’
‘I remember. She had to go to prison.’
‘It could have been worse. Hongbing has a few contacts, and I have even better ones. So I found Yoyo a lawyer who managed to negotiate her sentence down to six months.’
‘But what did they actually charge her with?’
‘Passing on State secrets, the same as always.’ Tu shrugged and smiled bitterly. ‘The chemical company had entered into a joint venture with a British company, and Yoyo had gone to persuade one of its employees to collect evidence about the cloak-and-dagger operation. That was enough. But it was also enough to attract the media’s attention to the case. China’s journalists aren’t as easily intimidated now as they were back in 2005, or even 2010. When one of their own is in the stocks, the dogs start to howl, and the Party is
divided when it comes to cases of corruption. The story travelled abroad, Reporters Without Borders took up Yoyo’s cause, the British Prime Minister made a few comments in passing during bilateral talks in Beijing. Three months later, Yoyo was released.’
‘And the company director went swimming in the lake, right? I heard he killed himself.’
‘It was probably more like a case of euthanasia,’ smirked Tu. ‘The authorities hadn’t reckoned with being put under so much public pressure. They were forced to call an investigation. I imagine a lot of names came under question, but after the villain went swimming in his own sewage they could hardly ask him, so to be on the safe side the acting director and plant manager were dismissed and the investigations dropped. In 2022, Yoyo resumed her studies. Have you read her name anywhere since then?’
Jericho thought for a moment. ‘Not that I know of.’
‘Exactly. She really started to behave herself, at least when her own name was under the texts. She wrote articles on travel and cultural events, tried to spread the new Chinese culture of “fun”. On the side, though, she acquired a bunch of pseudonyms and started to adopt different styles. She communicated via foreign servers, kicked the system up the backside whenever she could. She was like’ – Tu laughed, spread his arms out and made flapping motions – ‘Batgirl! A scene girl on the outside, but secretly embarking on a revenge mission against torture, corruption, the death penalty, legalised crime, environmental sins, the whole shebang. She demanded democracy, but a Chinese form of democracy! Yoyo didn’t want to follow the Western path; she wanted the hollow, rotting tooth that called itself the Party to be pulled from the country so real values would have a chance. So we wouldn’t be seen as just an economic giant, but also as the representatives of a new humanity.’
‘God protect us from missionaries,’ murmured Jericho.
‘She isn’t a missionary,’ said Tu. ‘She’s searching for identity.’
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