Beijing Smog Page 10

  Police in riot gear were lined up alongside the diggers, and one cop was talking into a loud hailer. It was hard to hear clearly since it kept screeching, but he was telling somebody to come out, that this was his last chance, and threatening to bury him under the rubble.

  Wang assumed they must be talking to the old holdout, the old man still refusing to leave his condemned home, the graffiti man. Moments later the man appeared at the main door of what was left of his block, wearing pyjamas and holding a placard high in the air, defiant.

  The old man began to shout, but was smothered by cops, all over him like hungry animals, pinning him to the ground, and then dragging him towards a police van. But they couldn’t completely subdue him and his angry words cut through the cold morning air.

  “The developers are the criminals! The developers are the criminals!”

  The cops pushed him into the back of the van, stuffing him in like a bag of trash into a garbage truck. He was beginning to cry, sobbing now, “Criminals, criminals. The lot of you”, his voice trailing off as the door was slammed behind him.

  The van pulled away and passed a wall, the graffiti wall, freshly repainted with a picture of a spacecraft and the words “Building the Future” and “Rejuvenating the Nation” in big characters. The riot police retreated, and the diggers and cranes moved in for the kill, the demolition balls swinging and the long arms of the diggers clawing the remaining walls of the old man’s building.

  By the time Wang and his roommates left their own place, thirty minutes later, heading for The Moment On Time coffee shop, the nearby apartment block was a pile of concrete and twisted metal. The old man’s ancient box-like television, crushed and half buried, was the only obvious evidence that he’d once lived there. That, some scattered flowers and a card from well-wishers. Liu went over and picked up the card. The message inside read, “Keep up the fight”, and next to the characters was a crude drawing of a stick alien.

  Liu also saw the placard the old man had been holding. It was face down in the rubble. From his own building it had been hard to make out what it said. He turned it over to see another scratchy drawing of an alien, with the words “Keep your hands off my home”.

  Wang hadn’t noticed. He’d just taken a call from Fatso, who was telling him that the first of the Star Wars caps should be ready ahead of schedule, but there’d been a slight mess-up and they’d all be with the guy in black with the funny mask.

  “Darth Vader. That’s fine. Don’t worry. He’s probably the best known of the characters,” Wang said, telling Fatso that the most important thing was speed.

  Fatso then told Wang he’d had another idea, what with the smog being so bad.

  “We rebrand the masks,” he said.

  “What, paint them black and call them Darth Vader, or something like that?”

  Fatso said that wouldn’t work. “3M, you can’t beat 3M. They make the best masks.”

  He said the useless PM2.5 Mega Blockers that for weeks had been sitting in boxes at his place would become useless 3M PM2.5 Super Mega Blockers, with the addition of a small piece of plastic on the front with the 3M logo. The plastic nodule would be designed to look like a filter, but would be just solid plastic. Fatso said he could sort the plastic pretty quickly and bring in a team of migrant labourers to stick them on every mask by hand. It wouldn’t take more than one afternoon.

  He seemed pretty excited and, once he’d hung up, Liu and Zhang agreed that rebranding the masks was a great idea. That Fatso could be pretty smart after all.

  The smog was so bad that morning that it had stopped registering on the air quality apps on their smartphones. It had gone off the scale. As they walked towards a main road past their University and to The Moment On Time, the tall buildings which lined it resembled ghostly shadows; cars with fuzzy headlights passed beside them.

  A long banner across the University’s main entrance read, “Building an Ecological Civilisation”. It was another slogan from the Party leader, in giant characters, which had been put there when he visited the campus to open some new buildings and plant some trees. But it was only visible from close up because of the smog. Wang took a photograph and posted it to his Gasping Dragon account with a brief caption:

  Nice idea, when are they going to start?

  “Did you ever find out what that is?” said Liu. “The ecological civilisation thing?”

  Wang just shrugged.

  He’d asked one of his tutors, partly as a joke and partly because he was genuinely curious. The tutor had asked the professor who ran the Computer Science Department, who’d checked with the University’s Communist Party office, which ran everything. They’d passed it on to the Party’s district office. Which is where the trail went cold and after two weeks the tutor had summoned Wang and told him he was an idiot and that the answer was obvious, though without saying what the answer was.

  Wang assumed that his tutor never got an answer. Shortly afterwards, the professor had been accused of a lack of ideological rigour, and had his permission cancelled to attend upcoming academic conferences in Europe and America.

  A small digger was trundling across an area below the ecological civilisation banner that used to be a lawn, but was being prepared for replanting.

  “What happened to the grass?” Zhang said.

  “It didn’t like the paint,” said Liu. He told his roommates that there’d been such a bad drought before the visit by the Party leader that the grass was a kind of brown. So the University had given it a coat of high gloss green.

  Once the visit was over, the grass died completely.

  “Too bad,” said Wang. “Grass should really be green.”

  It took around twenty minutes to reach The Moment On Time, where they took their usual table by the window, Wang and Zhang working the keyboards of their smartphones. Liu opening his laptop and logging into his share trading account, letting out a deep groan as soon as he did so. The market was crashing again.

  Liu then said that China was going blind, and soon most Chinese wouldn’t be able to see beyond the end of their nose. He said he’d seen it online, quoting a bunch of experts.

  “China’s got an epidemic of myopia, can’t see stuff in the distance, because we spend too much time indoors and looking at screens.”

  “Oh yeah?” Wang said, without looking up from his smartphone, where he was back trying to line up colourful blob-like animals and earn some more happy coins. “I don’t really see that.”

  “Very funny,” Liu said, “but this is serious.”

  And it then struck Wang that the smog was so bad most days that he might not notice if he was going blind.

  Wang then noticed that several of the regulars had started wearing masks inside the coffee shop, and it was true that even indoors the air didn’t smell good.

  Lily had brought a small air-purifying machine. At least that’s what she called it. Wang suspected it was a fake, and it sat lonely in one corner, spluttering and wheezing, struggling to cope. He was convinced that what came out of it smelt worse than the air that went in. But fake or not, there was keen competition for the tables nearby.

  And they all knew better than to complain to Lily.

  Wang then opened another game, and was soon racing on a hoverboard. He was a hooligan caught red-handed spraying graffiti on a train. He was riding a board called Panda, racing down a metro line and along the roofs of trains, chased by a grumpy train inspector and his dog.

  He was trying to grab gold coins out of the air and at the same time stop the board from crashing. But the board, with its two big panda eyes, slipped as he sped round a corner, trying to avoid an oncoming train, stretching for a coin, the snarling dog at his heels.

  He crashed and Panda exploded just as another message came through from his mother asking if he’d read her earlier ones and why he didn’t answer or ret
urn her calls.

  His knee began to itch again and his right foot trembled worse than ever. He tried planting it firmly on the ground, pressing hard and hoping nobody would notice. There was no way of avoiding it, he’d have to answer. So he opened the draft reply with the lonely words “Hi Mum”, and wrote:

  Great to hear from you. I am so sorry it has taken so long to write. I am working very hard, with so little time to myself, because I am determined to get the best results.

  My girlfriend Eu-Meh is really looking forward to meeting you. She’s smart and intelligent and a beauty queen, but very busy with studies. She’s from Shanghai, but has family in Australia. Like me, she’s hoping to study in America.

  We will try and get to Harbin during the Spring Festival.

  Please say hi to Dad.

  Your loving son, Chu

  He then attached a photograph he found online of a Chinese-Australian beauty queen called Yang Eu-Meh and pressed send.

  No sooner had it gone than he had second thoughts, thinking that was way too much detail, that he was digging himself even deeper into a hole, and wondering if the photo was really necessary. But it would keep her happy, keep his mother off his back, at least until the Spring Festival. He’d at least bought himself time.

  He then went back to hopping between social media sites, seeing what was trending. One online campaign had gone viral, people posting selfies wearing pollution masks and the word “Why?” written on the front. Hundreds of thousands had joined in, figuring there was safety in numbers and that wearing a mask made them tougher to identify.

  Wang posted one of himself wearing a PM2.5 Mega Blocker that was soon to become a 3M PM2.5 Super Mega Blocker, adding the online address of their shop.

  Others posted doctored pictures showing various monsters in the smog. Wang added his own: the stick alien lurking in the haze behind shrouded buildings.

  He then opened a video-sharing site and found at the top of the trending list a grainy video of an old man being dragged by police across a piece of wasteland. It took him a while to recognise the scene he’d witnessed that morning. It was silent and shot from a nearby window, moving in and out of focus before the shot was lost completely as the person making the video ducked behind a curtain to avoid being seen.

  Which to Wang made it all the more chilling. He was about to show it to Liu when the video disappeared from his screen and was replaced with a lost connection alert. It had been deleted.

  Zhang was reading a story about a collision in the South China Sea between a ship belonging to the Japanese coast guard and a Chinese fishing boat it was trying to chase off near some disputed islands.

  The Japanese had accused the Chinese of illegal fishing, of plundering the area of endangered species and damaging rare coral, which Zhang said was ridiculous.

  “The endangered species are Chinese. The coral too.”

  Wang just said, “Yeah, sure.”

  Zhang could get quite excited about that sort of stuff, and when he did Wang mostly ignored him. As did Liu. The patriotic bloggers, as they called themselves, and which Zhang liked to read, were the loudest on the web, mostly unbothered by the censors and often with official encouragement. China claimed all the South China Sea as its own, saying it had a right to the lot, and the latest collision had brought the nationalists out in force demanding that the entire Japanese fleet be immediately sunk, that Tokyo be nuked or worse. Stuff like that.

  Wang reckoned the patriotic bloggers were just about the most stupid people on the web, though there was plenty of competition for the title.

  And that gave him an idea.

  The area that China claimed was within what it called a nine-dash line, surrounding the entire South China Sea. Why not claim a bit more? So he wrote a post to a top nationalist website saying the claim was being extended to a 351-dash line encompassing the entire Pacific Ocean. Quoting an unnamed Party leader, he said that Ming pottery had been discovered on an island called Alcatraz, showing the presence of early Chinese settlers and therefore giving Beijing an indisputable historic right to the island and the entire ocean leading to it. He said all Chinese maps were being immediately updated.

  He wasn’t entirely sure where Alcatraz was, but once had watched a movie about the place, which was pretty cool. It had been some sort of prison, and China needed prisons. He shared that thought too.

  He then searched for Alcatraz and found the movie he’d watched. It was called Escape from Alcatraz, and he’d picked up a pirate copy a while back in a nearby market, but had since lost it. He copied the movie poster, a picture of a Hollywood actor called Clint Eastwood looking out through a crack in a wall, and he replaced Eastwood’s face with his stick alien. He shared that too, with a caption:

  Right historic wrongs! Return Alcatraz to the motherland!

  He then went back to the hoverboard, the one called Panda, which had recovered from its fiery crash and was soon being chased again, this time by an entire pack of snarling dogs. He was starting to get the hang of it now and kept their snapping fangs at bay until he got bored again, closed the game, and looked back out of the window, at the thick smog.

  He began to think again about myopia and whether he might be losing his eyesight, but just didn’t know it yet. That one day the smog might clear, but stuff would still be all fuzzy.

  “Hey Zhang,” he said, “what can you see when you look out towards the railway line?”

  But Zhang was no longer paying attention. He was taking selfies.

  Wang kicked him, and asked him again; this time Zhang told Wang there was no smog, the visibility was perfect, and that he was almost certainly going blind.

  Which is when Wang noticed for the first time that Zhang was wearing glasses.

  “I didn’t know you wore those,” Wang said. “Myopia?”

  “No. Vanity mainly,” Zhang said handing over the glasses, which had no lenses, just the frame, which Zhang said he thought was pretty cool, telling Wang that the selfies were for the dating app, since he’d now decided to use a genuine photograph rather than the one of the celebrity he’d grabbed off the web, just in case he did decide to meet his match.

  Wang said that sounded smart.

  He then typed ‘myopia’ into a search engine, still worried, and not finding Zhang’s joke particularly funny.

  As well as stuff about eyes he found the other definition: “a lack of imagination, foresight, or intellectual insight”. And that prompted him to join the online discussion, suggesting government officials might be particularly at risk. He shared that thought to his Gasping Dragon account, and alongside posted his stick alien on which he painted an outsize pair of spectacles with thick black lenses.

  – 11 –

  Shanghai Bull

  Anthony Morgan thought his talk at the Shanghai Stock Exchange had gone well. He was a true friend of China, said the Deputy Chairman of the Exchange, standing in for his boss who’d been detained on the eve of the conference for unspecified breaches of Party discipline.

  Foreign investors had praised him too, calling his talk sober and realistic, a breath of fresh air in the face of all the negativity and hysteria.

  “Great work, Tony,” said one former top US Treasury official.

  The mood had been upbeat, and Morgan had set that tone.

  He left the conference, and had just climbed into a cab for the Bund, heading to lunch with Bud from Alabama, when his iPhone rang. The voice at the other end said that it was the office of Mr Fang, and that Mr Fang needed some more investment options, real estate preferably, in America. And he needed them urgently.

  Morgan asked whom he was speaking to, but the man ignored him, repeating that it was urgent. Morgan said he was putting together a number of options for Mr Fang including beachfront and city centre properties, as well as farmland. East and west coast, and some in the
Midwest. Morgan asked what were Mr Fang’s preferences and budget. The man said that Mr Fang would look at the lot, that the budget was big and the priority was speed.

  “And another thing,” he said, “Mr Fang wants to buy a football team.”

  “Any particular football team?” Morgan asked, a little taken aback, not having a clue about football. “Are we talking American football or English?”

  The man from Mr Fang’s office said he’d check, but thought it was the one with the round ball, the English game, and that he’d prefer a top club, second division or above.

  “Mr Fang likes football,” the man said. And then he hung up.

  Mr Fang, who also called himself Michael, was one of Morgan’s newer clients, based in the southern boom city of Shenzhen, next to Hong Kong, and to whom Morgan provided what MacMaster and Brown described as wealth management services.

  Mr Fang represented a consortium of investors. Rich investors. Everything else about him was a bit hazy. But the way Morgan saw it, the guy had a lot of wealth to manage and was in a hurry to find a home for it, and at the end of the day what else was there to know?

  Mr Fang was uncomplicated, unlike Bud. Sorting that idiot from Alabama had been an ordeal, but it was worth the effort, to keep his own reputation intact. He’d not yet found out for certain what had happened to Bud’s original business partner, but the new partner he had in mind was solid, dependable, a Hong Kong guy with a bunch of factories in the south. One of Morgan’s oldest business associates.

  Still, he was uneasy about the lunch.

  But when he reached the restaurant, a new place in a plush hotel on the Bund, he found Bud in good spirits.

  “Go ahead, get the quotes from the guy down south, but I’m not sure I’m gonna even need a new partner,” Bud said, telling Morgan that a Chinese company had made a bid for his entire business. “They want to buy the whole thing, the whole fucking thing, and they are offering stupid money. All cash.”