Beijing Smog Read online

  She asked about her husband’s plans.

  Morgan said he was travelling to Southern China, to Shenzhen, to get the new partner lined up for Bud, though he may no longer need one. Maybe see one or two other clients.

  He said he would then be going to Hong Kong, and that he’d be back after a week.

  She placed the three files back into a brown envelope, handing them to her husband, and said, “Promise me you’ll be careful. This could be dangerous in the wrong hands.”

  “How’s that?” said Morgan.

  “This is a very powerful man,” she said, tapping the envelope. “I have a very bad feeling about this.”

  The coffee shop was quiet, and they’d chosen a table on the far side, nobody close, Cindy Wu lowering her voice as a man walked by, taking a nearby table.

  She showed Morgan the front page of the People’s Daily, the Communist Party mouthpiece, which carried what it called a report card for the Communist Party’s corruption busters, the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, saying that in the last year alone nearly half a million people had been punished for what it called “discipline violations”, including ninety top officials. It vowed that no matter who they were, “tigers or flies”, there’d be no hiding place.

  She said the graft-busters mostly operated in the shadows, with their own courts, their own prisons, their own rules. That they could grab anybody they want.

  “They’re making a lot of enemies. Look at who’s been targeted. Not only in the Party, but top officials in the army, state-owned companies, even private ones. They’ve virtually declared war on Shenzhen.”

  “We do a lot of business down there,” Morgan said. “You know there’s a real clamour to move assets out of the country.”

  “I’m sure there is,” Cindy Wu said. “While they still can.”

  She said the crackdown was going further still, that labour rights lawyers and other social activists were being targeted. That the Party was shutting down even the most limited space for criticism.

  She said that only online was there still room to breathe, but even there she said the Party was tightening the noose.

  “People who can are looking for a way out of China, for them and for their assets.” She said the graft-busters were the most powerful unit of the Party and had become the leader’s personal enforcers. She said there was even a rumour of a showdown between his faction and another loyal to the Prime Minister.

  “I really think there will be a backlash,” she said, tapping the newspaper. “Maybe it’s already started.”

  Beneath her long purple fingernails was a picture of a man described as the head of the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, the Party’s chief graft-buster. He had a balding head and a round face, child-like, but serious. And cold. Not an inkling of emotion. He was wearing an enormous pair of thick-rimmed and slightly tinted glasses.

  They sat in silence for a while, and then Cindy Wu stood to leave, pointed to the brown envelope and said, “I would be very, very careful with that, Tony.”

  She looked anxious, more so than he could remember in a long time.

  *

  Morgan went into the conference, where China’s top internet official was addressing an audience of executives from Western tech companies about the promise of the Chinese market.

  He sat at the back of the hall fiddling with his iPhone.

  The official, the head of the Cyberspace Administration of China, was reeling off statistics. Nearly everybody in the country owns a smartphone. Nearly 700 million internet users. The world’s largest online community. The value of e-commerce on course soon to reach a trillion dollars a year.

  “The door is always open to Western internet enterprises, as long as they do not hurt the national or consumer interest,” said the man whose day job was running the Great Firewall, the Party’s internet censorship machine, and the most extensive system of online control yet invented.

  But he knew his audience’s interest lay elsewhere, and recited a bunch of figures that he said showed that Western companies gained half their profits from the Chinese market.

  “China has an open and fair internet,” he said. “China manages cyberspace under the rule of law. In other words, we manage the relationship between freedom and order. We have to provide a healthy environment for the young.”

  And at that moment order and health got the better of a web posting Morgan was reading on his iPhone, more speculation about a power struggle in the Party. It went blank. He tried to turn on his VPN, but struggled to make the connection. He could open the People’s Daily. No surprise there. It was reporting that 200 websites had been shut down and ten bloggers arrested for “lies and speculation” and “fabricating and spreading rumours”.

  “We welcome you,” said the internet official, reaching the end of his speech, which was greeted with warm applause from the Western tech executives.

  One young American executive turned to Morgan and said, “That’s really encouraging. Amazing growth. You really can’t afford not to be part of this. I mean the law’s the law. You have to respect that in any market. I think we can do business here.”

  Morgan smiled, thinking about the kids on the Bund grabbing the bull by its balls, and saying sure. That’s good. Let’s chat later. There are many ways that MacMaster and Brown can help you find the right partner and get established here.

  Tech was a new business for Morgan, but a promising one. The internet official had been right, it was an enormous and growing market. But Morgan also knew that the price of entry would be a large pair of online shackles and the keys to back door access to their systems and technology in the interests of order and health.

  It wasn’t that the tech executives weren’t aware of this, at least in part. It was more that they didn’t really care. They saw it as a price worth paying. For entry to the market.

  To Morgan, they were deluding themselves. But it was also for him a very profitable delusion; as the conference came to a close, he traded business cards back and forth between smiles and handshakes, and set up coffee meetings and two lunches for the days ahead.

  He then sat back in the lobby, waiting for his car and going back on his iPhone. His VPN was working again.

  Xinhua, the state news agency, had announced that the head of the Government’s statistics office was the latest official under investigation for the same “serious discipline violations” as hundreds of thousands of others. He shared the link to @Beijing_smog, tweeting:

  China’s leading writer of contemporary fiction is rumbled. Did he exaggerate too much or not enough?

  *

  Chuck Drayton was at Sakura’s apartment when his phone rang. He’d got the summons early afternoon, Sakura telling him to come over because the protesters were back in front of her office and she was at home and wanted to have fun. Like now, right away.

  She said she was lonely because Bobby the pug was at the vets after developing some kind of fever, and Drayton wondered if that had anything to do with his toe. His own pain had become so bad that he’d gone to see the consulate’s doctor, telling her a stray had bitten him while his shoes were off and he was having a shoeshine. It was a convoluted story, but the best he could do and better than the truth. He’d immediately regretted it after the doctor insisted on a series of rabies and tetanus shots and handed him a cocktail of antibiotics.

  He’d not gone to The Facility that day, where progress was still slow and he was starting to find Tom and Dick and all their techno-rambling a bit tedious. When Sakura messaged he was nearby, at the consulate. He still took a taxi over, not wanting to put too much stress on his foot. He was limping when he reached Sakura’s place, telling her he’d stubbed his toe on the sidewalk and asking about Bobby, trying to sound sympathetic, while hoping all the time that it was nothing trivial.

  Her blind
s were shut and the apartment was in near-darkness again, which is the way she seemed to prefer it, like she had something against the sun. She was wearing faded jeans and a white T-shirt, her hair down this time. She ignored his question about the dog and his explanation about the limp, pulling him by his belt and falling backwards onto the sofa, Drayton on top this time.

  “Hey baby, mind if I just get rid of the coat?” he said. She ignored that too, keeping a firm grip on his belt and kissing him so hard that the question trailed away and the two of them rolled off the sofa and onto a rug that smelt of the pug. It was then that Drayton’s phone rang for the first time. The phone tumbled out of his pocket, but Sakura was holding him so tightly that he couldn’t have reached it, even if he’d wanted to.

  The next time his phone rang his trousers were around his knees. He was trying to pull her T-shirt over her head, but his coat was so twisted it was acting like a straight-jacket. He could see the face of his phone this time and recognised Morgan’s number.

  “Shit,” he said. “Sorry, I really gotta take that call.”

  She continued to hold him tight and they grappled like a pair of wrestlers before he broke free, grabbing the phone and sitting on the sofa. By that time, the ringing had stopped. Drayton pulled up his trousers and said, “I’m sorry, babe. I have to return the call.”

  He left Sakura’s apartment and went to the street outside, calling Morgan, who immediately picked up.

  “Sorry, Tony. You caught me in the middle of something,” he said.

  “I have the report you commissioned,” Morgan said, getting straight to the point.

  “That’s terrific, Tony. Our friend with the Ferrari-loving kid?”

  “That’s the one. I can scan it and email it over to you.”

  “No. Don’t do that. I prefer a hard copy,” Drayton said.

  “Sure,” Morgan said. “Where and when do you want to meet?”

  And Drayton said, “I’ll let you know”, feeling like he’d already said more than he’d wanted to on an open telephone line.

  When he returned to Sakura’s apartment she was sitting at a small table, her clothes back in place and with a pot of green tea and two small cups in front of her. She was reading something online, on her phone, and ignored him at first before asking what was so important that he had to run away, go outside, just as they were getting into things. He said sorry, embassy stuff, and went to take her hand, which she pulled away, getting to her feet. She picked up her coat and headed out of the door, saying she had to go to the vet, that Bobby had taken a turn for the worse, and for Drayton to let himself out.

  After she’d left, he punched air, a triumphant punch, because that was the second piece of good news he’d heard in the last five minutes.

  Then he left the apartment, wiping dog hairs off his coat, keen to see what Morgan and his wife had turned up.

  *

  Morgan had just arrived back at his Lucky Bund View apartment and poured himself a large Jack Daniels with ice when his phone rang. He pulled it out of his back pocket and crossed to the tall windows. The smog had lifted enough that he could now just about make out the Huangpu River below.

  There was no number identifier shown on the screen, and he said, “Morgan here.”

  It was Cindy Wu. She was crying, desperately trying to control herself.

  “Has he been in touch with you? Has he contacted you?” she said.

  “Has who contacted me?” Morgan said.

  “I waited at arrivals, at the airport, where I told him I’d be,” she said between heavy breaths. “He was definitely on the flight. I checked.”

  “You mean Robert? Something’s happened to Robert?”

  There was silence at the other end of the phone as Cindy Wu struggled to get the words out.

  “Cindy, Cindy. Calm down. Talk to me. What’s happened to Robert?”

  “He never came out, Tony. He never came through,” she said. “I don’t know where he is. It’s like he’s just disappeared.”

  – 16 –

  The Girl In The Corner

  It took a while for Wang Chu to notice that The Girl In The Corner was no longer in the corner, and at The Moment On Time coffee shop word quickly spread that she’d killed herself.

  “She threw herself from the roof of her dormitory building,” said Wang.

  “It wasn’t the roof,” said Liu Wei. “It was from a window.”

  While another student on the next table said they were both wrong, that she’d hung herself in a cubicle in the washroom.

  Her ex-boyfriend wasn’t much help, since he was now denying ever having been her boyfriend and was avoiding the coffee shop.

  Zhang said they were all silly rumours and that perhaps she wasn’t dead at all, but had been expelled because of the protest in defence of the Professor. Perhaps it had all been too much for her and she’d just left.

  “But there’s definitely something weird going on,” Zhang said.

  What they did know for sure was that the University had threatened to expel all those who took part in the protest, and had warned their families. It had also stepped up what it called patriotic education and ideological guidance and warned against what it called “pernicious Western values”.

  Soon after the protest, the University had announced that all students were required to attend extra classes in Marxism and Theories of Chinese Socialism. It said they were expected to take the classes seriously and that there would be tests. It warned students against listening to music, watching videos or doing anything else on their phones during the classes. Sleeping was expressly banned, and surveillance cameras were installed in some classrooms.

  There were special lessons for those who’d taken part in the protest or signed the online petition and deemed to be in most need of attitude adjustment.

  Like most students, Wang and his roommates regarded the University’s periodic ideology campaigns as a bit of a joke, but one of those things you went along with. The University usually didn’t take it too seriously either. Sure, the rules this time seemed a bit tougher and pretty stupid, like having to actually attend the lectures, but the way the roommates saw things, it was best to go through the motions and get it over with.

  But it had quickly become clear to them that The Girl In The Corner was in no mood to be lectured to by the Party and wasn’t about to have her attitude adjusted.

  Wang and his roommates had attended the first lecture, on the contribution of the Communist Party to the development of China, during which they all stayed awake, though Wang did manage to see off some more zombies on his smartphone, and Liu was able to monitor the stock market, though that proved more depressing than the lecture.

  Afterwards, questions were handed out, starting with multiple choice. The first one asked:

  Which of the following statements best describes the Communist Party’s achievements?

  It gave five options:

  a.The unparalleled combination of Marxism with China’s reality

  b.Leading China through a long struggle to prosperity and happiness

  c.Representing the common interests of all Chinese

  d.Leading the social and spiritual development of all Chinese

  e.Forging the Chinese Dream

  Wang had looked at Zhang, who’d looked at Liu.

  “Is this a trick question?” Liu mouthed silently to the others. To which Wang shrugged, put up his hand and asked the lecturer, who said it was a stupid question.

  That got the hall laughing, but not the lecturer, who banged his fist on the lectern, and corrected himself saying it was Wang’s question that was stupid, not the test. He said they could choose more than one answer and if they had half a brain they’d realise that all five were right.

  And with that helpful guidance, Wang, Zhang and Liu ticked all fi
ve. The next section asked for further thoughts on how the Party was enhancing the lives of the people. None of the roommates could immediately think of an answer for that, so not wanting to get it wrong they left it blank.

  The Girl In The Corner had been sitting at the back of the hall. She found that section far too tempting to ignore, and she did the unthinkable. She gave an honest answer:

  The Party can only truly command the respect of the people when it gets out of their bedrooms and allows them a completely free choice to have children. When it constructs buildings that don’t fall down. When it stops poisoning the air and soil. When it stops robbing and bullying the people.

  The roommates knew what she’d written because she later shared her answer in university chat rooms and online, where it spread rapidly before it was deleted. The Girl In The Corner had then received another summons by the university authorities, and was again threatened with expulsion and ordered to do an additional set of ideology classes. This time her invitation to tea had a far bitterer taste to it. Wang had heard that the tone was nastier and that the police had been involved, telling her that she might be charged with subverting state authority. Her businessman father was briefly detained as part of what was described as a corruption investigation.

  Among the students in The Moment On Time there was a grudging sense of respect for her spirit and her bravery. Though most saw it as good reason to have nothing further to do with her, not wanting to be seen as guilty by association. Nobody could argue with what she’d said. It was stating the obvious. But Wang and his roommates agreed that she was being unnecessarily reckless and provocative.

  “What for?” said Zhang. “What does she seriously expect to achieve?”

  Wang agreed. “What’s the point?” he said.

  The Girl In The Corner had become more withdrawn, and at a time when she needed support, she was shunned. The one exception was Lily, who was mostly rushed off her feet, but had spent what time she could at that table in the corner, with the girl. Lily recognised strength and decency when she saw it. She respected defiance. She’d talk to whomever she wanted to talk to, and didn’t give a hoot what anybody thought.