Beijing Smog Read online

  As he left the train, Morgan noticed the station wasn’t as busy as usual, and there were a lot of police, armed police, especially at the exits, watching people come and go. But his mind was elsewhere – on Bud and the reputation he needed to salvage.

  There was no sign of his driver, and when he phoned his office they told him that cars hadn’t been allowed near the station. So he put on the big grey anti-pollution mask, and left the station, walking through the smoggy gloom for five minutes before finding a taxi.

  “Beijing not okay. Air is terrible. Terrible,” the driver said before lighting a cigarette.

  The traffic moved quickly, and it took just half an hour to get to the museum, or at least a couple of blocks away from it, since Tiananmen Square had been closed off. Morgan paid the driver and walked the rest of the way, wheeling his bag and showing his invitation to get past a line of police, who searched him and his bag at the entrance to the square.

  When he entered the main foyer of the museum, the first thing he heard was Bud, well before he saw him, sounding off to a group of executives drinking coffee near the entrance.

  “I’m an end game guy. I like to know where we’re going. I don’t like to circle around,” Bud was telling them, and the others were nodding, like they understood that stuff.

  It seemed to Morgan like the man was broadcasting to the entire museum, and within five minutes from across the foyer he knew the price of the polyresin he used on his production line, where in Montgomery, Alabama, he went to church and the hassles his wife had faced at the Great Wall the day before.

  Then guides arrived, saying there would be a short tour before the reception, which had been delayed because the Prime Minister was running late. They divided everyone into groups, saying they were standing in the largest museum in the world under one roof. Morgan joined Bud’s group as they were led into an exhibition called The Road to Rejuvenation, and a few minutes later they were standing around a glass display cabinet studying a white cowboy hat.

  Bud crouched down for a better look, like he was examining a priceless artefact, while the guide said that it had been given to China’s then Paramount Leader during a visit to America. She then led the group to another larger display cabinet to look at a chair that the same leader had sat in during an inspection tour to Southern China.

  “Deng Xiaoping was the architect of China’s reform and opening,” she said.

  Bud asked the guide about a jacket hung next to the chair, and she said that was the jacket Deng had worn when he sat in the chair.

  “Wow,” said Bud. “Is that right?”

  “Today China is facing a brilliant future of great rejuvenation,” the guide said, looking straight at Bud. “The exhibition clearly demonstrates the historic course of the Chinese people of choosing Marxism, the Communist Party of China, the socialist road and the reform and opening up policy.”

  As they moved on Morgan tapped Bud on the arm.

  “I’m glad you could make it along,” he said. “Sorry about dinner.”

  “No problem, Tony. And thanks for getting me on the guest list here. There are some real big hitters. But we’ve really gotta sort stuff out.”

  “I’m working on that, Bud, and I already have another potential partner lined up for you.”

  “And this one ain’t gonna disappear on us?”

  Morgan laughed that off, saying it was all part of the fun of doing business here and telling Bud to keep the faith, that China was the future. That you had to ride the bumps. You had to be part of it.

  Bud then stopped and began looking around.

  “If you’re looking for anything about the Great Leap Forward or the Cultural Revolution, well they aren’t part of official history,” he said, trying to sound light-hearted, but making a serious point.

  And Bud said, “Sorry Tony, what’s that?”

  “Millions died, but you’ll find nothing here. Nor on the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989.”

  “I was looking for the washroom,” said Bud, finally spotting a sign. “Tiananmen? That was the riot thing, right?”

  And Morgan said yeah, something like that, thinking that Bud would do well in business in China. His hosts would love him.

  The museum lined the eastern side of Tiananmen Square, overlooking Mao’s mausoleum, in which the Great Helmsman and star of the museum was lying embalmed. Although the square was lit, it was hard to see Mao’s resting place through the smog.

  The tour ended back in the museum’s giant entrance foyer, close to where a series of steep escalators took visitors to its distant and remote corners, and under a statue of Mao and his generals. Mao was in the middle and taller than all the others. He was always taller.

  The Prime Minister’s reception was in the museum’s Central Hall, its walls lined with dozens of paintings on the Communist Revolution, including one that stretched the entire length of its far wall, the founding ceremony of the People’s Republic of China. Mao in the middle. He was the tallest again.

  The room quickly filled, servers dressed in white weaving their way through Chinese officials and their VIP guests. Trays in their gloved hands were laden with drinks and snacks.

  Morgan took a glass of sparkling wine.

  “Seventeen metres wide, Tony,” said an official who had appeared at Morgan’s side and was pointing at the big painting, in front of which a small podium had been set up for the Prime Minister.

  “Oh hello, Mr Liu,” Morgan said to the official who he recognised as Liu Fangu, a top economic aide to the Prime Minister. “It’s certainly big.”

  “I need to ask a favour of you, Tony,” said Liu, and Morgan said sure, what could he do? Liu gently took his elbow and guided him to a quieter corner of the hall under another painting of Mao, this time standing on the edge of a cliff, hands behind his back.

  “My son will soon be graduating from university, in computer science,” Liu said.

  And Morgan said wow, that boy certainly sounds smart.

  “I was hoping to find him an internship in finance, maybe in Hong Kong, to get a bit of experience with an international company, like your own.”

  Morgan said that shouldn’t be a problem, that he’d see what he could do.

  He wasn’t always sure what to make of Mr Liu. He was in small part responsible for the Bud mess, since it was he who’d first recommended to Morgan the man who was supposed to be Bud’s partner, a young entrepreneur doing a lot of high-tech stuff down south. But Liu still had the ear of the Prime Minister, that’s what really mattered, and that’s why Morgan would help his son.

  Then there was a burst of applause as the Prime Minister entered the hall, grinning like a Cheshire cat, waving and grabbing outstretched hands as he made his way towards the podium, onto which he climbed and thanked everyone for coming.

  “China is an ancient civilisation with 5,000 years of history,” he said. Morgan had lost count of the number of times he’d heard Chinese leaders trot that one out. It was a standard speech-opener, putting the upstarts in their place, reminding the Americans that as history goes, they were not even out of diapers.

  Then he said this was a challenging time for Beijing, that lower economic growth rates were the new normal as they tried to rebalance the economy and shift away from investment-led growth to growth driven more by consumers and innovation.

  A former US Treasury Secretary led a brief round of applause.

  The Prime Minister raised his glass and offered a toast to cooperation and a rosy economic future.

  “Hear, hear,” said the assembled guests.

  Morgan glanced at Bud, who had a wide grin on his face, enjoying the moment and feeling important, like the Prime Minister was addressing him personally, like he had a seat at the top table. Which is pretty much as Morgan had intended.

  The Prime Minster said investo
rs would always be welcome and that they and their intellectual property would be protected. He offered personally to address any problems they encountered, which generated more applause.

  And then he left. Waving, shaking more hands.

  Morgan watched him go. He’d heard the Prime Minister speak before, and thought that this time, behind his platitudes and the indelible grin, he seemed flustered, like his mind was elsewhere.

  Morgan left the hall with Bud, suggesting they grab a drink at a nearby hotel, on Chang’an Avenue, just off Tiananmen Square, and Bud said yeah, let’s do that, we’ve got a lot to talk about.

  They lined up to collect their coats, and on leaving each guest was given a cloth bag with an embroidered museum logo. The bag contained a book by the Communist Party leader called The Governance of China, together with a desk calendar showing the highlights of the National Museum. There was also a bright orange memory stick with the museum logo and containing images of what it called cultural highlights of Beijing.

  It took Morgan and Bud ten minutes to walk to the Beijing Hotel, where they sat in a bar just off reception. The bar was backed by a big fish tank, a couple of baby sharks going round in circles. Tall windows looked out onto Chang’an, but the smog was now so thick they could barely see the tall buildings on the other side of the road.

  Morgan began to tell Bud about the history of the hotel, about how the famous image from the Tiananmen Square massacre, the man facing down a tank, had been taken from a room in this very hotel. That it was right outside here. But he stopped in mid-sentence, Bud not listening, his attention elsewhere, watching the waiter feeding the sharks, sprinkling some stuff in the water that got them pretty excited. Tank man.

  Instead he told him about the smog.

  “It can be bad in the winter,” Morgan said. “When it’s cold, and without much wind. The smog gets trapped over the city. There are a couple of decent phone apps which give regular smog readings.”

  “I guess this is what you Brits call a pea-souper,” Bud said, looking out of the window, where the streetlights had given the smog a yellowish-green tint.

  “The good news is that the Government’s making big efforts to clean it up, and when the Government decides something in China it usually happens,” Morgan said, just as the server arrived with a bottle of Moët in an ice bucket and two glasses.

  “What’s with the bubbly?” Bud said, as the server popped the cork and began to pour the champagne.

  “We’re celebrating a great future for you in China,” Morgan said. “And how a little setback is not going to get in the way of that.” He told Bud he’d been working in China for thirty years, but that it could still be a bit of a learning curve. “You’ll emerge stronger. You’ll see.”

  Bud relaxed as the bubbly went down, saying yeah I guess, and he thanked Morgan for his support.

  Then he said, “I just don’t get it. I thought a deal was a deal. And this was a fucking big deal. An entire production line. And it could have led to more. You may just think of them as garden gnomes, Tony, but we have advanced engineering processes that are world class. 3D printing. We’ve even licensed some of our processes to the aerospace industry. Imagine that. From gnomes to jet fighters. I was prepared to transfer that stuff over here, to share it. At least some of it. The bits I’m allowed to.”

  Bud opened his laptop and showed Morgan pictures of one of his Alabama production lines, full of little men with long white beards, one in sunglasses, another on a bike. The next one picking its nose. One more giving the finger. Lasers were moulding the resin. “World class, Tony. Individually tailored gnomes. And it doesn’t have to be just gnomes.”

  Morgan said he had a plan.

  “Let’s at least get up and running with the lower-end stuff,” he said. “I have already lined up a good company that can get you started. A Hong Kong entrepreneur owns it, with factories down south, in Shenzhen. He’s reliable. I’ve known him for years. He’ll get you going until we find a full-on partner that can handle the more sophisticated products.”

  Bud said that sounded encouraging, but the deal needed to be solid. He said politics back home were difficult right now and he was getting a lot of bullshit about shifting jobs to China.

  Morgan said he understood, and ordered another bottle of the Moët, changing the subject and asking about Bud’s wife and his plans now for the rest of his China trip. Bud said he’d stay for a couple more days in Beijing, see the sights, before coming down to Shanghai.

  Morgan asked him what he had in mind and offered to provide a car and driver, and Bud said that would be great, though he wasn’t quite sure where to go. He then dug around in the bag he’d been given in the museum, taking out the bright orange Cultural Highlights memory stick.

  “Let’s see what they recommend,” he said, inserting the device in a USB port on his laptop. It took a couple of minutes for the computer to recognise the drive. Then an icon appeared on the desktop with the name Beijing Surprises. Bud opened it to reveal a list of tourist spots, starting with the Forbidden City and Winter Palace. He clicked on the Winter Palace and a slideshow began, and he said, “Nice pictures.” But the slideshow kept freezing, like the memory stick had other things on its mind.

  “It’s a new computer,” said Bud, shaking his head. “I don’t get why it’s so fucking slow.”

  Then an alert box appeared on the screen saying a programme it identified with lots of weird letters and numbers was seeking permission to access his computer.

  “For fuck’s sake,” said Bud. “This is so fucking annoying.” He clicked the box that said yes, to let the programme in. The laptop speeded up after that, and Bud looked at a couple more slideshows: a famous duck restaurant and a space museum. When he went to close the memory stick window it got stuck again and didn’t want to eject. So he just pulled it out.

  They drained the rest of the champagne and Morgan said they should meet again in Shanghai and that he was sure things would work out.

  “We’ll have you up and running in China in no time,” Morgan said.

  “I’m relying on you, Tony,” Bud said, getting impatient with his laptop, which was whirring and refusing to shut down, like it had a lot going on.

  “God I hate computers,” Bud said. “They can be so fucking stupid.”

  – 3 –

  The Gasping Dragon

  The aliens just kept coming, wave after wave of them. Faster than he could blast them out of the sky. The situation looked desperate, but not completely lost. Not yet. Because he was Wang Chu, leader of the resistance, saviour of the universe.

  He swung his battleship violently to the right, and then dived before climbing rapidly, guns blazing, taking out several more alien gunships. Take that you sucker! He used a sudden meteor shower for cover, and ducked behind a red planet, just as an alien laser blew a large chunk of it away. Awesome!

  Warning lights flashed on his control panel. He’d been hit, but the battle was turning. The meteors had destroyed a big chunk of the alien fleet, and he spun his limping battleship around, emerging from cover for the final showdown.

  Then the battery of his smartphone died, and the intergalactic battlefield disappeared, replaced by a blank screen. Shit! He leapt from his chair and towards a power socket that was hanging from the wall, straining under the weight of adapters. He fumbled with the leads, looking for the right one, almost pulling the socket out completely, desperate to get power back in the phone. To get back into battle.

  He’d been fighting the aliens for hours. He’d lost count of how many.

  This was only the second time he’d left his chair all day. The first was to go to the bathroom, when he simply couldn’t hold on any longer. He’d then gone out to fetch noodles for lunch from a local stall, figuring that eating might not be a bad idea either. He could have ordered online. He had at least three apps for that, but ha
d wanted to go outside, to clear his head and finalise his battle plan. To push the aliens out of his galaxy and move to the next level of the game.

  By the time he’d got back with the noodles his eyes had been watering and he had a scratchy throat. The sooty air outside was so bad he could taste it.

  Waiting for his phone to charge was agonising and he fidgeted awkwardly in his seat, which was beside the room’s only window, overlooking a cluttered courtyard. Though all he could see through the smog was the vague outline of the neighbouring apartment block. Its dark red wall and jumble of wires, window bars and pot plants had become a kind of surrealist smudge.

  His smartphone returned to life with a chorus of buzzes and beeps. He made another lunge for the socket, grabbing his phone like some hungry predator smothering its prey, then sitting on the floor beside the socket, keeping the phone plugged in, not wanting to jeopardise the victory that was so close.

  The battlefield reappeared, but he immediately threw the phone to the floor with a groan. The game hadn’t saved his settings, so he’d have to start the battle all over again. It was beyond annoying. He’d seemed so close to winning. So close to the next level.

  He sat for perhaps five minutes, his head in his hands, before picking up the phone again, deciding to see what was trending online and finding a video of a Tibetan mastiff dog that a zoo had tried to pass off as an African lion.

  A report alongside said the zoo had sent the original lion elsewhere for breeding, replacing it with the mastiff, which does have a furry brown coat and bit of a mane. But they were exposed when their lion started to bark.

  Another dog was being passed off as a wolf.

  It had already been shared hundreds of thousands of times.

  Only when somebody posted a digitally enhanced picture of a local Communist Party leader, with a hairy mane and a caption, “Real or fake?”, did the censors step in, and posts started disappearing, replaced with a message saying the connection had been lost. Access denied. Deleted by the unseen but all-watching hand of the internet police.