Beijing Smog Read online

  But the story was already out there, embellished by rumours of llamas dressed as giraffes and a labrador posing as a donkey.

  Wang reposted the original story to The Gasping Dragon, his Twitter-like account, which had more than 100,000 followers.

  He shared another video of a man who’d released a box of bees in a crowded metro station after security had prevented him taking them on the train. He thought that was pretty funny too.

  He then saw a series of photos and a video, spreading fast. Going viral. Armed paramilitary police running. Others pushing, looking angry. A row of armoured vehicles, shot from a distance. Ambulances. Frantic-looking paramedics pushing a stretcher trolley. It was hard to tell what was going on, since many were blurry, shot and then uploaded with unsteady hands. Smartphones on the move.

  In the background of several was the vague outline of a vast egg-like roof, its dome floodlit and just about penetrating the thick smog.

  There was a video too, which already had hundreds of thousands of likes. It showed a balding older man, a foreigner, wearing a dinner jacket and bow tie, red-faced and shouting, demanding to be allowed out of somewhere that looked like a hall. There was a stage behind him full of abandoned musical instruments. The hall looked full, but everybody’s attention was on the foreigner, round rimless glasses hanging from one of his ears, and waving around what looked like a little baton. Police wrestled him to the ground.

  Wang shared the video to The Gasping Dragon.

  He then went back to the photos, intending to share them too, but they’d been deleted. The internet censors were erasing them almost as quickly as they were being posted.

  Then the screen of his smartphone went black again and the phone started quacking at him, sounding like a demented duck. It was the ringtone he’d assigned to his mother, whose name appeared across the screen. He hesitated and then pressed the red button that rejected her call. He felt a momentary sense of relief, but that quickly turned to guilt. He knew he should have picked up, her third attempt that day, but he didn’t know what to say to her.

  He opened a messaging app and saw eleven marked as new. Three were spam, investment schemes promising massive returns on money Wang didn’t have, and which he deleted. Two were from a university tutor and marked “URGENT. PLEASE READ”, while the rest were from his mother.

  He deleted the messages from the university without opening them. They weren’t the first warnings he’d received from his tutor and he knew pretty much what they’d say, chasing work he hadn’t done, and giving him yet another final deadline.

  He then sat looking at the unopened messages from his mother. He scratched his knee and tried to control a sudden trembling in his right foot. It was a nervous reaction usually triggered by any communication from his parents.

  He opened the most recent message, which began with the familiar question about why he hadn’t been in touch or returned her calls. His mother then asked about his girlfriend, saying she couldn’t wait to meet her. Was she the one he would settle down with? When was he going to bring her home? It was a long and rambling message, going on to say she was so pleased he had so many job offers and that studying in America sounded fantastic too. It was good to have options. She said she was so proud that he was making the most of his studies, grasping opportunities never available to her or his father.

  The foot tremor got worse, so did the itch. There was no girlfriend, and there were no options. The graduate job market sucked. Studying in America was his dream, but a pipe dream unless he could raise some serious cash. And that assumed he could even get the grades, which at that moment seemed like a distant prospect. He’d made it all up to humour his parents.

  It wasn’t as if he could deflect their attention onto a brother or sister, since he had neither. He was an only child, a product of China’s one-child policy, and his parents had invested all their hopes in him. He got that. At least he did when he thought about it, if he thought about it at all. Which wasn’t very often. Mostly he just saw nagging.

  He pressed Reply, wrote “Hi Mum”, and then for five minutes sat looking at the screen. He couldn’t think of anything else to write, so saved the empty message to drafts. It would have to wait until he felt more inspired. Or creative.

  Instead he joined a university chat room that was running an online competition for the ugliest snowman.

  Beijing had just had a heavy snowfall, and Wang voted for a bug-eyed creature made of three big snowballs stacked on each other. Its out-sized head had dark shadows around small eyes made of bottle-tops, a carrot nose and a receding hairline, the colouring created from a liberal layering of mud.

  For good measure he posted a picture of the Prime Minister alongside the snowman with the caption, “Spot the difference”, thinking they really did look similar.

  Which then started an online trend, with each new ugly snow creature accompanied by some official or celebrity it most closely resembled. The thread was terminated and the chat deleted by internet censors soon afterwards, but only after Wang had commented online that they should be careful because the ugly snowmen might take offence at being unfairly likened to government officials.

  He looked again at the one that looked like the Prime Minister and thought he had a problem with his screen because the snow wasn’t white, but more dirty grey. But then he remembered this was Beijing snow, and he figured the snow picked up a lot of filth and toxins from the smog on its way down, before it settled on the ground. He shared that thought online too, together with a picture of a pair of disfigured zombie hands he’d grabbed from a movie poster.

  “Beware of the toxic snow!” He then wrote, “I went outside to have fun with snowballs and came home a zombie.”

  Then he found a video that seemed to have been taken by a passenger from an aircraft window. It showed a baggage handler lazily throwing boxes and bags onto a conveyor belt to the aircraft and mostly missing, the contents spilling all over the floor, and the man not giving a shit. Funny.

  He was alone in a two-room fifth-floor apartment he shared with two other students in a shabby low-rise block in a district called Haidian, in the north west of Beijing, the university district. This is where he called home, though for the most part he lived in a wild online world beyond the screens of his computers, where he could conquer just about any world he wanted, or at least have a fighting chance at doing so.

  He was tall and thin, topped by a mop of unkempt black hair and large black-rimmed glasses. On the rare occasions he did get to see his mother, she would tell him how unhealthy he looked and declare that he was incapable of looking after himself and needed a woman in his life, either her or the elusive girlfriend. Perhaps both. And as annoying as Wang found the lecture, his mother was not entirely wrong.

  He was wearing a thick black coat and a pair of fingerless gloves, the coat to keep him warm, the gloves to leave his fingers free to work his keyboards. A chunky radiator heated the room, but as the Beijing winter began to bite it struggled to counter the bitter cold that seeped in through a badly fitted window frame.

  Once he’d regained control of his trembling right foot, he put both feet up on the ledge below the window. He placed a battered laptop on one knee, while at the same time he pummelled the well-worn keys of his smartphone. There were broadening cracks on both screens.

  The laptop was a Lenovo think-pad, which used to be called an IBM before the Chinese company bought the American computer-maker. At least that’s what it said on the case. Wang’s model had been revved-up, souped-up and generally customised in every imaginable way, with the finest software that could be copied.

  The smartphone was new, but with plenty of mileage. It was a local model that looked a lot like an iPhone, but at a fraction of the price.

  The main room was lined on two sides by bunk beds, with sheets hung along the side of each bed for privacy, and also to shield those who
chose to sleep from those who didn’t, from the bright lights of computer screens working into the night.

  In the small kitchen, a sink was overflowing with used plastic lunch boxes and disposable wooden chopsticks. Hardened slithers of noodle clung to the boxes and to the sink.

  Wang looked out again at the smoggy smudge beyond his window, raised his phone and took a photograph. He then strapped on a soiled surgical-style mask, extended his arm, raising his eyebrows in a look of horror and took a selfie, which he uploaded to his Gasping Dragon account.

  He removed the mask and threw it towards the sink, but it ricocheted off a lunch box, scattering several cockroaches that had taken up residence inside. It was a PM2.5 Mega Blocker, a small logo said so on the front, and it was one of the products Wang sold through an online shop he ran with his roommates.

  The name of the mask referred to the tiny and deadliest particles of air pollution, able to penetrate deep into the lungs and blood stream, and leading to heart attacks and premature death, or so said a report he’d read, which he’d copied for the sales blurb, together with warnings that Beijing’s toxic air routinely reached levels multiple times the maximum recommended by international health experts.

  He thought that was a good sales pitch and the mask had sold well, at least initially. Unfortunately, Wang’s PM2.5 Mega Blocker was neither mega nor much of a blocker. The shop was being bombarded with complaints that it didn’t work. The roommates had a consistent approach to complaints. They ignored them. And after firing up his Lenovo, Wang began to delete the latest crop from their website.

  One buyer moaned that she might as well hold tissue paper to her mouth, which made Wang smile, since the Mega Blocker was largely that: tissue paper. There’d been so many complaints the roommates had decided to remove the mask from the shop, at least for the time being.

  The masks were made at a small Haidian workshop from which Wang and his roommates frequently sourced their products. There were few things that could not be copied or concocted by its feisty owner, a man they called Fatso.

  Wang and his roommates didn’t have a lot in common, but if there was one thing they did agree on, it was the need to make money. Lots of it. Wang had been telling the truth when he’d told his mother that he wanted to study in America. That bit he hadn’t made up. What he didn’t tell her was that he still had no offer of a place and no money to pay for it.

  The problem for the roommates was that the greater their entrepreneurial zeal, the further they seemed to fall into debt.

  Smog-protection gear had seemed a no-brainer. It had become big business since the smog became smog. For years the Communist Party had described it as fog, a weather issue, or a foreign conspiracy on account of a small air quality sensor on the roof of the US Embassy which tweeted regular and scary updates.

  Mostly, though, they’d called it an internet rumour.

  Until it became so bad it could no longer be denied.

  For Wang and his roommates, masks had been the easiest smog business to get into, though sales of air purifiers were also booming, as were pollution apps, which had become standard on any smartphone in China, where a check on smog levels was now routine most mornings.

  Wang looked at the screen of his phone, where a pollution app used as an icon the face of a woman with a mask. The badge on the icon said “428”, which it described as hazardous. “Stay indoors”, it recommended. The smog index had a scale of one to 500. When it exceeded 500, the air became too bad to be measured.

  There were more beeps from his phone. More alerts. The Communist Party had made a rare online statement in response to the weird security images he’d seen earlier, saying there was no truth in stories of what it called “something going wrong in the capital”. Not only were these rumours, they were scurrilous rumours.

  In Wang’s online world that meant they were probably true – or at least a little bit true. That something must have happened. Even though the images had largely been deleted, the Party’s denial fired up the online rumour mill.

  There’d been a terrorist attack, a bunch of machete-wielding Islamic militants on the loose. The roof of a hall had collapsed, trapping hundreds of people. There’d been an industrial disaster, a factory exploding. Poison gas had seeped in during a concert. A senior government official had been assassinated. There’d been a coup attempt.

  It had happened at the concert hall known as the Egg. Or possibly the airport. A luxury hotel maybe. The city’s main railway station. Possibly all four.

  Wang felt inspired. So he did a quick search online and found an old photograph of American tanks in the Iraqi desert, preparing for an assault on somewhere called Baghdad. He added a caption saying the People’s Liberation Army was crossing the Gobi Desert and bearing down on Beijing and posted it to The Gasping Dragon.

  He then took a glass cup to his kitchen for a refill with hot water, and was pleased to find there was still life in the congealed tea leaves that had been sitting for two days at the bottom of the glass.

  He was feeling creative now, so quickly went back to his phone, wanting to have some more fun. He opened The Gasping Dragon, and wrote:

  He looked at the words for a while. Zhongnanhai was the name of the Communist Party’s leadership compound next to the Forbidden City. He knew that any reference to that place risked being quickly deleted by the internet censors, who seemed to be busy that day.

  So he opened a file of clip art and replaced the word Zhongnanhai with a small picture of a cigarette, since this was also the name of one of China’s best-selling brands. Then he looked at it again.

  He liked that, and was about to share it when he got worried about aliens, thinking that might get blocked too. So he went back into his clip-art file and settled on a picture of a stick alien, with which he replaced the word ‘alien’ in his post.

  “That should work,” he said to himself. He looked again at his creation, smiled and then shared it.

  Wang slumped down in his chair, closed his eyes and within moments was asleep.

  While he slept, precisely one hour twenty-seven minutes and fourteen seconds later, an internet censor who knew a thing or two about cigarettes deleted his post. But by then it had been shared more than three million times.

  The alien had escaped.

  – 4 –

  Airpocalypse Pale Ale

  Chuck Drayton liked to tell anybody who would listen that the old mansion housing the US Consulate in Shanghai had once been the home of drug dealers and torturers. And he reckoned he could learn a thing a two from both when it came to convincing American businesses about the threat from Chinese hackers.

  He left the consulate through a series of clanking and pinging security doors leading out onto the tree-lined streets of the city’s old French Concession, wishing they’d all get hacked because maybe then the fuckers would take him seriously.

  He needed a beer after the disaster that had been his afternoon.

  He crossed the road, shaking off an old shoeshine man who chased his feet, trying to land a dollop of paste, and passed the nearby mansion that housed the Iranian consulate, right next door to the local branch of Hooters. He thought about slipping in there, maybe catch a mullah or two letting their hair down.

  The thing about the French Concession was the choice. Sure there was Hooters, and plenty of other tacky places, but there were also a whole host of cool boutiques, cafés and restaurants inside the rows of French-style mansions and shophouses.

  Plenty of simple places too, with local food.

  It took him five minutes to reach a pub, a microbrewery run by an enterprising guy from Minnesota, where he took a seat in a corner and ordered a pint of Airpocalypse Pale Ale. The beer was usually called Shanghai Wallop, a hoppy little brew, but they changed the name on polluted days and gave discounts linked to the air quality readings, which had reached unhealthy lev
els. Thirty per cent off.

  It was a gimmick, but it brought in the crowds. Air purifiers humming in the corner helped too.

  The consulate that morning had organised a seminar on cybercrime, and had invited a bunch of American business people based in Shanghai, as well as executives visiting from the States for some big trade fair and conference.

  They could have held it at the consular section, but that was a soulless place above a shopping mall on the Nanjing Road, the city’s main shopping street. It had been Drayton’s idea to use the mansion, which had history. They’d like that. It was more secure too, behind tall walls and even taller trees.

  And they’d recently had it renovated, bringing in American contractors, to preserve the beauty and get rid of the listening devices, at least the ones they could find.

  It had been built in 1921, French Renaissance-style, and was at first home to a big British trading company that had once grown rich shipping opium to China. During the cruelty and madness of the Cultural Revolution it had been a centre for what the Communist Party called “political education”, which to Drayton meant large-scale fingernail extraction.

  The turnout at the seminar had been pitiful. Twenty people, mostly looking like they’d rather be somewhere else.

  Still, he’d tried to grab their attention straight away, shock them a bit, saying that cybercrime was an epidemic costing the world economy US$600 billion every year.

  “Think about that,” he’d said. “And the bad guys are always one step ahead with this stuff.”

  He’d told them that in China cyber spying against US companies seemed like part of government policy, that copying was easier and cheaper than inventing.

  “We’re witnessing the biggest theft of knowledge ever,” he’d said, telling them there were two types of American company: those who’d been hacked, and those who’d been hacked but just didn’t yet know it.