The Shanghai Union of Industrial Mystics (27 page)

If that was it, it would only be a temporary problem, as it was just a matter of time before the Taiwan issue resolved itself. China’s military leaders were acquiring foreign arms as fast as they could, aiming to hit ‘the crossover point’ as soon as possible—the point at which the People’s Liberation Army was more powerful than the Taiwanese defence force, even with equipment from Western allies. Some said that China had already achieved it; others said it would be a year or two before the balance was clearly in the Motherland’s favour. At that point, the leaders’ noble dream of one China could be realised: the Taiwanese would have no choice. This was important to many people in power, particularly the elderly, but she had to admit that it meant little to younger people.

Commander Zhang was a Communist Party member, but her card was in her breast pocket wallet, not her heart. There was a crucial two centimetres of difference. The ideological content of membership had somehow become detached and drifted away from its practical considerations. There had been quiet but important changes over the past decade. The Party card had begun to identify not your political affiliation but your age, sex and job. The vast majority of members—some said 80 per cent—were more than thirty-five years old. More than 80 per cent were men: membership had little attraction for women. Also, you had to be a member if you wanted to achieve anything in the Chinese civil service. It was almost a union card for government officials and army officers. So a Party card almost inevitably meant old, male and employed by the authorities. In her case—she was twenty-nine, the youngest commander they had ever had—in her case only the third of the three typical member characteristics was accurate.

The Party was changing. Every year or two campaigns would be launched to attract younger members, more females, and people in private industry. These programs usually worked. People quickly signed up once they heard what was on offer. There was a host of privileges, some official, some unwritten, that accumulated to Party members. Your children got into better schools, you heard what was happening before ordinary people did, and you had a much better choice of jobs. And most importantly of all, you were part of the network. You were linked in to the circles of people who had power—and that meant the military and paramilitary forces, and their allies.

The Americans did not understand this, nor did they understand how China’s armed forces worked. Yes, they ostensibly guarded the borders of the country. But they also guarded the ideological borders of the Party. If there was dissent in the country, that was equivalent to the borders of the Party being attacked, so of course the dissent was snuffed out with great force. Taiwan and Hong Kong were on the fringes of the mainland in terms of both physical borders and ideological borders—so it was no wonder that both were kept on short leashes.

When Commander Zhang, who was from Nanning City, had originally moved to Shanghai, she had thought about joining the People’s Liberation Army and becoming part of the 2.5 million-strong green-uniformed body that makes the biggest contribution to keeping the Party in power. But she found its business interests too anti-ideological: what was an army body doing running nightclubs and factories? It had been trying to cut back on its business interests for years, but the clean-up was going slowly. As a result, the PLA’s prime motivations were blurred. She felt there was a lack of professionalism in the way it was managed. You run an army differently from the way you run a business empire. So instead, she had joined the People’s Armed Police, a smaller body spun off from the PLA in 1983, but with key tasks such as guarding important government institutions. She had quickly risen to being a senior office in the Special Police, a unit of the Internal Guards Corps, although for this mission they were sharing duties with the State Guests Protection Unit.

Both the PLA and the People’s Armed Police were managed by the Central Military Affairs Commission, an eleven-man group made up of senior generals plus the most important Party leaders. The small print in the articles said that the Commission’s chairman was elected by the National People’s Congress, a body which represented the masses. But that was a joke. The hot seat always went to the Party’s top man. Mao Zedong, a charismatic but fatally flawed military leader, held the chairmanship of the Commission for years, and passed it on to Deng Xiaoping, another former soldier. Deng held on to power even after resigning as head of the Communist Party of China. How did he do it? He kept the seat of chairman of the Commission. When Jiang Zemin took the job in 1989, and Hu Jintao in 2004, there was concern that they lacked the military background necessary for the role. But both increased military budgets, ensuring that they kept the support of the real power base in China.

Americans always overestimated the importance of politics and politicians and political systems like democracy. In China, power was what counted, and the Central Military Affairs Commission was where the power lay.

Commander Zhang’s phone rang. ‘Yes?’

‘There’s a bomb in my elephant: Rong has never heard it either. He thinks it is something sexual. He says it is almost definitely offensive. Do not say yes. Do not repeat it to anyone else. I suggest you don’t reply or react in any way.’

‘Thank you, Wu
lao-shi
.’ Zhang put the phone down and tried to dismiss Dooley’s barked words. But the memory of the call would not leave her. There was an urgency in the American agent’s voice that she found impossible to put aside. And the fact that he was talking about cancelling the event— how could he joke about such a thing just minutes before the two Presidents arrived? Perhaps the man was on drugs. Amercians did that sort of thing all the time, she knew. Even former president Bill Clinton liked to talk about inhaling drugs, didn’t he? And wasn’t it common knowledge that George W Bush was an alcoholic? Maybe Dooley was high on something. After all, had this been a serious emergency, the alarm would have been set off and sirens would be shaking the entire Shanghai Grand Theatre.

The alarm went off and sirens shook the entire Shanghai Grand Theatre.

In a lake city in the fifth century, a rebel warlord named Xie
killed the king and took his palace.

He searched for the ring bearing the royal seal but could
not find it. He tore the building to dust but it was not there.

His men even searched the stools of the young princes in case
one of them had eaten it. But they had not.

The judges ruled that since no one had the royal seal, the
land could have no king. Darkness settled on the kingdom.

The princes lived in the dust with only the birds to talk to.

One year later, the eldest prince turned up at the court
with the ring and the judges proclaimed him king. The
judges asked him where he had hidden it.

He said: ‘I did not hide it. I put the ring on the foot
of the bar-headed lake goose. Every year the geese fly five
thousand li away for the winter. But they always return to
their original homes.’

Blade of Grass, even people who live in the dust can get
friends in high places, and sometimes unexpected ones.

Remember the saying of wise man Mo Zhou: ‘You can
go no further than halfway into a dark forest: from then on
you are coming out of the other side.’

From ‘Some Gleanings of Oriental Wisdom’
by CF Wong.

The problem they had had outside the theatre was repeating itself at Renmin Park Gate Number Five, through which they were trying to leave the area: individuals and families were surging around them, wanting to touch the elephant.

‘Don’t touch,’ Joyce said. ‘Bomb inside. Big bomb. Bang. I mean
baang
.’ But the crowds smiled up at her and ignored everything she said. What was the Mandarin phrase? Already she had forgotten it. She shouted down to Wong: ‘A farm. Fields. That’s what we need. Crops. They go for miles, and there’s no one around. Paddy fields, maybe. Where’s the nearest farm?’

Wong grimaced and gave her his how-stupid-can-you-get look. ‘This is city centre. This is middle of biggest city in China. There is no farms here.’

‘Oh. Any other parks?’

‘No empty ones.’

‘So what’s plan B?’

‘What?’

Joyce closed her eyes again. ‘What are we going to do?’ she said quietly to herself. She decided she needed to try again to visualise the answer. She placed her palms over her eyes to create true darkness. In her mind’s eye she saw a picture of crowds of people milling around—and then she saw a truck speeding along with the elephant inside, rushing past all the crowds, heading for the wide open spaces. It was a low-sided vehicle, and the elephant was happily waving its trunk at the people they passed. They were approaching a massive, clean, flower-lined animal hospital away from the city. That’s what they needed: a large vehicle to take them to an animal sanctuary filled with veterinary surgeons pulling on their gloves ready for an operation. ‘We need a van or a truck or a pickup or a horse box. See if you can hire one. How much time do we have left?’

‘Forty minutes, thirty seconds.’

Wong liked the idea—it seemed the only option, and a similar notion had occurred to him as soon as he realised how crowded the park was: they definitely needed vehicular help. So he stepped into the road near the north exit to the park and started examining vehicles rolling slowly past. By standing in the middle of the road and waving a handful of banknotes, he managed to persuade the seventh large vehicle which passed him to halt. It was a heavy van, fortunately with a low floor and a high ceiling. The driver, naked from the waist up despite the cool temperature, leaned out, a cheap cigarette attached to his lower lip. There followed a rapid conversation in Mandarin and Shanghainese which involved a lot of numbers and pointing to the elephant.

The phone Joyce had acquired from the fruit-seller rang. It was Linyao, who had slipped away during the panic at the theatre. ‘Joyce, it’s me. Where are you?’

‘We went into Renmin Park, just behind the theatre. Now we’ve headed out of the park again, out of Gate Number Five. Come and meet us here. We don’t know what to do. We need your help. Wong’s trying to get someone to take the elephant away from the city centre in a truck.’ By the time she had given directions to Linyao, agreement had been reached between Wong and the truck driver. The feng shui man looked unhappy—clearly the price had been high. ‘They’ll take us,’ he told Joyce.

‘Thank God you found an empty one.’

‘It’s not empty. That’s why I have to pay so much.’ He shook his head and groaned out loud, suffering physical pain as he pressed a pile of banknotes into the driver’s hands.

The men in the cabin quickly unloaded wardrobes and other furniture from the van and left it on the side of the road. One of the younger men was assigned to stand guard over it. The others urged Joyce to get the elephant inside.

It was not easy. The sickly beast did not want to enter a hot, dark, noisome, small room on such a cool and pleasant April day. But one of the men had a bunch of green bananas in his lunch box, which eventually lured the creature inside. The men slammed the door shut behind the beast and Wong and McQuinnie hopped into the cabin with the driver and his brother.

‘Where to?’ the driver asked.

‘Out of town,’ Wong said.

‘Which way?’

‘Any way. The quickest way.’ The feng shui master decided that it would not be wise to tell the men that they had just accepted the job of transporting a soon-to-explode bomb, so merely impressed upon them the importance of getting the elephant to some open air as quickly as possible.

‘We need to get there in forty-two minutes,’ he said, ‘so drive.’

The men turned the truck left into Huanghe Lu, heading north, and stopped dead, caught in a traffic jam. Everything came to a standstill for two minutes.

Just as Wong was going out of his mind with impatience, there was a slight movement: each vehicle advanced 20 metres or so, and then the traffic stopped again.

One more minute passed.

‘
Cheese
,’ whined Joyce.

‘Yes, cheese,’ Wong agreed. Why this extremely common English expression was not included in his book
Advanced
English Idioms Book 2
, he had no idea.

He kept looking at his watch. It was awful how quickly time passed—and how slowly they moved. A metre. Then two metres. Then a whole minute with no movement at all. They had thirty-nine minutes left. And then thirty-eight. And then twenty-nine. And they had moved less than 50 metres from the park gates.

Cars, Wong decided, were the root of all societal evil. It was not money. It was not the love of money. It was cars. You could see this very clearly in China, which had developed a taste for the motor car later than most other countries. Cars introduced two great evils. The first was the removal of all relationships outside the family. In foot-powered communities, people fulfilled their needs from their neighbours: people within walking or cycling distance. They bought their rice or pancakes or
choi sum
from the farmer next door, their child was taught by the local teacher down the street, and the shoemaker around the corner made their footwear. And they in turn bought things from you. The interrelationships were vital, strong and were renewed every day. But once cars entered the picture, people drove to fashionable stores five or ten or a hundred minutes away, and bought things from people they did not know. They soon forgot the names of the vendors in their own villages. Soon, no one knew anyone outside their immediate families. Strangers dealt only with strangers. People no longer knew their neighbours. Natural human communities broke down. This was a huge, negative change which could be seen happening in rural villages, and blame for it could be squarely laid at the feet of Western capitalist car-makers such as Henry Ford.