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‘Hongbing. A clever enough tactic, but it didn’t help much. At the end of ’68 they came to arrest Hongbing’s mother for reactionary statements supposedly, though it was actually because quite a few Guards had been practising Cultural Revolution between her legs, and she wouldn’t accept that it helped the poor peasants one jot if people like them dragged her into bed. They took her off to a re-education camp, where they, well, re-educated her. She came back home very ill, and broken, not the same person as she had been. Chen De started teaching again, sporadically, taking enormous risks to do so, but mostly he worked in the factory and did his best to teach his boy as much as he could, in secret, for instance telling him how to live an ethical life and why – highly dangerous propaganda, I can tell you! Then in the mid-seventies they noticed his links to the old committee. By now Mao liked to spend most of his time with the daughters of the Revolution, making sure that none of them were virgins. Chen De was accused of counter-revolutionary tendencies, seven years late, very quick trial, then prison. Hongbing was left behind, a child alone, looking after his sick mother, so he took over the job in the tractor factory.’

Tu paused, pouring himself more tea.

‘Well, various things changed, some for the better, some for the worse. His mother died, and then Mao soon after, Deng was rehabilitated from having been in disgrace, and Hongbing’s father could teach again – as long as he stuck to the Party line, of course. The boy grows up caught between ideology and despair. Since he has no role-models around him, he falls in love with cars, which were very rare indeed at the time. You can’t make a living from something like that out in the country, so when he’s seventeen he moves to Shanghai, which is as fun-loving as Beijing is sclerotic. He takes a string of odd jobs and falls in with a group of students who are tending the delicate shoots of democratic thought in post-revolutionary China, and they introduce him to books by Wei Jingsheng and Fang Lizhi – the Fifth Modernisation, opening of society, all those enticing, forbidden thoughts.’

‘Hongbing was a democracy activist?’

‘Oh, yes!’ Tu nodded enthusiastically. ‘He was up there in the front line, Owen my friend. A fighter! 20 December 1986, seventy thousand people took to the streets in Shanghai to protest against the way the Party had manipulated appointments to the People’s Congress, and Hongbing was at their head. It’s a miracle that they didn’t
fling him behind bars right then. Meanwhile he’d also got a job at a repairs garage, fixing up cadre cars, making influential friends. This was where he lost the last of his illusions, since the new brand of Chinese managers could have invented corruption. Well, never mind that. Tell me, does 15 April 1989 mean anything to you?’

‘4 June does.’

‘Yes, but it all began earlier. Hu Yaobang died, a politician the students had always seen as their friend, especially after the Party made him their own internal scapegoat for the disturbances of ’86. Thousands of people march in Beijing to remember him and pay their respects on Tiananmen Square, and the old demands come up again: democracy, freedom, all the stuff that enrages the old men in power. Then criticism of the regime spreads to other cities, Shanghai as well, of course, and Hongbing raises a clenched fist once more and organises protests. Deng refuses dialogue with the students, the demonstrators go on hunger strike, Tiananmen becomes the centre of something like a huge carnival, there’s something in the air, a mood of change, a happening, and Hongbing wants to see it for himself. By now there are a million people on the square. Journalists from all over the world, and the last straw comes when Mikhail Gorbachev arrives with his ideas of perestroika and glasnost. The Party is in a tight corner indeed.’

‘And Hongbing’s in the thick of it.’

‘For all that, it could have ended peacefully. By the end of May most of the Beijing students want to wind the movement up, happy to have humiliated Deng, but the new arrivals like Hongbing insist that all demands must be met, and that escalates things. The rest is well known – I don’t have to tell you about the Tiananmen Massacre. And once again, Hongbing has the most incredible luck. Nothing happens to him because his name’s not on any of the blacklists. He went back to Shanghai, with the last of his illusions in shreds, decided to concentrate on his job instead and made it to deputy foreman. It’s grown up to be a lovely big garage over all these years, the nouveaux riches have turned their backs on bicycles and nobody knows cars like Hongbing does. Every now and again he gets a trip to the brothel as a gift from a customer, the upper cadre invite him for meals, he’s a good-looking lad, some fat cat functionaries wouldn’t much mind if he got their daughters pregnant.’

‘So he’s adapted to the times.’

‘Up until winter of ’92, which is when Chen De hangs himself. He’s spent all those years keeping his head down, and then he strings himself up. Depression. His wife had died, you see, and the Revolution had destroyed his family. Hongbing explodes with self-loathing. He hates his own name, he hates it when his drinking buddies boast and blather and yell
ganbei
, profiteers who used to be interested in the democracy movement but have sold out. He wants to make his voice heard. The
year before, the dissident Wang Wanxing had been arrested for unfurling a banner on the anniversary of the Tiananmen Massacre, right in the middle of the square. It called for the rehabilitation of the demonstrators who had been killed. So the Tiananmen anniversary comes round again, 4 June 1993, and Hongbing demonstrates for Wang’s release along with a couple of like-minded souls. He reckons that this is a small thing to ask, modest enough, that it might have better chances of success than always pissing up the same tree and shouting that the whole system should change. And lo and behold, someone takes notice of him. The wrong kind, unfortunately.’

‘He’s arrested.’

‘On the spot. And this is where things get really despicable, although you might say that it’s all been quite despicable enough. You’d be wrong. So far, it’s just been brutal.’

Tu paused, while the sun climbed higher and flooded the Thames with light.

‘For many years there was a pretty little Buddhist temple a few kilometres outside Hangzhou, in an idyllic spot between rice fields and tea plantations. Until they tore it down to build something in its place that was deemed more useful to Chinese society.’

‘An ankang.’

Jericho felt his tiredness vanish. He had heard about the ankangs, though he had never seen one. The literal meaning of ankang was
safety, peace and health
, but in fact these were the police psychiatric prisons.

‘The ankang at Hangzhou was the first psychiatric clinic of its kind in China,’ Tu said. ‘Based on the belief that there is one perfect ideology, and that anybody who questions it must be suffering from some sort of mental illness, either acute or chronic. Just like you’d have to be mentally ill to believe that the Earth is a cube, or that your spouse is really a dog in disguise. Taking the Soviet Union as their example, China had always made a habit of declaring that its dissidents were crazy, but the Party only gave the psychiatric clinics that cute little name –
ankang
– at the end of the eighties. Up till then, they had operated in secret.’

‘Tell me, that dissident whom Hongbing was trying to get freed from prison, Wang Wanxing – wasn’t he in an ankang as well?’

‘For thirteen years, and then in the end he was deported in 2005. Up until then, there had only ever been rumours about the ankangs, dark mutterings that they had less to do with caring for the mentally ill than humiliating people who were of sound mind. That was when a debate began, very tentative at first, and it didn’t stop the Party from opening more of these so-called clinics. There’s a constant supply of people with paranoid delusions of human rights or schizophrenic beliefs about free elections. The world is full of lunatics, Owen, you just have to pay close
attention: trade unionists, democrats, religious believers, people presenting petitions and lodging complaints about the demolitions and urban planning policy in Shanghai, for instance, and demanding outlandish things like citizen consultation. Not to mention the real crazies, the ones who think that our perfect society could harbour corruption.’

Jericho kept quiet. Tu slurped at his tea, as though to wash the taste of the word ankang from his mouth.

‘Well, anyway, since Wanxing was deported in 2005 the victims have begun to speak up for themselves. Early 2005 the People’s Congress even passed a law forbidding police torture, though this was a farce of course. It’s still standard operating practice to work suspects over until they sign some kind of confession as proof of mental illness, then you can torture merrily away and call it medical treatment. There are about a hundred ankangs in China, and these days there’s a lot of public debate and international pressure because of them, but back when Hongbing was admitted to the Hangzhou clinic it was still 1993 and there was no such thing as a right of appeal. There was a red banner hanging in the plane trees in the grounds, a very pretty thing to look at, saying
A healthy mind in a healthy body means lifelong happiness
, the usual cynical vocabulary of the gulag. Hongbing gets a diagnosis: he’s suffering from paranoid psychosis and political monomania. You won’t find a doctor outside China who’s heard of either of these conditions, they’re not on any international list, but that’s just more proof of how stupid foreigners are. The clinical assessment is all couched in the most harmless terms, it says that Hongbing makes a good impression, his mental condition is stable, he does as he’s told, he listens to the radio, he likes reading, he’s keen to help, it’s just that – and I’m quoting word for word here – he displays
massive impairment in logical thought
as soon as talk turns to politics. He’s quite obviously mentally disturbed and his thought processes display clear signs of megalomania, affective aggression and a pathologically overdeveloped will. The doctors prescribe a course of pharmaceutical treatment and close supervision to bring poor Hongbing back to his wits, and with a stroke of their pen, he has no more rights.’

‘Couldn’t he talk to a lawyer, at least?’ Jericho asked, nonplussed. ‘There must have been some way to get his case heard.’

‘But, Owen.’ – Tu had started eating the nibbles again, scooping up another handful just as soon as he’d swallowed the first – ‘that would have been a nonsense. I mean, how can a madman contest the fact that he’s mad? After all, everybody knows that loonies always think they’re the only sane ones. There’s no way to appeal against a police finding that you’re mad; the only people who decide how long you’re detained are the police psychiatrists and functionaries. That’s what makes it
so unbearable for the victims. In a prison or a work camp, at least you know how long they’ve sent you down for, but when you’re in an ankang it’s entirely up to your tormentors. But do you know what’s truly despicable here?’

Jericho shook his head.

‘That most of the inmates really are mentally ill. That’s cruel, eh? Just imagine how a healthy person suffers when he’s surrounded by others who are seriously disturbed, criminals, threatening him the whole time. Not even half a year after admission, Hongbing sees two inmates murdered, and the staff stand by and watch. Night after night he forces himself to stay awake, for fear he could be next. Then there are other prisoners, pardon me, patients, who are perfectly sane, just like he is. Doesn’t matter. They all have to go through the same hell. They’re given regular therapy, the chemical cosh, insulin shock, electroshock therapy. You’d never believe all the cures they have for a sick mind! They stub their cigarettes out on your skin, genitals preferably, they torture you with hot wires. Extreme heat, sleep deprivation, dunking in ice-cold water, and beatings, always the beatings. Troublemakers get chained to the bed and tortured till they pass out, for instance by sticking a needle into their upper lip and then passing a current through – they vary the voltage, switching from high to low so that you can’t get used to the pain. Sometimes, if the doctors and nurses feel in the mood, all the inmates in a section have to submit to punishment, whether or not they’ve done anything wrong. Given this level of expert care, many patients die of heart attacks. One that Hongbing had befriended was so desperate that he went on hunger strike. So they chained him to the bed as well, and then the mentally ill inmates were told to force-feed him, under staff supervision. But how do you go about that? Since nobody actually taught them what to do, they just force the poor guy’s jaws open and tip the liquid food into him until he suffocates, but at least he’s eaten. The death certificate called it a heart attack. Nobody was charged. Hongbing was lucky, if you want to call it that: they didn’t use the worst tortures on him. There are some car-crazy cadre members in Shanghai who put in a word on his behalf, discreetly, so that they wouldn’t draw reprisals onto themselves, but it was enough to make sure he got relatively privileged treatment. He gets a cell to himself, he’s allowed to read and watch television. Three times a day he gets a dose of narcoleptics, with very pronounced side-effects, and all the while many of the doctors are quietly letting him know that they think he’s entirely healthy. Hongbing hides the pills under his upper lip and then gets rid of them down the loo, then he gets insulin shock therapy as punishment and lies in a coma for days. Another time he’s strapped down, the doctor puts on a pair of gloves with metal plates on them and puts his hand on his forehead, boom, there’s an almighty bang and he can’t see or hear. Electroshock therapy, this time as a punishment
for being Hongbing. It’s always booming and banging in the ankang – you can’t get a wink of sleep for all the screams of pain. The patients hide under the beds, in the toilet, under the wash-basin, no use any of it. If you’ve been chosen, they’ll find you. Oh, we’re out of nibbles.’

It took Jericho a moment to react. In a trance, he stood up, went to the bar and came back with a couple of bags of crisps.