The Fat Years (26 page)

He Dongsheng had begun to pay attention.

“We want to live, too,” Lao Chen continued, “and we can only live if you live.”

“So,” said He Dongsheng, “if you want to live, then let me go immediately.”

“Don’t be so hasty,” said Lao Chen. “If we just casually let you go, you wouldn’t just shrug your shoulders and act as though nothing had happened; you would turn around and send somebody to arrest us. So even if we let you go this very minute, we have already committed a capital offense. It would be hard for us to escape execution; and even if you spoke up for us and we avoided the death sentence, we still wouldn’t escape being punished for a major crime. No, we don’t need your forgiveness now, and we’re not asking you for an extrajudicial favor.”

“Then what the hell
do
you want?” asked He Dongsheng.

“We just want you to understand that we are all now in a ‘live together or die together’ situation. Live, and we all live, or die, and we all die—and the choice is up to you. Do you want to hear my explanation?”

“Let’s hear it!”

“First, let me explain the die-together part,” said Lao Chen. “Consider for a moment that our camera and sound recorder are all set up and connected to the Internet and to our cell phones; all we have to do is press a button and they will all start broadcasting. If we do this, the whole world will know that you have been kidnapped. No doubt you would soon be rescued and we would be up shit creek, but how do you think your precious Communist Party would treat you after that? How would the Party interpret this absurd situation? No matter how any of us explained it to the Party, who among them would believe our
unbelievable
reason for kidnapping you? All our interrogators would wonder about the ‘genuine’ reasons behind your case. Leaving aside for the moment the fact that your nocturnal car rides around Beijing would lead to some wild speculation, do you think your great Communist Party would ever trust or employ you again? Of course, before we got arrested, we would broadcast as much genuine and false written material as possible, detailing how you revealed state secrets for us to send out on the Internet. Don’t you think that your official career would then bid you an abrupt adieu? You’re better informed than we are on the modus operandi of your precious Party. You figure it out.”

“You’ll definitely die if you do that,” said He Dongsheng.

“We’re done for now, with one foot in the grave already. If we die, though, we’ll have you buried with us; even if we don’t actually kill you, we
will
ruin your official career.”

“Ha!” laughed He Dongsheng. “So you call that dying together?”

“Exactly,” said Lao Chen. “You could also call it mutual suicide.”

“What about the live-together part?”

“First off, in a minute we’ll ask you some questions, and you will answer every one of them to our satisfaction. If you do, then in the morning we’ll simply let you go.”

“Tomorrow morning, you’ll just let me go? I don’t believe you!”

“It doesn’t matter whether you believe it or not,” said Lao Chen. “What matters is whether or not you’re willing to play this game of live or die together. If you’re not, then you’re choosing for us all to die together. We’re going to die anyway, but first we’ll kill off your official career; later on, we’ll decide if we want to really kill you as well. If you’re willing to play, it will be game over when the sun comes up. You can drive your Land Rover home as usual. At night when you can’t sleep, you can go out and drive all around town, take a nap when you’re tired, and return home when the sun comes up. You know that others also know that this Politburo member regularly stays out all night, so no one will ask any questions.”

“And later on?” asked He Dongsheng.

“Later on? There isn’t any later on. That is, you continue on your glorious road and we continue on our ordinary paths; we keep our lives and you keep your official position. Nobody will say a word about what took place tonight; after tonight, every one of us keeps mum, as though nothing ever happened.”

“How can I believe you won’t talk?”

“Obviously, you don’t believe we won’t talk, but if we said anything we would probably be hunted down and executed; so to save our own lives, we won’t talk. On the other hand, we don’t much believe that you won’t try to take revenge on us. After you go home, you might still worry about us and send someone to kill us to keep us quiet. Killing someone to keep them quiet requires recruiting others to do the killing, and one of us might still escape long enough to broadcast tonight’s events on the Internet for all the world to see. There are dangers either way. You can figure out the odds yourself. You can surely understand that, rationally, the best thing to protect our own interests is for
all
of us to maintain complete silence and not make any unnecessary moves, or attract any unwanted attention. In other words, both sides should abide strictly by this ‘live or die together’ agreement.”

“Rationally? Agreement?” exclaimed He Dongsheng. “You seem to have too much faith in human nature.”

“I am willing to take a gamble,” said Lao Chen. “Are you?”

“You know the story of the frog who carried a scorpion across the river, don’t you? The scorpion could not help himself from killing the frog, and then it drowned—that was its nature.”

“True enough, true enough. Both sides are taking a risk. I have to admit that this is a dangerous gambit that we are forced to employ. If there was another way, I would not want to risk my life in such a dangerous fashion. Four lives balanced against your official position. I’d have to say that we are risking much more than you are. To tell you the truth, I suggested this plan because I couldn’t think of any other strategy that would meet the demands of both sides in this situation. Brother Dongsheng, can you come up with a better win-win solution? Take your time and think it over.”

He Dongsheng thought the whole situation was preposterous. But he was not in the middle of a dream. This “live or die together” idea was a mug’s game, but Lao Chen and the others seemed to be quite serious about it. They are risking their lives to ask me a few questions and will then let me go. What on earth are these lunatics thinking? But it looks like all I have to do is agree to play the game and I can stay alive, at least temporarily. After I get out, I’ll have the initiative and everything will be easier to handle.

“You can ask your questions,” said He Dongsheng, “but I can’t reveal any state secrets.”

“That’s not up to you,” said Lao Chen. “We’re not here to haggle over prices like we do on Xiushui Street. The four of us have risked everything, and we want you to answer all our questions until we are completely satisfied. We have already put aside all considerations of death, so if we are not fully satisfied with your answers, this would all become meaningless.
We are all prepared to see the jade smashed to pieces and face death together. Besides, Brother Dongsheng, whether or not you give away any state secrets, if your honorable Party suspects you of doing so, then you
have
given away state secrets. If we broadcast this scene up to this point only, I think you would never get clean even if you jumped into the Yellow River. ‘Live or die together’ is a complete, indivisible, perfectly unbreakable circle of agreement. Both sides either abide by it completely, or the deal is off. What do you say?”

“I have to leave at daybreak,” said He Dongsheng, afraid that if he stalled any longer Lao Chen might change his mind.

“It’s a promise.”

“Give me another glass of water.”

As Zhang Dou gave He Dongsheng another glass of water, Lao Chen took the opportunity to give instructions to Little Xi and Fang Caodi. Speaking also for He Dongsheng’s benefit, he said, “Whatever is asked and answered here tonight is only for the five of us to hear. None of it is ever to be leaked to the outside world, even if you think it should be. This is the key element of the ‘live or die together’ agreement.”

No one responded.

“You all agreed already,” said Lao Chen, “to follow my instructions even if I told you to do something you didn’t want to do. So you’ll do as I say, okay?”

They nodded.

“What are you waiting for?” asked He Dongsheng. “If you don’t ask me something soon, it will be daylight. Fire away.”

The interrogation: He Dongsheng began to speak, and once he started talking, he had an irrepressible charisma. His listeners occasionally interrupted him with a question.

In the last twenty years, Chinese official discourse has hardly ever mentioned the events of 1989, as though not mentioning them would make them disappear from history. In order to avoid trouble, popular discourse also avoided discussing the entire year of 1989. Even when recalling events of the 1980s, discussions always ended with the end of 1988. So everybody joked that in China 1988 was immediately followed by 1990.

One year was not to be mentioned. Had it disappeared?

For some people that year was an indelible memory. It was just like the title of a book commemorating the June 4, 1989, Tiananmen Massacre by the Hong Kong Journalists’ Association:
The People Will Never Forget.

But will the people really never forget?

For the great majority of young mainland Chinese, the events of the Tiananmen Massacre have never entered their consciousness; they have never seen the photographs and news reports about it, and even fewer have had it explained to them by their family or teachers. They have not forgotten it; they have never
known
anything about it. In theory, after a period of time has elapsed, an entire year can indeed disappear from history—because no one says anything about it.

According to He Dongsheng, 2009 was the ninetieth anniversary of the 1919 May Fourth Movement, the sixtieth anniversary of the establishment of the Chinese communist government, the fiftieth anniversary of the Dalai Lama’s escape from China, the twentieth anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Incident, and the tenth anniversary of the suppression of the Falun Gong Movement. The so-called 90-60-50-20-10 anniversaries made everybody very nervous. So people jokingly made another suggestion: from now on, after eight we should just go straight to ten; after 2018, let’s just go on to 2020.

The fourth of June 1989 had little direct connection, however, to He Dongsheng and his generation of Communist Party and national leaders. They had all risen into the government’s inner circles of power after 1995, and were not tainted by the “original sin” of June 4, 1989. After the events of 2009 had passed, He Dongsheng believed that that year had been alarming but not dangerous, certainly not as fraught with danger as 2008. A couple of years later, the external situation suddenly changed again, when the world economy entered a new period of crisis that was certain to unleash long-suppressed internal contradictions. Added to that was the party-state’s imminent change of leadership in 2012, and that was the period when the Communist Party’s mettle was most severely tested.

From 2008 onward, a whole series of incidents took place: a riot in Wan-an in Guizhou Province of over ten thousand people accusing the police of covering up the death of a young girl; the July 2009 riot of over ten thousand Tonghua Iron and Steel workers in Jilin Province, against a takeover by a privately owned company; the June 2009 Shishou City riot in Hubei Province due to the suspicious death of Tu Yuangao, a chef at the Yonglong Hotel, and to widespread anger at alleged drug trafficking and official corruption. Government-reported “large-scale collective public security incidents” of over five hundred people had risen to over a hundred thousand a year. All these incidents made He Dongsheng realize that local governments were very weak in the face of collective protest riots. In Wan-an, the government and police simply threw down their weapons and ran away; and in Tonghua, if the central-government machine had gone into action, it would have had to suppress industrial workers. If the Communist Party suppressed industrial workers, what would become of its legitimacy?

After these incidents, He Dongsheng was assigned to a top-secret small group in the central government tasked with drawing up contingency plans for any future large-scale disturbance. They came up with a number of proposals. At the same time, Party Central held a series of joint planning meetings with the military, the Public Security police, and the special armed police, a force organized in the wake of the Tiananmen Incident. They also brought several thousand county-level Party secretaries and leading Public Security Bureau cadres to Beijing to undergo intensive training.

In 2009, He Dongsheng was already clearly aware that the world economy was going to experience another crisis even greater than the one before. If the Chinese government handled it properly, though, it might actually present just the right set of circumstances for China to find a solution to its long-unresolved internal problems, and turn a danger into an opportunity. He Dongsheng even believed that whether or not China could enter an era of ascendancy earlier than expected depended on only two things: the international situation, and the appearance of some stroke of luck in China’s internal situation that would allow the government to take full advantage of the opportunity to bring order out of chaos, and complete all the unfinished business of the last thirty-plus years of “Reform and Opening.” What he meant by a stroke of luck was, to put it frankly, a major crisis. Only a major crisis could induce the ordinary Chinese people to accept willingly a huge government dictatorship.