The Man From Beijing (38 page)

And that is precisely what was happening one winter’s day in 2006. Early in the morning a number of black cars drove in at high speed through the gates in the wall, which closed again immediately. A fire was burning in the largest of the conference rooms. Nineteen men and three women were gathered there. Most of them were over sixty, the youngest about thirty-five. Everybody knew everybody else. As a group they formed the elite that in practice governed China, both politically and economically. The president and the commander-in-chief of the armed forces were absent. But delegates would report back to both when the conference was over and present the proposals they had all agreed upon.

There was only one item on the agenda for today. It had been formulated as a matter of great secrecy, and all those present had been sworn to silence. Anybody who broke that oath need have no doubt that he or she would disappear from public life without a trace.

In one of the private rooms a man in his forties was pacing restlessly. In his hand was the speech he had been working on for months, which he was due to deliver this morning. He knew that it was one of the most important documents ever to be presented to the inner circle of the Communist Party since China had become independent in 1949.

Yan Ba, who worked in futurology at Beijing University had been given the assignment by the president of China himself two years previously. From that day onward he had been relieved of all his professorial duties and assigned a staff of thirty assistants. The whole project had been shrouded in maximum secrecy and supervised by the president’s personal security service. The speech had been written on just one computer to which only Yan Ba had access. Nobody else had seen the text he was now holding in his hand.

Not a single sound penetrated the walls. According to rumour the room had once been a bedroom used by Mao Zedong’s wife, Jiang Qing; after Mao’s death she had been arrested together with three others, the so-called Gang of Four, put on trial and had later committed suicide in prison. She had demanded absolute silence in whatever room she slept in. Builders and decorators had always travelled in advance to insulate her bedroom, and soldiers had been sent out to kill any dogs that might bark within hearing range of any temporary accommodation she was staying in.

Yan Ba checked his watch. It was ten minutes to nine. He would begin his lecture at precisely a quarter past. At seven o’clock he had taken a pill prescribed by his doctor. It was supposed to make him calm but not drowsy. He could feel that the nervousness really was ebbing away. If what was written on the papers in his hand became reality, there would be earth-shattering consequences throughout the world, not merely in China. But nobody would ever know that he was the person who had devised and formulated the proposals that had been put into practice. He would simply return to his professorship and his students. His salary would increase, and he had already moved into a larger flat in central Beijing. The pledge of secrecy he had signed would affect him for the rest of his life. Responsibility, criticism and perhaps also praise for what happened would go to the relevant politicians to whom he, like all other citizens, owed allegiance.

He sat by the window and drank a glass of water. Big changes do not take place on the battlefield, he thought. They happen behind locked doors. Alongside the leaders of the United States and Russia, the president of China is the most powerful man in the world. He must now make some momentous decisions. The people assembled here are his ears. They will listen to what Yan Ba has to say and make their judgements. The outcome will slowly seep out from the Yellow Emperor to the world at large.

Yan Ba was reminded of a journey he had made a few years earlier with a geologist friend. They had travelled to the remote mountainous regions where the source of the Yangtze River is located. They had followed the winding and increasingly narrow stream to a point where it was no more than a trickle of water.

His friend had put down his foot and said: ‘Now I am stopping the mighty Yangtze in its tracks.’

The memory of that incident had dogged him throughout the laborious months during which he had been working on his lecture about the future of China. He was now the person with the power to change the course of the mighty river.

Yan Ba picked up a list of the delegates who had begun to assemble in the conference room. He was familiar with all the names and never ceased to be astonished that they were gathering to listen to him. This was a group of the most powerful people in China: politicians, a few military men, economists, philosophers and not least the so-called grey mandarins who devised political strategies that were constantly being measured against reality. There were also a few of the country’s leading commentators on foreign affairs and representatives from the security organisations. All were part of an ingenious mix that made up the centre of power in China, with its population of more than a billion.

A door opened silently and a waitress dressed in white came in with the cup of tea he had ordered. The girl was very young and very beautiful. Without a word she put down the tray and left the room again.

When the time came at last, he examined his face in the mirror and smiled. He was ready to put down his foot and stop the river in its tracks.

It was completely silent when Yan Ba moved up to the lectern. He adjusted the microphone, arranged his papers and peered out at his audience, which looked shadowy in the dim light.

He started talking about the future: the reason he was standing there, why the president and the polituro had called on him to explain what major changes were now necessary. He told his audience what the president had said to him when he was given his task.

‘We have reached a point where a new and dramatic change of direction is required. If we don’t make the change, or if we make the wrong one, there is a serious risk that unrest could break out. Not even our loyal armed forces would be able to stand up to hundreds of millions of furious peasants intent on rebellion.’

That was how Yan Ba had seen his task. China was faced with a threat that had to be met by discerning and bold countermeasures. If not, the country could collapse into the same state of chaos it had experienced so many times before in its history.

Hidden behind the men and the few women sitting before him in the semi-darkness were hundreds of millions of peasants waiting impatiently for a new life, like the lives the expanding middle classes in urban areas were enjoying. Their patience was running out, developing into boundless fury and demands for immediate action. The time was ripe; the apple would soon fall to the ground and begin to decay if they did not rush to pick it up.

Yan Ba began his lecture by miming a symbolic fork in the road with his hands. ‘This is where we are now,’he said. ‘Our great revolution has led us here, to a point that our parents could never even have dreamed of. For a brief moment we can pause at this fork in the road and turn round and look back. In the distance is the destitution and suffering we come from. It is recent enough for the generation before ours to remember what it was like, living like rats. The rich landowners and the old public officials regarded the people as soulless vermin, fit for nothing apart from working themselves to death. We both can and should be astonished at how far we have progressed since then, thanks to our great party and the leaders who have led us along the right paths. We know that truth is always changing, that new decisions must constantly be made in order to ensure that the old principles of socialism and solidarity will survive. Life does not stop to wait; new demands are being made of us all the time, and we must seek out the knowledge to enable us to find the solutions to these new problems. We know that we can never attain an everlasting paradise to call our own. If we do believe that, paradise becomes a trap. There is no reality without struggle, no future without battles. We have learned that class differences will always manifest themselves, just as circumstances in the world keep on changing, countries going from strength to weakness and then back to strength. Mao Zedong said that there is constant unease under the skies, and we know that he was right – we are on a ship that requires us to navigate through channels whose depth we can never judge in advance. For even the sea floor is constantly shifting: there are threats to our existence and our future that cannot be seen.’

Yan Ba turned a page. He could sense the total concentration in the room. No one moved; everyone waited for what came next. He had planned to talk for five hours. That is what the delegates were expecting. When he told the president his lecture was written, he had been told that no pauses would be allowed. The delegates would have to remain in their seats from start to finish.

‘They must see the whole picture,’ the president had said. ‘The whole must not be split up. Every pause brings with it a risk that doubts would crop up, cracks in the coherent understanding that what we must do is necessary.’

He devoted the next hour to a historic overview of China, which underwent a series of dramatic changes not just during the last century but throughout the many centuries since Emperor Qin first laid the foundation of a united country. It was as if within this Middle Kingdom a long chain of hidden explosive charges had been laid. Only the most outstanding leaders, the ones with the sharpest visionary eyesight, would be able to predict the moments when the explosions would take place. Certain of these men, including Sun Yat-sen and not least Mao, had possessed what the ignorant population regarded as an almost magic ability to interpret their times – and would bring about the explosions that someone else, let us call her the
nemesis divina
of history, had placed along the invisible path that the Chinese nation had to traverse.

Needless to say, Yan Ba spent most of this part of his lecture talking about Mao and his era. Mao founded the first Communist dynasty. Not that the word ‘dynasty’ was used – that would have aroused echoes of the previous rule of terror – but everyone knew that was how the peasants who had spearheaded the revolution regarded Mao. He was an emperor, despite the fact that he allowed ordinary people to enter the Forbidden City and didn’t force them to step to one side, at risk of being beheaded if they didn’t, when the Great Leader, the Great Helmsman, went past. The time had now come, Yan Ba explained, to turn back once more to Mao and accept with humility that he had been right about how the future would evolve, even though he has been dead for thirty years. His voice was still very much alive; he had the capabilities of a prophet and a scientist to see into the future, to shine his own kind of light into the dark of future decades.

But what had Mao been right about? There was a lot he had got wrong. The leader of the first Communist dynasty had not always treated his contemporaries the way he should have. He had been at the forefront when the country had been liberated, and the dream of freedom, the spiritual content of the liberation struggle itself, according to Yan Ba, was about the right of even the poorest peasant to hope for a better future without risking being beheaded by some despicable landowner. Instead, the landowners were now the ones who would be decapitated; it would be their blood that enriched the earth, not that of the poor peasants.

But Mao had been wrong in thinking that China would be able to make enormous economic advances in just a few years. He maintained that one iron foundry should always be sufficiently close to another for the workers to see the smoke from each stack signalling to one another. The Great Leap Forward, which was supposed to project China into both the present and the future, was a huge mistake. Instead of large-scale industrial production, there were people in their backyards melting down old forks and saucepans in primitive furnaces. The Great Leap Forward failed; Chinese workers were unable to jump over the bar because their leaders raised it too high. It was now impossible for anyone to deny, even though Chinese historians had to be sparing with the truth when describing difficult times, that millions of people had starved to death. There was a period of some years when Mao’s rule was not unlike earlier imperial dynasties. Mao had locked himself into his rooms in the Forbidden City and never admitted that the Great Leap Forward had been a failure. Nobody was allowed to talk about it. But nobody could know what Mao actually thought. In the writings of the Great Helmsman there was always an area conspicuous by its absence: he concealed his innermost thoughts. No one knows if Mao ever woke up at four in the morning, the bleakest time of day, and wondered just what he had done. Did he lie awake and see the shadows of all the starving, dying people who had been sacrificed at the altar of his impossible dream, the Great Leap Forward?

Instead, Mao counter-attacked. Counter-attacked what? Yan Ba asked rhetorically, and paused for several seconds before answering. Counterattacked his own defeat, his own failed policies, and the danger that there might be whispering in the shadows, a backstairs coup. Mao’s exhortation to ‘bombard the headquarters’ – a new kind of explosive charge, you might say – was his reaction to what he saw around him. Mao mobilised young people, just as everyone does in a state of war. Mao exploited young people the way France, England and Germany did when they marched them off to the battlefields of the First World War to die with their dreams choked by the slushy mud. There was no need to go on about the Cultural Revolution – that was Mao’s second mistake, an almost entirely personal vendetta against the forces in society that challenged him.

By then Mao had started to grow old. The question of his successor was always at the top of his agenda. When the next in line, Lin Biao, turned out to be a traitor and perished in a plane crash on his way to Moscow, Mao began to lose control. But to the very end he continued to issue challenges to those who would outlive him. There would be new class warfare; new groups would try to benefit at the expense of others. Or as Mao repeated as a mantra, ‘Each individual will be replaced by his opposite.’ Only the stupid, the naive, anyone who refused to see, would imagine that China’s future was assured once and for all.