Qiu Xiaolong - Enigma of China

“You mentioned that many people have come to your place. Can you tell me more about them?” Chen asked, shifting the focus of the conversation.

“Yes, various teams showed up over many weeks. I was too shocked to remember their names. They looked through the things Zhou left behind, then took away the computer and other stuff that they claimed was possible evidence.”

“Did they find what they were looking for?”

“I don’t know. Zhou hadn’t left anything valuable here.” After a short pause, Mrs. Zhou continued. “We do own several apartments in the city, but it was my decision to buy them. Zhou hardly ever talked to me about his work, but he would get many phone calls. From what I overheard, I thought housing prices would keep going up, so I borrowed heavily from banks for the various down payments. I am still paying off those mortgages. Please don’t believe all the Internet stories about how wealthy our family is.”

It wasn’t up to him to look into the wealth of the Zhous, but Chen couldn’t bring himself to believe anything she was telling him about how their real estate was acquired.

“They were back again the day before yesterday, combing through the apartment one more time.”

That was after Zhou’s death, Chen thought.

“What did they say to you?”

“Jiang, the head of the group, kept demanding that I turn over what Zhou had left behind. I didn’t know what he was talking about. As I’ve said, Zhou seldom talked to me about his work at home, and he didn’t give me anything related to it.”

“Did they have a search warrant?”

“No, but they went ahead without one. Didn’t you say shuanggui is beyond the police bureau’s control? They didn’t have to follow any procedure. They just turned the place upside down.”

“That’s not right.”

“They even forbid me to talk to anybody about it. I was told I couldn’t say a single word to the media or to other people. You’re different, I know. You’re the only one I’ve talked to.”

Chen couldn’t help feeling a wave of sympathy for her. In China, as long as a Party official was in his powerful position, he had everything. But once he was out of power, everything was gone.

That was why Mrs. Zhou appeared so helpless. Her husband was gone, her home had been repeatedly searched, and no one would ever lend a hand.

That was probably why Party Secretary Li had been hanging onto his bureau position so desperately, making things difficult for Chen.

“It has been just like a dream shattered to pieces,” she said, then started sobbing inconsolably. “Last night, I wished I wouldn’t wake up, and would instead stay lost forever in the dream.”

It is nothing but a dream, / in the past, or at the present. / Whoever wakes out of the dream? / There is only a never-ending cycle / of old joy, and new grief. / Someday, someone else, / in view of the yellow tower at night, / may sigh deeply for me .

But was there something else to Mrs. Zhou’s complaints?

It was an elusive thought. Chen told himself not to jump to anything like a conclusion. There was a lot more for him to check out first.

The first thing Chen did when he got back to his office was turn on his computer, almost exactly the way Yu had described Peiqin.

Chen was struggling with something he had heard before Peiqin filled him in more fully.

On the Internet, anything politically sensitive would be “harmonized” into nothing through a keyword search by specific Web control mechanisms. So Chen wasn’t exactly surprised when his search for the phrase “95 Supreme Majesty” repeatedly drew a blank. With each search he got the inevitable error message.

After repeated attempts, he changed tactics by typing in “top brand cigarettes,” and this time he was able to find some related content. A lot of questions were being raised about Zhou’s alleged suicide. Speculation about his death was rampant. Posters on various Web forums were devoting an incredible amount of energy and time discussing possible clues, analyzing them, and advancing one possible scenario after another.

Chen spent a couple of hours going through the Web posts and blogs. One of the bloggers was particularly sharp-his tone was satirical, and his conclusion caught Chen’s attention.

“A house isn’t built in one day, nor by one man. Think of all the new houses in the city. Zhou knew too much, so he was harmonized out of sight.”

Chen realized that there was an antigovernment sentiment among the dedicated Web posters and that their reactions were justified. For a detective, however, generalizations like that weren’t the way to conduct an investigation.

Chen moved on from reading about Zhou’s death to some general background information about the housing market.

As a rule, government control of Web content applied there as well. But complaint or criticism seemed to be permissible to an extent. Perhaps the government was aware that it would be useless to try to totally suppress it since the housing problem affected too many people. On the other hand, the Web forums and blogs where it was discussed seemed to be run by people clever enough to avoid direct confrontation with the authorities. Chen particularly liked a bit of doggerel he found titled “Calculation”:

It would take three million yuan / to buy an apartment of one hundred square meters / in an acceptable location in Shanghai, / therefore, for a farmer tilling three acres, / at the average income of eight thousand yuan per year, / he would have to work from the Ming dynasty to the present, / not calculating in the possibility of natural disasters; / for a worker, with a twenty-five hundred yuan monthly income, / he would have to work from the Opium War in the Qing dynasty, / with no holiday, weekend, or any break whatsoever; / for a white collar, with sixty thousand as his yearly salary, / he would have to start working in 1950, / without eating or spending anything; / and for a hooker, she would have to fuck ten thousand times, / every day, with no interruption / even during her period, moaning, groaning, writhing, / from the day she turned sixteen to the age of fifty-five, / and all that without including the necessary expenses / for decoration, furniture, and electronics for the room .

That explained why these “netizens” threw themselves into the search campaign that brought Zhou down, but as another post pointed out, Zhou wasn’t an isolated case.

Zhou’s actions wouldn’t be possible without the long, long chain of corruption behind him-link after link, circling the whole city. Behind all the propaganda, housing reform is in reality a huge scam, benefiting only Party officials, and inflating the economy into an impossible bubble. Theoretically, the land belongs to the people collectively, but now it’s sold to them-and only for seventy years. The seventy-year limit is a long-sighted regulation or calculation. Not only can the current officials sell the land, but their sons and grandsons can sell it all over again…

The phone rang and interrupted Chen’s Web browsing, bringing him back to the reality of his office. It was Jiang, the investigator for the Party, who was still staying at the hotel. He was the one the police were supposed to report their progress to.

“Is there anything new, Chief Inspector Chen?”

“Not really. Detective Wei is in charge of the investigation. We just compared notes this morning. It seems to him that there are some questions raised by the autopsy.”

“What questions?”

“According to the autopsy, Zhou took a fairly large dose of sleeping pills that evening.”

“We checked into that. He had trouble falling asleep. It wasn’t unusual for him to take that many pills. He told me he took them every night at the hotel. He was under a lot of stress in those last days.”