Qiu Xiaolong: Enigma of China

Chief Inspector Chen Cao, of the Shanghai Police Bureau, was attending a lecture at the Shanghai Writers’ Association, sitting in the audience, frowning yet nodding, as if in rhythmic response to the speech.

“The enigma of China. What’s that? Well, there’s a popular political catchphrase-socialism with Chinese characteristics-which is indeed an umbrella term for many enigmatic things. Things that are called socialist or communist in our Party’s newspapers but are in practice actually capitalistic, primitive or crony capitalistic, and utterly materialistic. And feudalistic, in that the children of high cadres-or princes-are themselves high cadres: the ‘red trustworthy,’ or the successors in our one-party system.

“In spite of the Party propaganda machines chunking away at full throttle, Chinese society is morally, ideologically, and ethically bankrupt, yet still going, going like the rabbit in an American television commercial.”

After tapping his pants pocket, looking for a pack of cigarettes, Chen stopped and thought better of it.

It was one of those controversial yet permissible lectures. The speaker was a well-known scholar named Yao Ji, a research law professor at Shanghai Academy of Social Science. Not exactly a dissident, Yao was nonetheless considered a potential troublemaker because of his open criticisms of the problems in society. He had published a number of contentious articles and posted even more unpublishable articles on several blogs online. A gaunt, angular man, he spoke with his hands on the podium, his body leaning slightly forward, and his prominently balding head reflecting the light pouring in through the stained-glass window. He looked like a hallowed figure, as in a time-yellowed painting.

Chen happened to know a thing or two about Yao due to an internal blacklist memo circulated in the police department. But it wasn’t his business, Chen told himself. He adjusted the amber-colored glasses along the ridge of his nose and pulled down the French beret just a little. He hoped he looked like anything but a cop. Here and now, it wasn’t a good idea to be recognized, even though several members of the association knew him fairly well. For the moment, Chen found himself bugged by the word enigma. It somehow reminded him, distantly, of a painting he’d seen, though he couldn’t recall the details. Professor Yao was producing a flurry of concrete examples.

“Indeed, what are the characteristics of China? There are so many different interpretations and definitions. Here are some examples that speak for themselves. A Beijing University professor tells his students: ‘Don’t come to me if you don’t make four hundred million by the time you’re forty.’ The professor specializes in real estate development, advocating high-priced housing investments in return for the referral fees he receives from developers. For him, and for his students, the only value in the world of red dust is what shines in cash.

“In a reality show, where the participants were discussing how one makes a marriage choice, a young girl stated her manifesto: she would rather weep in a BMW than laugh on a bike. The message of that is unmistakable. A rich husband who can provide her with material luxuries-even if in a loveless marriage-is what she wants. In a recent drunk driving case, the accused actually shouted at the cops, ‘My father is Zhang Gang.’ Zhang Gang is a high-ranking Party official, in charge of the local police bureau. Sure enough, the cops were hesitant to arrest him, but a passerby recorded the scene with his cell phone and placed the clip on the Internet. Immediately ‘My father is Zhang Gang’ becomes an Internet catchphrase.…”

These were all examples of what was really happening in China, Chen thought. But what did they mean?

For the government, “stability” was the main priority. It was declared that the economic and social progress from China’s reforms had been achieved because of that stability. Yet the Party authorities were finding it increasingly hard to maintain that stability, despite their efforts to cover up any “unstable” factors.

Professor Yao was coming to his conclusion.

“In a time when the government’s legitimacy is disappearing and the Party’s ideology disintegrating, I am, as a legal scholar, still trying to hold that last line of defense-a real, independent legal system-hoping against hope for the future of our society.”

Chen, his brows knitted more deeply, joined in the applause. As a cop, he found it far from pleasant to listen to such a lecture.

Still, he would rather be sitting here than in a routine political meeting with Party Secretary Li Guohua and other officials at the bureau.

Li, the Party boss of the police bureau, was reaching retirement age, and Chen was unanimously seen as his successor. But for one reason or another, Li had been recently reappointed for another two years. As a sort of compensation, Chen was made the first deputy Party secretary of the bureau and a member of the Shanghai Communist Party Committee.

To those on the outside, it looked like a promotion for Chen, but not in the Party power structure. Some “leading comrades” in the city government, not considering Chen “one of them,” didn’t want him to be the head of the bureau. They were uncomfortable with the prospect of Chen’s taking on such a key position.

So the meeting at the Writers’ Association gave him an excuse to not attend the routine Tuesday political studies meeting at the bureau. It would only drive him nuts to sit there while Li mouthed all the political phrases from the Party newspapers.

The subsiding applause pulled him back from his wandering thoughts. Now came the question and answer period. After that, it would be time for the meeting of executive members that they had scheduled weeks earlier.

Chen got up and walked out of the conference hall and out into the building’s secluded garden. The association was located in a mansion built by a wealthy businessman in the thirties, then seized by the Party after 1949. For many years, the mansion had been used as the office complex for the Writers’ Association.

He walked through the garden, coming to a stop by a tiny pond. He gazed at the white marble angel posing in the middle of the water. It was nothing short of a miracle, he mused, that the statue had survived the Cultural Revolution.

It was all because of Old Bao, the doorkeeper for the association, who, as an ordinary worker, was “politically glorious” and trusted by the Red Guards back then. One dark night during the Cultural Revolution, he moved the statue home in stealth on a tricycle and hid it under his bed. When the Red Guards came to smash anything “bourgeois and decadent,” the nude statue, which was on the top of their list, was inexplicably gone. They questioned everybody except Old Bao, who was wearing a red armband and shouting revolutionary slogans more loudly than anyone. The disappearance of the statue remained a mystery for more than a decade, until after the Cultural Revolution ended. Then Old Bao moved the statue back to its original site in the garden. When people asked him why he had taken such a risk, he simply said that it was his responsibility as doorkeeper to keep things in the mansion from being damaged or destroyed.

Looking up from the pond, Chen saw a man waving at him from the visitor registration desk near the building’s entrance. It was none other than Young Bao, the only son of Old Bao. When the old man was about to retire in the midnineties, his son was without a job. Thanks to Chen’s suggestion that the son succeed the father, Young Bao came to sit at the same desk, with the same register, with a cup of tea-possibly the same cup-just as Old Bao had for years.