Don Winslow - The Trail to Buddha_s Mirror

They grilled him for five days, privately in a cell and in public “struggle sessions.” He wrote self-criticism after self-criticism, always giving them enough to feed on but not enough to bury him. He denounced other officials, particularly those he knew to be rabid ideologues, as co-conspirators. The same patron who had denounced him arranged for his exile to Xinxiang instead of imprisonment or slow death in the countryside.

The exile lasted for eight years. Eight years of patience, planning-and plotting. Painstakingly and quietly he rebuilt contacts, sent and received messages from like thinkers. There were hundreds of patriotic officials left who had found a quiet harbor and were waiting for the storm to peak. It finally did, in near civil war, when the army acted to quell the internecine fighting between rival groups of Red Guards.

But the economy was once again ruined. The professional class had been virtually eliminated. Millions of disaffected Red Guards wandered the countryside, and the lunatics were still in charge of the asylum. And this time she did not come back.

And you, old friend, you finally expired.

Xao stared down again at this quarter’s grain production figures from the communes. Doubtless more lies. More inflation of the truth. No one wants to look bad. Still afraid to be denounced. Old habits die hard.

The best farmers denounced as rightists and killed or thrown into prison. A generation of our best scientists lost, their research-bought so dearly, so painstakingly, so patiently-lost in a blaze of idiotic, insane adolescent fury unleashed by you, old friend.

But slowly Xao’s true comrades began to emerge from their hiding places. Deng himself, his own patron, came out of hiding in Canton to maneuver once again to the fore, and was now engaged with Hua in a struggle for control. Deng, who even recently was denounced for advocating the use of foreign experts, was patient. The stakes were too high to be rash, Deng had warned him-they were playing for the very soul of China.

Xao turned his chair around and looked out the window at his driver standing beside the car. He buzzed for his assistant, the ever-dour Peng. “Tell my driver I will not be leaving for at least two more hours. Ask him to go around to the Hibiscus and get himself some food, and ask him to bring something back for me.”

“Yes, Comrade Secretary.” Peng smirked. Comrade Xao had sent the driver to the Hibiscus restaurant every evening this whole week. He must eat four yuan a day!

“And see if you can get someone in here to work on this ceiling fan!” Xao continued. “It’s stifling in here!”

Xao went back to the statistics. Even taken at face value, they were dismal. Allow for exaggeration, and they approached disastrous. He reached into the bottom left-hand drawer of his desk and pulled out a blue folder labeled, PRELIMINARY STATISTICS ON PRODUCTION FROM PRIVATE HOLDINGS. It was the only copy. Best not to let the bastards in Beijing see this stuff quite yet.

He delved into it yet again. It was tantalizing: the only production statistics in his province that were actually on the rise. And these farmers had every reason to lie on the downside, since they owed a percentage of all their production to the commune. And still… and still… Oh, old friend, I wish I could stoke the flames of hell with these papers for you. Make you burn a little more.

He was involved with his statistics when his driver came back with a covered dish of bean curd and vegetables and a large tureen of fish soup. The driver set it on his desk in front of him.

“Thank you,” Xao said. “Did you eat?”

“Yes, Comrade Secretary.”

Xao offered the pack of cigarettes. His driver, a tall, well-built young soldier he had brought with him from Henan, shyly took one cigarette. Xao struck a match, lit a fresh cigarette for himself, and used it to light the soldier’s.

“And?” Xao asked.

“There was a message.”

“Good.”

’ ‘The doll is in the hallway,’” the driver recited.

Xao inhaled the smoke, which tasted better than it had all day. He was suddenly ravenously hungry.

“Tell her to wait.”

“Yes, Comrade Secretary.”

The driver saluted and left the room.

Xao took a pair of chopsticks from the top desk drawer and wiped them on the hem of his shin.

“‘The doll is in the hallway,’” he repeated to himself. “Good.” The food was delicious.

Kipling had it wrong with that bit about East and West never meeting. East and West meet in Hong Kong.

Hong Kong usually gets called an island, which is true as far as it goes. The island of Hong Kong meets the basic requirement, being surrounded by water, but the colony of Hong Kong includes more than 230 islands. However, the largest chunk of the colony sits on the mainland, which is to say it isn’t surrounded by water at all. It’s surrounded by China.

The colony of Hong Kong is more correctly called the Crown Colony of Hong Kong, which is a way of letting you know it’s one of those pieces of real estate the British stole when they were still capable of doing that kind of thing. They grabbed Hong Kong Island itself back in 1841 as compensation for a few warehouses of their opium that the Chinese burned. Seems that the Chinese government had some objections to the British trying to turn Chinese citizens into junkies, and interfered with the sacred principles of free trade by confiscating the dope. So Queen Victoria lent the Royal Navy to her drug dealers and showed the cheeky mandarins that British merchants would peddle dope to anyone they damn well pleased, thank you very much. The navy shelled a few forts, killed a few chinks, and took an empty little island called Hong Kong as reimbursement for the out-of-pocket expenses. The Queen was pissed, though, because she thought she should have gotten a lot more for her money than one stinking rock with no potential customers on it, and fired the guy who inked the contract. That’s the thing about pushers-they’re never satisfied.

Sure enough, the British spent the rest of the century asserting the sacred right-to-deal, teaching the yellow heathen a lesson, and collecting more land as a tutorial fee, and that’s how the Crown Colony of Hong Kong came to occupy some 366 square miles, and the Chinese came to wish that Kipling had been right.

The West had the nifty high-tech weaponry, but the East had something better: population. Lots of it. You can plant any flag you want, but if it waves over a place that has a few thousand Brits and five million Chinese, you don’t need a rocket scientist to figure out that the place is more Chinese than British. And it took the Chinese about five minutes back in old ’41 to decide that there was some serious money to be made by getting in the middle between the West and the East, and that Hong Kong was just the place to do it. Hong Kong became the back door to China, a place from which to sneak stuff in and sneak stuff out, and any time you have a lot of sneaking going on, you have a lot of money going with it. Nothing sweet moved in either direction without Hong Kong getting a taste, and the place became a paradise for people with an aptitude for your basic capitalism with the gloves off.

The Chinese moved there in droves. They walked, they took boats, they swam. They still do. No one really knows the population of Hong Kong, especially since 1949, when Mao took over and made things hot for people with an aptitude for your basic capitalism with the gloves off, and inspired several hundred thousand of them to go for a moonlight swim in the South China Sea.

So Hong Kong is crowded. Now, arithmetic will tell you that five million or so people in 366 square miles isn’t that bad, but long division doesn’t tell you that most of those 366 square miles go up and down. Most of Hong Kong is made up of steep hills, many of them uninhabitable, so the population is crammed into relatively small segments of the colony. When you get a lot of people in a small area where lots of money changes hands, what you also get is great extremes of wealth and poverty, because the fingers on some of those hands are pretty sticky.