Ким Робинсон - Red Moon

North Korea was another kind of client state, they said, like some kind of really fucked-up SAR. Singapore, having been founded by Chinese expats, was some kind of cousin or nephew to China, with a distant resemblance to the SARs. Tibet was too big to be normal—so big, high, and weird that it was not an SAR but rather a province of the nation, in theory the same as any other province. So it didn’t get discussed in the same way Hong Kong and the other city-states did. That said, it was in fact a specially administered region. As was Inner Mongolia, and the western regions like Xinjiang, where ethnic minorities were still numerous despite the government having deliberately flooded these regions with Han, so the locals were no longer majorities even in their own home regions.

“The moon,” Qi remarked at one point, “is like a miniature Hong Kong in a giant Tibet.”

“The question is which one is it like politically,” one of their visitors said.

Qi shrugged. “It’s so different up there that it will be a new thing. That’s what I liked about it.”

“Why did you go there again?” Fred asked.

She shrugged. “I wanted to get away.” She looked around the room. “This kind of hiding—this is how I live all the time. It’s gone on for years. So I tried to get away from that. I guess it didn’t work.”

She fell into a brooding silence, and after a while her friends left.

One evening, when they were chopping up the makings of a salad, Fred said hesitantly, “So who are those people helping us? And what was that group you met in that cellar in Shekou? And what did you say to them?”

“They were migrants, there in Shekou,” she said, chopping faster than Fred could imagine chopping. It was alarming: chopchopchopchopchop! “Migrants, and migrant advocates.”

“They looked Chinese to me.”

She stared at him. “Internal migrants.”

“How do you mean?”

“Do you know about the hukou system?”

“No. Tell me.”

She sighed at his ignorance. “In China, where you are born determines your whole life. You’re assigned a household registration tied to your birthplace, and that’s the only place you can legally live, unless you get registered somewhere else by getting a registered job, or getting into a school. But those are hard things to get, and most people have to stay where they were born. So if you’re born out in the country, that’s it. And life there is so hard it’s almost like the Middle Ages. Subsistence farming, not much money, not much to do. People go hungry there, sometimes. So lots of people leave their legal residence and come to the cities to find work. Those are the migrants.”

“Are there a lot of them?”

She gave him one of her hard looks. “Five hundred million people, is that a lot?”

“Um, yes.”

“One-third of all Chinese. More than all the people in America.”

“Really?”

“Really. And the thing is, since these people aren’t in the cities legally, they can’t get health care or put their kids in school. And their employers can exploit them, pay them crap and not provide any worker safeguards. When they get sick they have to go home to where they are registered. Same when they lose their jobs. If they get robbed, they can’t go to police.”

“That sounds bad.”

“Yes! It’s part of what’s called the crisis of representation, and maybe the biggest part. Lots of people in this world have no real representation in government. Not just China, but everywhere. America too. So now, in China, all kinds of migrant networks have developed as work-arounds. Groups from the same region, or groups sharing information by word of mouth, so that they can find out where the informal pay is highest. They also try to protect each other, like with private security or militia. And there are foremen who hire them who are better than others. But even so, they’re vulnerable. They’re second-class citizens. Sometimes the Party has tried to reform the system, but it’s too big, and the urban Chinese who have a good hukou have advantages they don’t want to share. They’re like the middle class anywhere. With so many poor people in this world, can the middle class afford to share? If they do, won’t they become just as poor as the poor? So a lot of privileged Chinese, and a lot of Party members, are not in any hurry to reform. Why get rid of such a big pool of cheap labor? And so five hundred million people live like illegal immigrants in their own country. It’s like the caste system in India! They’re not untouchables, but no one touches them. And all because they were born in the back country. Waidiren means people from outside the city. Nongmingong means peasant workers, but now it’s another word for these people. So is diduan renkou , the low-end population.”

“So what did you say to them?” Fred asked, remembering their faces.

“I told them they’re a force! They’re the workers, the people. Renmin ! The Chinese revolutions were all won by the masses. So these words in Chinese are very powerful politically. Renmin , that’s the people. Qunzhong , that’s the masses. Dazhong , that’s like the common people. Now people are using these words again, and sharing sayings from the 1911 revolution, and the war against Japan, and the Communist revolution. Lots of people are quoting Mao again, and not just baizuo , white leftists that means, meaning people like you from the West telling us what to do.”

“I never did that.”

She laughed. “I should hope not, you know so little! But that doesn’t always stop people.”

“So they’re organizing?”

“Yes. But offline. It’s not a netizen thing. The netizens are mostly urban youth, content to live in their wrists and get by in the gig economy. They’re not working-class, they’re the hollowed-out middle class. Often very nationalistic. They’ve taken the Party line, and they don’t see how much they have in common with the migrants. They’re the precariat, do you know that word? No? Everyone’s precarious now, you should know that word. You’re the precariat. For us here, it’s the withouts. The two withouts, the three withouts, there are all kinds of variations on the withouts, but the main without is a hukou registration where you actually work. Those are the people you saw in that room.”

“And are you their leader?”

“I’m one of them,” she said after thinking this over for a while. “It didn’t make sense at first, because I’m a princeling and a woman, and I’ve lived abroad, and my dad is in the Party leadership. But all that might be part of it. I work well as a figurehead. But I want to be more than a figurehead, so I help organize things. Chinese revolutionary movements have often had woman leaders. There was the one in the White Lotus revolt, and the one who fucked things up at Tiananmen Square. And Jiang Qing for that matter, Mao’s wife. Or Empress Dowager Longyu, who ran things at the end of the Qing dynasty. And there’s been various other empresses who seized power when their husbands died.”

“How did a woman fuck things up at Tiananmen Square?”

“She wanted bloodshed more than reform. And she got it.” She chopped up a carrot as if she were beheading this person. It was truly impressive how fast she could chop vegetables. “Anyway it doesn’t matter what happened in the past. Now is now. Now, Chinese women are fed up. We’ve always been second-class citizens. As Confucius recommends! That’s one reason I like the Maoists, they at least pretended to be feminists. Women hold up half the sky! But for most of Chinese history women have been internal migrants. They migrate from father’s family to husband’s family, and work like donkeys while keeping the whole thing going. Social reproduction they call it but really it’s everything. And for a long time with their feet squished to little balls so they couldn’t even walk. Now they’re workers too along with everything else, twelve hours a day in a factory sewing or running robots, then go home and do all the rest of it, and it’s just too much .” Chopchopchopchopchop! “We’re all mad. A lot of them are madder than I am! Because they’re the ones in the sweatshops. Sweet little Chinese girls all into their cloud games and pop stars, I tell you, they will jump out of their phones and kill you dead if they get a chance.”