Ким Робинсон - Red Moon

My hometown is crowded. When is Beijing not crowded? Even at three a.m. it’s crowded. I like the feel of all that action. Faces bright with life, people pursuing their project of the hour. Everyone is comfortable among their fellow Beijingers, we are like fish in water. Other people are just clear water to us, we swim through our fellows, we move together like a school of fish. What I can see of Beijing now is like a small town on market night—it’s just that there are a hundred thousand blocks just like it, running out from here across the land in all directions. So it is both crowded and uncrowded at one and the same time.

That happens so often here. Put it this way: anything you can say about China that you think might be true, the opposite statement will also be true. Try it and you’ll see what I mean.

Say for instance that China is big. Fair enough; it is big. A billion and a half people, one of every six people on Earth, living on a big chunk of Asia, in a country with the longest continuous history of any country. Big!

Then turn it around and say: China is small.

And this too is true. I see it right here on this corner. Introverted, authoritarian, monocultural, patriarchal; a small-minded place, with one history, one language, one party, one morality. So small! Think for instance of the way the Ministry of Propaganda now speaks of the Five Poisons, meaning the Uigurs, the Tibetans, the Taiwanese, the democracy advocates, and the Falun Gong. Poisons? Really? This is so small. It reduces China to just Han people who support the Party unequivocally. That’s a small number, maybe smaller than the Ministry of Propaganda imagines. The Party exists on the people’s sufferance. Mao used to speak of the fifty-five ethnic groups of the Chinese people. And we have two major languages, not one; putonghua is common, but Cantonese is spoken by one hundred million people, including many of the Chinese who live outside China, making them a political force of a very important kind. Not to mention the fifty-five ethnic languages, and so on. So, not the Five Poisons, please; rather the Five Loves, as taught in all our elementary schools: love of China, love of the Chinese people, love of work for China, love of scientific knowledge, love of socialism. These are the Big Five, as opposed to the Small Five of the supposed poisons. I myself frequently feel all the Five Loves, as I suppose many of you do.

So, looking around and thinking about this, face after face, street after street, building after building, to be fair I have to admit that it seems more accurate to say that China is big than to say that it’s small. I could walk the streets of this city for the next ten years and never walk the same block twice. But you take my point, I hope. We think in pairs and quadrants, and in threes and nines, and every concept has its opposite embedded in it as part of its definition. So we can say, in just that way: China is simple, China is complicated. China is rich, China is poor. China is proud, China is forever traumatized by its century of humiliation. On it goes, each truth balanced by its opposite, until all the combinations come to this, which actually I think has no valid opposite: China is confusing. To say China is easy to understand—no. I don’t know anyone who would say that. It would be a little crazy to say that.

So, with that admitted, we become like the people in the indoor/outdoor workshop I am passing right now. Here men and women toil with admirable focus to carve mammoth tusks from Siberia into hollowed-out sculptures of the most amazingly meticulous and intricate figuration. We are like these dexterous workers, and our idea of China is like one of these mammoth tusks. We chip away at it, and sliver by sliver we carve an elaborate model of China, something we can see and touch and try to understand. The model can explain things to us, it can be beautiful. But remember it is never China.

“Comrade, I have another alert for you.”

“Tell me.”

“A back channel into the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection headquarters overheard a message from a commission field team stationed in its Hong Kong office, reporting to Beijing. Two of their agents in Hong Kong observed another team of agents arresting Chan Qi and Fred Fredericks.”

“Discipline inspection agents observed other agents?”

“Yes. Those commission agents reporting this arrest to Beijing sounded displeased at this new development, saying they had located Chan and Fredericks getting on a bus in west Hong Kong, and were following the two to see if they would lead the agents to a safe house where they suspect someone must have been hiding the two young people since the time they disappeared from Shekou. Now, instead, the two are in the custody of this other group.”

“Which group?”

“The Hong Kong commission officers were perhaps using a code name for them, as they called these interlopers red darts.”

“Red darts? Not Red Spear?”

“Red darts. I can replay the recording of the report for you, if you like.”

“Please do that.”

The analyst listened to the recorded voices. The men making their report did indeed call the agents who had arrested Chan and Fredericks red darts . Hongse feibiao . It was not a term he had heard before. The agents were definitely not happy.

He said, “Please list all national security groups known to interact with the PLA.”

“Ministry of Public Security. Ministry of State Security. Central Commission for Military and Civilian Integration. Small Leading Group on the Internet and Informatization. State Asset Supervision and Administration Commission. Foreign Affairs Leading Small Group. International Department of the Central Committee. National Security Commission. National Security Leading Small Group. Central Leading Group on Comprehensively Deepening Reforms. Central Commission for Discipline Inspection. National Defense Science Commission. Cyberspace Administration. AI Strategic Advisory Committee. The Ministry of Propaganda. Lunar Security Administration. Lunar Research Personnel Coordination Committee.”

“All right, please stop.”

“There are more.”

“I know. The group I would really like to belong to, if I had my choice, is the Economic System and Ecological Civilization System Reform Specialized Group. But this is not my fate. How many groups in total are on this list of security organizations?”

“Seventy-three.”

“And each of them has a certain personnel, and an assigned space of action of more or less specificity. And not all of them share their data. And there is no integration by a single higher organization.”

“Most of them interact with the PLA, so perhaps the PLA could integrate them.”

“Good speculating, Little Eyeball, but no. I have contacts in the army, and they tell me there is no such integration there, nor is such a thing possible. Thus we have the balkanization of surveillance, which is one aspect of the infighting. Wolidou . A very old problem of the Chinese bureaucracy, probably as old as the system itself.”

“You must tell me.”

“I know. I am telling you. The idea of a total surveillance state is just a story told by some people. They like the story, or fear it. They use it to create fear in others. But there is no panopticon. The system is instead like a fly’s eye, but without a fly’s brain. Or maybe there is a fly’s worth of brain to it, but no more than that.”

“It does not seem well engineered.”

“No. It’s an improvisation. That’s what happens when the party-state puts itself above the laws it makes. It can form a new working group at any time, and it does. Then that group joins the infighting. And there is no law to control any of that.”