Z is the more profound individual, farsighted in his views, and he is the one who understands me best. There were two particular initiatives of mine that I reported only to him, and when he didn’t respond at first, I was afraid that I had been mistaken about him and regretted being too impetuous. It was Z, however, who argued in the Selection Committee that they should ignore their rules and allow me to become an official member of the Group even though I hadn’t finished my studies. X also claimed credit for this, telling me that he and Z argued together on my behalf, otherwise I would have had to remain a member-in-waiting for another three to five years.
Youth is too valuable a commodity, so how could I allow myself to be so easily held back by them? I intend to actively accelerate the achievement of my goals. I discovered that Z was the key to my success, because he has a secret relationship with the one person whom every member of the Group calls big brother, Ban Cuntou. Ban Cuntou is a genuine Red aristocrat. On the surface, he is supposed to be an investor in overseas projects, but in point of fact he is intimately connected with all the legitimate and illegitimate activities of the Party, the government, and the military establishment. He is, as we say, able to “communicate with Heaven itself,” and I believe that he will eventually become one of our nation’s heads of state. Everyone in the Group is well connected, but they all exhibit reverence and fear when talking to big brother Ban Cuntou. Big brother Ban Cuntou and Z are the real souls of the Group-although I don’t believe in the soul. Unfortunately, it is not easy to get close to Ban Cuntou, and so far I have not figured out any way to attract his attention. So I’ll just keep working on Z for the time being.
When I was an undergraduate, I already did a lot of running around for X, Y, & Z. They all have different organizations and they control a great many resources. For example, they can allocate funds for research projects to scholars who are willing to be allied with them; they can obtain the support of wealthy foundations to fund high- level academic conferences, support like-minded people, and set up united fronts; they can organize twice-yearly conferences for outstanding graduate students in the humanities, to train the next generation of the academic elite. All expenses paid for. The food and entertainment are superb, but the mentally intensive brainwashing is also terrific; that’s why the conferences have been dubbed the Devil’s Training Camp, or the New Whampoa Academy.
With so many activities, X, Y, & Z naturally have to divide up the work. For example, only Y and Z lecture at the Devil’s Training Camp, while leaving the organizational work to X. X does not appear up front as the organizer. The nominal organizer is Q, because Q is best at shaking things up and at influencing young people, especially passionately enthusiastic new MA students. Q has a very high opinion of himself, and he also aspires to become a state tutor, but X, Y, & Z look down on him. They say his academic qualifications are insufficient, he’s had no scholarly publications, and his position keeps changing. In private they call Q the Pied Piper-like the Pied Piper of Hamelin in the German fairy tale who played the flute so bewitchingly that he enticed all the children away from home. X, Y, & Z are clearly aware that in an intellectual revolution-and what the SS Study Group is promoting is nothing less than an intellectual revolution in which the contemporary Chinese worldview will triumph- there are many roles to be played, and a Pied Piper to lead away the children is indispensable.
The first time I confided in Z about my activities was about the first time I implemented the Group’s concept that politics is the art of distinguishing between the enemy and ourselves. I told him that from my sophomore year on, I’d organized my classmates to systematically refute reactionary discourse on the Internet, and to denounce reactionary Web sites to the authorities. After that, we moved on to simultaneously observing the virtual world and the real world. We would report to the university president and the Communist Party Secretary any professor in our university who was promoting the Western system of values or liberalism in class. Our working model spread like a virus and was soon being copied in many other colleges and universities. This clearly made known my operational abilities and demonstrated that many university students listened to me and even worshipped me-I am the charismatic leader of today’s youth generation.
After Z listened to all this, he didn’t say much, but I knew that he had taken it all in. That’s because not long after that meeting he nonchalantly asked, “Have you attended any of Professor Gong’s lectures at your faculty?” I immediately understood what he wanted, and, after making some inquiries, I learned that Gong had openly criticized the politics of the ancient Confucian Gongyang School in his class. I brought together all the students who had taken Gong’s classes and incited them to denounce him to the university president for slandering traditional Chinese culture. They also launched an online petition demanding that a thorough investigation be carried out and that Gong be fired. This process is not yet complete, but we’ve given Gong so much trouble he can hardly take it anymore. I’m quite certain that Z is very satisfied with my performance.
What I didn’t tell Z was that my yearlong denunciation activities have finally been appreciated by the government. First the Internet Monitoring Department of the State Council Information Office and then the Ministry of State Security formally contacted me-this amounts to saying that I am now an official informer for both Public and State Security units. I didn’t tell Z or the other members of the SS Study Group about this either, so that they would not be on their guard with me. When I report to the authorities that I am now an official insider in the SS Study Group, they will certainly have an even higher regard for me.
My second initiative makes an interesting story. Six months ago, some time after I had become a Group member-in-waiting, I went to listen to Z give a public lecture. The topic was “The Role of Love in China’s Present Age of Prosperity.” In it he said, “Today our society is suffused with ‘love’ and the media are repeatedly promoting great love, universal love, and love of all mankind. For a while everybody feels good, their hearts are full of ‘love,’ they experience a feeling of satisfaction and happiness. The entire nation is harmonious, crimes of violence decrease, even domestic violence decreases. Thus, we can see the power of ‘love.’ ”
Every time he used the word “love,” Z made hand gestures indicating quotation marks around it.
When I was just about bored to death and thinking that Z didn’t have anything new to say, near the end of his lecture he softly came out with the following sentence: “Everybody is busy ‘loving,’ so the martial spirit is not on display, there are no enemies, and hatred cannot emerge.” His words hit me like a bolt of lightning. Z is so profound and he has pondered this topic very deeply, I thought.
I remembered that Y once had said, “The vast majority of the people in the world have not received any rigorous philosophical training and they do not possess the intelligence to understand things clearly. We philosophers cannot tell them the truth, otherwise they would attack us just like they executed Socrates. In a public forum, a philosopher can say only what the masses love to hear and cater to them. Nevertheless, a philosopher may utter a few code words, heeding the difference between insiders and outsiders and permitting the insiders, members of his own party, to grasp his true meaning, as in the traditional phrase ‘subtle words carry profound meanings.’ ”
Z and Y are kindred spirits, and so Z was also employing “subtle words to carry his profound meanings.”
He talked about “love” for the sake of the masses, and they thought he was promoting “love,” or that he believed China’s present Golden Age of Ascendancy needed such “love.” But in his entire lecture, Z only
Someone like me who has received philosophical training and knows how to read between the lines to find the “profound meaning” understood that Z’s “love,” in quotation marks, referred to the previously mentioned great love, universal love, and love for all mankind. In theory, the martial spirit does not necessarily require hatred or enemies, but enemies and hatred can strengthen people’s martial spirit-enemies and hatred are an aphrodisiac for the martial spirit. The real goal of Z’s lecture, his “subtle words carrying profound meanings,” was to negate the idea that people should “love” even their enemies-to refute the kind of so-called universal values of great love and love for all mankind that fail to distinguish between the enemy and ourselves. His lecture even implied that we must identify our enemies and let our hatred rise against them so that our martial spirit can be fully displayed. This I understood.
I knew this was also the ingenious method I could use later to earn Z’s trust. With his strong idea of the difference between inside and outside forces, he will surely make me a close member of his inner circle. I immediately organized six Peking and Tsing-hua University students who already worshipped me into a group of iron-willed loyal braves and began to practice martial arts with them. I feel that university students today are all
