experienced during the past two years. Lao Chen could only listen until Fang Caodi drove his dust-covered Cherokee into the village where Zhang Dou and Miaomiao lived.
When Zhang Dou heard Little Xi’s voice he thought it sounded familiar. Little Xi also felt that she had seen Zhang Dou before, but could not quite remember where.
That night, Zhang Dou and Miaomiao put up a tent in their yard and gave their bedroom to Little Xi, while Fang Caodi put up a folding cot in his room for Lao Chen to sleep on.
Little Xi had already said she wanted to be with Lao Chen, but she needed a little time to adjust, a hint that she didn’t want to move in and live with him straightaway. Fang Caodi said Little Xi could stay in Miaomiao’s room for the time being, and when the weather was a little cooler, he and Zhang Dou could build on another room for her.
Lao Chen speculated that if for the moment Little Xi didn’t want to move in with him, that didn’t mean she wanted to live for a long time in the countryside. He didn’t, however, push her to decide straightaway; he thought that by staying for a while with Miaomiao and Zhang Dou and having Fang Caodi to talk to, she would avoid the prying eyes of the government, and this was not a bad idea at all.
It was very difficult for an outsider like Lao Chen to anticipate what sort of a powerful fighting spirit might be generated when people like Fang Caodi and Little Xi, who had been without a comrade to share her Chinese-style idealism for such a long time, came together. Not to mention with a strong young man like Zhang Dou as their ally.
After a detailed discussion with Fang Caodi and Zhang Dou, Little Xi gradually began to regain her memory of the first day of that lost month. It was on the eighth day of the first lunar month, after the Spring Festival holiday had ended and people started to return to work, that the television, papers, and Internet reports all carried the same news: the global economy had entered a new period of crisis.
We all suddenly felt we were facing imminent disaster, they recalled. A roller-coaster ride of varying accounts appeared on the Internet and mobile phones. In the beginning, everybody cursed America for its runaway inflation and for the overnight 30 percent drop in the value of the dollar that caused the Chinese people to lose a vast amount of their hard-earned foreign-exchange reserves. Then we heard that the southern factories had closed down, the peasant workers could not return to the cities to work, and the Chinese economy was really going to collapse this time. Next came the news that the price of gold had risen to $2,000 an ounce, that the Shanghai and Shenzhen stock markets had completely shut down to avoid further losses, and that martial law had already been declared in Xinjiang and Tibet. The atmosphere in Beijing changed instantly. Office workers headed for home, causing a huge traffic snarl-up, while gossip of all kinds continued to circulate. By the afternoon, the people’s response was to start stocking up on food and everyday essentials.
Zhang Dou described how at that point he and Miaomiao had gone out immediately to buy dog and cat food, and a good thing too, because after it ran out there was none available for over a month.
In any system (especially an economic system), if everyone’s activity is duplicated and multiplied so that there is only one sort of feedback without any opposing message, that system will surely collapse, they concluded. Stocking up on food and essentials worked like that. At first everyone was afraid of prices rocketing, so they bought everything, cleaned out the shelves, and stockpiled stuff at home. When everyone did the same thing, the supply was soon insufficient to meet the demand, and then genuine panic buying set in.
It was equally strange that while Beijing’s official Central Television was broadcasting news reports of social chaos all around the world, no one came on to reassure the public that supplies of food and other essentials would be sufficient to meet people’s needs. Fang Caodi said the government could not simply have been so slow to act. He and Little Xi at the time both believed that there was something suspicious about the situation-there had to be another reason for the government’s inaction.
Little Xi remembered that she had phoned around all that afternoon to various intellectuals and media people she knew to see if they had any ideas about what to do, or if they wanted to get together to discuss the situation. Everyone was too busy stocking up on food and other supplies for their own families, and nobody had the time to talk about formulating a response. In the late afternoon, Little Xi and Big Sister Song decided to close the restaurant and go home. On the way home, they noticed how few people and cars there were on the streets, just as after June 4, 1989, and during the 2003 SARS epidemic. They were carrying food back from the restaurant when someone rode by on a bicycle and grabbed a big turnip right out of Big Sister Song’s hands.
Rumors circulated on the Internet, television, and mobile networks, while police car, ambulance, and fire-truck sirens could be heard howling outside. But no night curfew was announced, so people in the courtyard organized their own mutual defense squad.
Little Xi could still not remember the events of the second day. The effort of recalling gave her a headache and made her feel sick.
She knew only that one night when she came home she had shouted, “They’re going to crack down again!” She could not sleep all night and kept mumbling to herself. Early the next morning, she went out into the courtyard to curse the Communist Party, the government, and the neighbors, and shouted that the law courts were all bullshit. She fainted soon after, and when she woke up she was in a mental hospital. This was what her mother told her after she was discharged but, strangely enough, after a while even Big Sister Song could no longer remember any of it.
Fang Caodi said he was in Guangdong at the time, and the state of anarchy lasted for seven days. For the first six, everybody was already terribly frightened because they had heard there was great chaos in various other regions. Fang Caodi had been in those areas, however, and they had not really been that chaotic. But he was given the third degree because he was an outsider. On the twelfth of the month, he slipped away to the border area where Guangdong, Jiangxi, and Hunan come together and stayed in a peasant’s house. Later on, he heard that the fourteenth had been the worst day because a riot, with looting and arson, had broken out. Many local residents tried to escape by going to the county seat, where they heard things were safer. Lots of people received the same message over and over again: “I have just had this news from the highest authorities-the country is in chaos, the government has lost control, take care of yourselves, everybody!”
Is China going to collapse? This was a question many had been asking for years. Will the Chinese government lose control? Fang Caodi had traveled all over the country, in the western regions, the central plains, and elsewhere, and he had always told everyone, “Relax, there’s no way for the disaffected to join forces; China will always experience small disturbances, but never complete chaos; the disturbances will be local in nature and will never spread to the whole country.”
During those seven days, however, the people felt like they were in purgatory; every day was too long, and by the seventh day they had put up with as much as they could stand and were about to go to pieces. As you can imagine, various criminal elements were keen to do their worst, so the population felt terrorized. There was almost mass hysteria. It looked as if total anarchy would soon break out-a fight of neighbor against neighbor to protect one’s life and property. People had just one hope in their minds-that the machine of state would soon go into action.
Fang Caodi had also begun to think by then that if the situation didn’t improve soon, China really would collapse into total chaos.
On the eighth day of the troubles, the fifteenth of the first lunar month, a small detachment of the People’s Liberation Army entered the township where he was and received an enthusiastic welcome from the populace.
Zhang Dou said this was the way he had heard it, too. On the fifteenth day of the first lunar month, two years earlier when the People’s Liberation Army entered Beijing to restore order, the people of Beijing turned out in full force on the streets to welcome them. That afternoon the Public Security Bureau, the armed police, and the People’s Liberation Army issued a joint communique that a crackdown had begun. Zhang Dou didn’t have a Beijing residence permit and didn’t dare go out on the streets; instead, he hid out at home for three weeks.
Little Xi wondered whether she herself had actually gone out to welcome the People’s Liberation Army troops. Then she really
Fang Caodi told Little Xi that once the crackdown started, any suspicious person would have been locked up. He himself was turned in by a peasant and taken to the local Public Security Bureau, where he was almost sentenced to death. Luckily for him, there had been a young female judge who stood her ground against her colleagues and insisted that they handle his case on the basis of the law and the constitution. She had saved his life.
