The Years of Rice and Salt

  Beijing at the time was a place of most severe deprivations. There were millions who had moved there during the war, who still lived in improvised shantytowns outside the gates. The wartime work units had expanded far to the west, and these still stood like a succession of grey fortresses, looking down on the wide new streets. Every tree in the city had been cut down during the Twelve Hard Years, and even now the city was bare of almost all vegetation; the new trees had been planted with spiked fences protecting them, and watchmen to guard them at night, which did not always work; the poor old guards would wake in the mornings to find the fence there but the tree gone, cut at the ground for firewood or pulled out by the roots for sale somewhere else, and for these lost saplings they would weep inconsolably, or even commit suicide. The bitter winters would sweep down on the city in the autumn, rains full of yellow mud from the dust torn out of the loess to the west, and drizzle down onto a concrete city without a single leaf to fall to the ground. Rooms were kept warm by space heaters, but the qi system often shut down, in blackouts that lasted for weeks, and then everyone suffered, except for the government bureaucrats, whose compounds had their own generating systems. Most people stayed warm then by stuffing their coats with newspaper, so that it was a bulky populace that moved around in their thick brown coats, doing what work they could find, looking as if they were all fat with prosperity; but it wasn’t so.

  Thus many people were ripe for change. Kung was as lean and hungry as any of them, but full of energy, he didn’t seem to need much food or sleep: all he ever did was read and talk, talk and read, and ride his bike from meeting to meeting and exhort groups to unify to join the revolutionary movement spearheaded by Zhu Isao, and change China.

  “Listen,” he would say to his audiences urgently, “it’s China we can change, because we are Chinese, and if we change China, then we change the world. Because it always comes back to China, do you understand? There are more of us than all the rest of the people of the Earth combined. And because of the colonialist-imperialist years of the Qing, all the wealth of the world has come to us over the years, in particular all the gold and silver. For many dynasties we brought in gold by trade, and then when we conquered the New World we took their gold and silver from them, and all that came back to China too. And none of it has ever left! We are poor not for any material reason, but because of the way we are organized, do you see? We suffered in the Long War the way every nation suffered in the Long War, but the rest of the world is recovering and we are not, even though we won, because of the way we are organized! The gold and silver is hidden in the treasure chests of the corrupt bureaucrats, and people freeze and starve while the bureaucrats hide in their holes, warm and full. And that will never change unless we change it!”

  He would go on to explain Zhu’s theories of society, how for many long dynasties a system of extortion had ruled China and most of the world, and because the land was fecund and the farmers’ taxes supportable, the system had endured. Eventually, however, a crisis had come to this system, wherein the rulers had grown so numerous, and the land so depleted, that the taxes they required could not be grown by the farmers; and when it was a choice of starvation or revolt, the farmers had revolted, as they had often before the Long War. “They did it for their children’s sake. We were taught to honour our ancestors, but the tapestry of the generations runs in both directions, and it was the genius of the people to begin to fight for the generations to come — to give up their lives for their children and their children’s children. This is the true way to honour your family! And so we had the revolts of the Ming and the early Qing, and similar uprisings were happening all over the world, and eventually things fell apart, and all fought all. And even China, the richest nation on Earth, was devastated. But the necessary work went on. We have to continue that work, and end the tyranny of the rulers, and establish a new world based on the sharing of the world’s wealth among all equally. The gold and silver come from the Earth, and the Earth belongs to all of us, just like the air and the water belong to all of us. There can no longer be hierarchies like those that have oppressed us for so long. The fight has to be carried on, and each defeat is simply a necessary defeat in the long march towards our goal.”

  Naturally anyone who spent every hour of every day making such speeches, as Kung did, was quickly going to get in serious trouble with the authorities. Beijing, as the capital and biggest manufacturing city, undamaged in the Long War compared to many other cities, was assigned many divisions of the army police, and the walls of the city made it possible for them to close the gates and conduct quarter-by-quarter searches. It was, after all, the heart of the empire. They could order an entire quarter razed if they wanted to, and more than once they did; shantytowns and even legally allowed districts were bulldozed flat and rebuilt to the standard work unit compound plan, in the effort to rid the city of malcontents. A firebrand like Kung was marked for trouble. And so in the Year 31, when he was around seventeen, and Bao fifteen, he left Beijing for the southern provinces, to take the message to the masses, as Zhu Isao had urged him and all the cadres like him to do.

  Bao followed along with him. At the time of his departure he took with him a bag containing a pair of silk socks, a pair of blue wool shoes with leather bottoms, a wadded jacket, an old lined jacket, a pair of lined trousers, a pair of unlined trousers, a hand towel, a pair of bamboo chopsticks, an enamel bowl, a toothbrush, and a copy of Zhu’s “Analysis of Chinese Colonialism”.

  • • •

  The next years flew by, and Bao learned a great deal about life and people, and about his friend Kung Jianguo. The riots of Year 33 evolved into a full revolt against the Fifth Military Assemblage, which became a general civil war. The army attempted to keep control of the cities, the revolutionaries scattered into the villages and fields. There they lived by a series of protocols that made them the favourite of the farmers, taking great pains to protect them and their crops and animals, never expropriating their possessions or their food, preferring starvation to theft from the very people they had pledged themselves to liberate.

  Every battle in this strange diffuse war had a macabre quality; it seemed like a huge gathering of murders of civilians in their own clothes, no uniforms or big formal battles about it; men, women and children, farmers in the fields, shopkeepers in their doorways, animals; the army was merciless. And yet it went on.

  Kung became a prominent leader at the revolutionary military college in Annan, a college headquartered deep in the gorge of the Brahmaputra, but also spread through every unit of the revolutionary forces, the professors or advisers doing their best to make every encounter with the enemy a kind of education in the field. Soon Kung headed this effort, particularly when it came to the struggle for the urban and coastal work units; he was an endless source of ideas and energy.

  The Fifth Military Assemblage eventually abandoned the central government, and fell away into a scattering of warlords. This was a victory, but now each warlord and his little army had to be defeated in turn. The struggle moved unevenly from province to province, an ambush here, a bridge blown up there. Often Kung was the target of assassination attempts, and naturally Bao, as his comrade and assistant, was also endangered by these attacks. Bao tended to want vengeance against the attempted assassins, but Kung was imperturbable. “It doesn’t matter,” he would say. “We all die anyway.” He was much more cheerful about this fact than anyone else Bao ever met.

  Only once did Bao see Kung seriously angry, and even that was in a strangely cheerful way, considering the situation. It happened when one of their own officers, one Shi Fandi (“Oppose Imperialism”), was convicted by eyewitnesses of raping and killing a female prisoner in his keeping.

  Shi emerged from the jail they had kept him in shouting “Don’t kill me! I’ve done nothing wrong! My men know I tried to protect them, the bandit that died was one of the most brutal in Sechuan! This judgment is wrong!”

  Kung appeared from the storeroom where he had slept that
night.

  Shi said, “Commander, have mercy. Don’t kill me!”

  Kung said, “Shi Fandi, don’t say anything more. When a man does something as wrong as you have, and it’s time for him to die, he should shut up and put a good face on it. That’s all he can do to prepare himself for his next time around. You raped and killed a prisoner, three eyewitnesses testified to it, and that’s one of the worst crimes there is. And there are reports it wasn’t the first time. To let you live and do more such things will only make people hate you and our cause, so it would be wrong. Let’s have no more talk. I’ll make sure your family is taken care of. You be a man of more courage.”

  Shi said bitterly, “More than once I’ve been offered ten thousand taels to kill you, and I always turned them down.”

  Kung waved this away. “That was only your duty, but you think it makes you special. As if you had to resist your character to do the right thing. But your character is no excuse! I’m sick of your character! I too have an angry soul, but this is China we’re fighting for! For humanity! You have to ignore your character, and do what is right!”

  And he turned away as Shi Fandi was led off.

  Afterwards Kung was in a dark mood, not remorseful about the condemnation of Shi, but depressed. “It had to be done but it did nothing. Such men as he often come out on top. Presumably they will never die out. And so perhaps China will never escape her fate.” He quoted from Zhu: “ ‘Vast territories, abundant resources, a great population — from such an excellent base, will we only ever go in circles, trapped on the wheel of birth and death?’ ”

  Bao did not know how to reply; he had never heard his friend speak so pessimistically. Although now it seemed familiar enough. Kung had many moods. But in the end, one mood dominated; he sighed, leapt to his feet: “On with it, anyway! Go on, go on! We can only try. We have to occupy the time of this life somehow, we might as well fight for the good.”

  • • •

  It was the farmers’ associations that made the difference in the end. Kung and Bao attended nightly meetings in hundreds of villages and towns, and thousands of revolutionary soldiers like them were conveying Zhu’s analysis and plan to the people, who in the country were still for the most part illiterate, so that the information had to be conveyed by word of mouth. But there is no form of communication faster and more certain, once it reaches a certain critical point of accumulation.

  Bao learned every detail of farming existence during that time. He learned that the Long War had stripped away most of the men who had been alive, and many of the younger women. There were only a few old men around no matter where you went, and the total population was still less than it had been before the war. Some villages were abandoned, others were occupied by skeleton crews. This made planting and harvesting crops difficult, and the young people alive were always at work ensuring that the season’s food and tax crops would be grown. The old women worked as hard as anyone, doing what they could at their age to help, maintaining at all times the imperial demeanour of the ordinary Chinese farmwife. Usually the ones in the village who could read and do accounts were the grandmothers, who as girls had lived in more prosperous families; now they taught the younger folk how to run the looms, and to deal with the government in Beijing, and to read. Because of this they were often the first ones cut down when a warlord army invaded their region, along with the young men who might join the fight.

  In the Confucian system the farmers were the second most highly regarded class, just below the scholar bureaucrats who invented the system, but above the artisans and merchants. Now Zhu’s intellectuals were organizing the farmers in the back country, and the artisans and merchants in the cities largely waited to see what would happen. So it seemed Confucius himself had identified the revolutionary classes. Certainly there were many more farmers than city-dwellers. So when the farmer armies began to organize and march, there was little the old Long War remnants could do about it; they had been decimated themselves, and had neither the means nor the will to kill millions of their countrymen. For the most part they retreated to the biggest cities, and prepared to defend them as if against Muslims.

  In this uneasy stand-off, Kung argued against any all-out assaults, advocating more subtle methods for defeating the city-based warlords that remained. Certain cities had their supply lines cut off, their airports destroyed, their ports blockaded; siege tactics of the oldest kind, updated to the new weapons of the Long War. Indeed another long war, this time a civil war, seemed to be brewing, though there was no one in China who wanted such a thing. Even the youngest child lived in the wreckage and shadow of the Long War, and knew another one would be catastrophe.

  Kung met with White Lotus and other revolutionary groups in the cities controlled by the warlords. Almost every work unit had within it workers sympathetic to the revolution, and many of them were joining Zhu’s movement. In reality there was almost no one who actively and enthusiastically supported the old regime; how could there be? Too much bad had happened. So it was a matter of getting all the disaffected to back the same resistance, and the same strategy for change. Kung proved to be the most influential leader in this effort. “In times like these,” he would say, “everyone becomes a sort of intellectual, as matters so dire demand to be thought through. That’s the glory of these times. They have woken us up.”

  Some of these talks and organizational meetings were dangerous visits to enemy ground. Kung had risen too far in the New China movement to be safe making such missions; he was too famous now, and had a price on his head.

  But once, in the thirty-second week of Year 35, he and Bao made a clandestine visit to their old neighbourhood in Beijing, hiding in a delivery truck full of cabbage heads, and emerging near the Big Red Gate.

  At first it seemed everything had changed. Certainly the immediate vicinity outside the Gate had been razed, and new streets laid out, so that there was no way they could find their old haunts by the Gate, as they were gone. In their place stood a police station and a number of work unit compounds, lined up parallel to the old stretch of city wall that still existed for a short distance on each side of the Gate. Fairly big trees had been transplanted to the new street corners, protected by thick wrought-iron fences with spikes on top: the greenery looked very fine. The work unit compounds had dorm windows looking outwards, another welcome new feature; in the old days they were always built with blank walls facing the outside world, and only in their inner courtyards were there any signs of life. Now the streets themselves were crowded with vendor carts and rolling bookstalls.

  “It looks good,” Bao had to admit.

  Kung grinned. “I liked the old place better. Let’s get going and see what we can find.”

  Their appointment was in an old work unit, occupying several smaller buildings just to the south of the new quarter. Down there the alleys were as tight as ever, all brick and dust and muddy lanes, not a tree to be seen. They wandered freely here, wearing sunglasses and aviator’s caps like half the other young men. No one paid them the slightest attention, and they were able to buy paper bowls of noodles and eat standing on a street corner among the crowds and traffic, observing the familiar scene, which did not seem to have changed a bit since their departure a few packed years before.

  Bao said, “I miss this place.”

  Kung agreed. “It won’t be long before we can move back here if we want. Enjoy Beijing again, centre of the world.”

  But first, a revolution to finish. They slipped into one of the shops of the work unit and met with a group of unit supervisors, most of them old women. They were not inclined to be impressed by any boy advocating enormous change, but by this time Kung was famous, and they listened carefully to him, and asked a lot of detailed questions, and when he had finished they nodded and patted him on the shoulder and sent him back out onto the street, telling him he was a good boy and that he should get out of the city before he got himself arrested, and that they would back him when the time came. That was the way it wa
s with Kung: everyone felt the fire in him, and responded in the human way. If he could win over the old women of the Long War in a single meeting, then nothing was impossible. Many a village and work unit was staffed entirely by these women, as were the Buddhist hospitals and colleges. Kung knew all about them by now, “the gangs of widows and grandmothers”, he called them; “very frightening minds, they are beyond the world but know every tael of it, so they can be very hard, very unsentimental. Good scientists frequent among them. Politicians of great cunning. It’s best not to cross them.” And he never did, but learned from them, and honoured them; Kung knew where the power lay in any given situation. “If the old women and the young men ever get together, it will be all over!”

  • • •

  Kung also travelled to Yingkou to meet with Zhu Isao himself, and discuss with the old philosopher the campaign for China. Under Zhu’s aegis he flew to Yingzhou, and spoke with the Japanese and Chinese representatives of the Yingzhou League, meeting also Travancoris and others in Fangzhang, and when he returned, he came with promises of support from all the progressive governments of the New World.

  Soon after that, one of the great Hodenosaunee fleets arrived in Yingkou, and unloaded huge quantities of food and weapons, and similar fleets appeared off all the port cities not under revolutionary control already, blockading them in effect if not in word, and the New China forces were able over the next couple of years to win victories in Shanghai, Canton, Hangzhou, Nanjing, and inland all over China. The final assault on Beijing became more of a triumphal entry than anything else; the soldiers of the old army disappeared into the vast city, or out to their last stronghold in Gansu, and Kung was with Zhu in the first trucks of a giant motorcade that entered the capital uncontested, indeed hugely celebrated, on the spring equinox marking the Year 36, through the Big Red Gate.