Enigma of China(16)

After repeated attempts, he changed tactics by typing in “top brand cigarettes,” and this time he was able to find some related content. A lot of questions were being raised about Zhou’s alleged suicide. Speculation about his death was rampant. Posters on various Web forums were devoting an incredible amount of energy and time discussing possible clues, analyzing them, and advancing one possible scenario after another.

Chen spent a couple of hours going through the Web posts and blogs. One of the bloggers was particularly sharp—his tone was satirical, and his conclusion caught Chen’s attention.

“A house isn’t built in one day, nor by one man. Think of all the new houses in the city. Zhou knew too much, so he was harmonized out of sight.”

Chen realized that there was an antigovernment sentiment among the dedicated Web posters and that their reactions were justified. For a detective, however, generalizations like that weren’t the way to conduct an investigation.

Chen moved on from reading about Zhou’s death to some general background information about the housing market.

As a rule, government control of Web content applied there as well. But complaint or criticism seemed to be permissible to an extent. Perhaps the government was aware that it would be useless to try to totally suppress it since the housing problem affected too many people. On the other hand, the Web forums and blogs where it was discussed seemed to be run by people clever enough to avoid direct confrontation with the authorities. Chen particularly liked a bit of doggerel he found titled “Calculation”:

It would take three million yuan / to buy an apartment of one hundred square meters / in an acceptable location in Shanghai, / therefore, for a farmer tilling three acres, / at the average income of eight thousand yuan per year, / he would have to work from the Ming dynasty to the present, / not calculating in the possibility of natural disasters; / for a worker, with a twenty-five hundred yuan monthly income, / he would have to work from the Opium War in the Qing dynasty, / with no holiday, weekend, or any break whatsoever; / for a white collar, with sixty thousand as his yearly salary, / he would have to start working in 1950, / without eating or spending anything; / and for a hooker, she would have to fuck ten thousand times, / every day, with no interruption / even during her period, moaning, groaning, writhing, / from the day she turned sixteen to the age of fifty-five, / and all that without including the necessary expenses / for decoration, furniture, and electronics for the room.

That explained why these “netizens” threw themselves into the search campaign that brought Zhou down, but as another post pointed out, Zhou wasn’t an isolated case.

Zhou’s actions wouldn’t be possible without the long, long chain of corruption behind him—link after link, circling the whole city. Behind all the propaganda, housing reform is in reality a huge scam, benefiting only Party officials, and inflating the economy into an impossible bubble. Theoretically, the land belongs to the people collectively, but now it’s sold to them—and only for seventy years. The seventy-year limit is a long-sighted regulation or calculation. Not only can the current officials sell the land, but their sons and grandsons can sell it all over again…

The phone rang and interrupted Chen’s Web browsing, bringing him back to the reality of his office. It was Jiang, the investigator for the Party, who was still staying at the hotel. He was the one the police were supposed to report their progress to.

“Is there anything new, Chief Inspector Chen?”

“Not really. Detective Wei is in charge of the investigation. We just compared notes this morning. It seems to him that there are some questions raised by the autopsy.”

“What questions?”

“According to the autopsy, Zhou took a fairly large dose of sleeping pills that evening.”

“We checked into that. He had trouble falling asleep. It wasn’t unusual for him to take that many pills. He told me he took them every night at the hotel. He was under a lot of stress in those last days.”

“But it’s rather unusual for a man to take sleeping pills shortly before hanging himself.”

“Perhaps, in spite of the sleeping pills, he was too worried to fall asleep that night. Then, in the darkness, he thought of suicide. It isn’t unimaginable.”

“I visited his widow,” Chen said, “who complained about the repeated searches of their home, and the confiscation of his computers and all other documents. Was there anything found on his computer?”

“Nothing. He had deleted all the files.”

Chen wondered whether Jiang was telling the whole truth, but there was nothing the chief inspector could do about it.