Enigma of China(73)
“Come on. You’re a celebrated poet, always full of poetic hyperbole.”
But he wasn’t. The metaphor he recited wasn’t applicable just to him but to the others involved in the case as well. The proverb had come to him last night as he lay sleepless in a Shaoxing hotel room, staring at the shifting patterns of shadows across the ceiling.
He had thought of it again in the morning, after reading the e-mail from Comrade Zhao.
Sheng lit a cigarette for Chen, and then one for himself. Waving the match out casually, he changed the topic. “How was your trip to Shaoxing?”
“Oh, it was for a literature festival. Shaoxing is the hometown of Lu Xun,” Chen said, immediately on high alert. “Internal Security truly is well informed.”
“Please don’t take that the wrong way. I just happened to be talking to your Party Secretary Li yesterday and he mentioned your trip.”
That was possible. Still, it came as no relief to Chen. Li had been informing Internal Security of every move he’d been making.
“The festival is simply an excuse for a group of writers to go sightseeing and feasting. The Shaoxing wine there is really superb. I finished off a small urn of it and got so drunk that Bi Liangpei, the chairman of Shaoxing Writers’ Association, had to help me all the way back to the hotel.”
That was mostly true. Bi had walked him back to the hotel, but Chen hadn’t been that drunk. He remembered trying to find Lianping amidst the chirping of small insects in the hotel garden in the dark, which somehow reminded him of the earlier scene in Shen Garden. She wasn’t registered at the hotel. He wondered whether she’d taken the night train back to Shanghai.
“I wish I could have been there,” Sheng said, setting a cup of instant coffee down on the coffee table. “I was here, doing nothing but working through a list of the people who posted about Zhou online and posted evidence of his corruption. However, the pictures they posted of Zhou’s cars and houses were all real. There’s no way to accuse them of slandering him, and I have to admit it’s understandable why they targeted him. Since such a large number of people were posting and protesting about Zhou, it’s out of the question for the government to punish them all. Some of them were simply following the crowd.”
Sheng abruptly seemed to be singing a different tune.
“So…” Chen echoed noncommittally, waiting for Sheng to continue.
“The sender of the first e-mail, however, is a devious troublemaker. There’s no question about it. The human-flesh search was coordinated with the subsequent barrage of online posts, which were too sudden and overwhelming for Zhou or anybody to properly respond. It was devastating to the image of our Party.”
“With corruption rampant among our officials,” Chen said, “that kind of Internet attack probably won’t stop anytime soon.”
“You’re right about that. A brand-new Internet star specializing in human-flesh searches popped up recently, though I don’t think he’ll be a real problem.”
“An Internet-search star?”
“Yes. And such stars have fans of their own. Once they have developed a huge following, they may demand Web sites pay them to post their blogs,” Sheng said, shaking his head. “As for this new star, he’s surnamed Ouyang. His special skill is determining the brand of watch an official is wearing in news photos, and then posting the photos online with the brand and price of the watch listed underneath.”
“Expensive watches, I bet.”
“Rolex, Cartier, Omega, Tudor, Tissot… you name it,” Sheng said with unconcealed irritation. “He recently caused a huge uproar with a post containing more than twenty pictures of Party cadres wearing those luxury brands. He didn’t even have to comment on it. In a single day, it was posted and reposted on numerous Web sites, triggering another wave of crowd-sourced searches with more than a hundred thousand responses.”
“Yes, those expensive watches blatantly belie the image of hard-working, plain-living Party cadres.”
“But posting about it can lead to disillusionment with our Party and the socialist system. We have to do something about it.”
“Ouyang didn’t do anything wrong by reposting some newspaper pictures. Openly punishing him for that could backfire.”
“We didn’t have to punish him overtly. We just asked him out for a cup of tea, and Ouyang agreed to cooperate. He won’t be posting anything like that again.”
Chen had heard of asking someone out for “a cup of tea,” which meant government officials like Sheng warning a troublemaker over tea. Sometimes they didn’t just use a stick. Sometimes they offered a carrot as well.