Fat Years - Chan Koonchung [102]
Where was the machine of state?
In fact, the Public Security police, the armed police, and the army were all in a state of readiness that day. Party Central had announced to all levels of government that the entire nation was in a state of emergency, and that the “Action Plan for Achieving Prosperity amid Crisis” had gone into operation. This was a coordinated chain of actions. The entire nation had to be regarded as a single chessboard and each move had to scrupulously follow the planned schedule if complete success, total victory, was to be achieved.
In the first phase, except for establishing martial law in Xinjiang and Tibet, the machine of state was forbidden to do anything without express orders from Party Central. In other words, the party-state machine was going to wait. Why? They were waiting to see how long it would take for genuine chaos to materialize. Waiting to see how long the common people could endure a state of anarchy. When that moment arrived, the people themselves would call on the government not to abandon them; they would beg the government to save them. The machine of state was waiting for the people of the entire nation once again to voluntarily and wholeheartedly give themselves into the care of the Leviathan.
If large-scale rioting or a mass exodus of people occurred, that would be the signal for the machine of state to go into action. As things turned out, the people went through six days of being so scared they couldn’t face another such day, rumors were circulating wildly, and by the seventh day, many regions reported to Party Central that a genuine upheaval had broken out in their area. Still, in this situation, only a few places experienced large-scale rioting and mass exodus. On the eighth day, the fifteenth of the first lunar month, token forces of the People’s Liberation Army and the armed police entered over six hundred cities around the country, and, as expected, were welcomed with open arms by the local population. This demonstrated the fact that in a moderately well-off society, the people fear chaos more than they fear dictatorship. And besides, Chinese society was really not as disorderly as was imagined; the vast majority of the Chinese people crave stability. As long as the government was not a target of attack, everything could be easily taken care of.
That afternoon, the national security police, the armed police, and the People’s Liberation Army jointly announced the beginning of a crackdown on criminal elements, and social order was restored almost immediately; even petty looting came to an abrupt halt. The government also announced that it would start distributing rice from its grain reserves. Rations would be handed out every day, completely free of charge, and no one would be refused; the people’s livelihood would be guaranteed and they need have no fear of hunger. The most interesting thing, however, was that the people grumbled that the reserve rice, having been harvested over a number of years, tasted bad. They didn’t want to eat it, and they certainly weren’t going to line up for it. Also, due to the crackdown on criminal activity, the usual opportunists didn’t dare to buy up the reserve grain to sell off to rice-wine distilleries.
“Why? Why did you have to terrorize the common people like that?” Fang Caodi indignantly interrupted He Dongsheng.
He Dongsheng answered as though he were delivering a classroom lecture: “The beginning of the crisis was the key; if handled poorly at first, it would be hard to clean up the mess later. This crisis was extraordinarily serious, serious enough to give rise to mass disturbances on a nationwide scale. It started as an economic crisis, but it was capable of causing the long-smoldering volcanic contradictions deep under the surface of society to erupt. If the government reaction was too mild and too fragmentary, the people