Fat Years - Chan Koonchung [120]
He even began to reflect fondly on the now-defunct liberal faction of intellectuals. Without them as a target, all the antiliberal forces—the Old Left and the New Left, the nationalists, populists, traditionalists, and ultraright—directly concentrated all their attacks on the present leadership group. Unfortunately, when the global economy went into decline and China’s Age of Prosperity officially began, the liberal faction, accused of being pro-Western, sharply declined, and the market for their ideas dried up. After a period of reflection, most of the members of the liberal faction came to support the present pragmatic authoritarian leadership. They now believed that China could not follow the path of the Western nations, and that the present Chinese model was the best option in the world as it really exists. Those few well-known liberals who stubbornly refused to change their minds were effectively forbidden to voice their opinions—they could not appear in the media, publish, lecture, or teach. There was now only the occasional small fry, like Little Xi—his eyes met hers—who went on the net and carried on a very weak guerrilla resistance.
Heaven save the Communist Party
This was certainly a long, slow night. As Lao Chen, Little Xi, and Fang Caodi listened to He Dongsheng bombard them with information, their emotions went on a roller-coaster ride; they were totally exhausted, and yawning continuously. Zhang Dou had already dozed off several times, the tiny camera dandling on his knee.
By contrast, the more He Dongsheng talked, the more energized he became. It was as though he had been hosting a one-man marathon talk show, and he didn’t have to hold anything back, he could say whatever he wanted. It’s great, he thought, to be able to say whatever I want; I haven’t felt so happy in a long time. He also realized that he was saying things that he normally could not say, but if he didn’t say them today, he would probably be measured for his coffin before he’d ever have another chance to talk like this. He was also fully aware that he had never before drunk Beijing tap water, but today he had downed several glasses and he was bound to have an unusual reaction to it.
He Dongsheng thought of a strange thing that had recently transpired and he just had to talk about it, would not feel right if he didn’t.
“I’m going to tell you,” he said to his captors, “a state secret. Last month a terrorist organization infiltrated a top-secret state-run chemical plant and tried to blow it up. Luckily our security forces were tipped off in advance and killed them all on the spot. The astonishing thing was that those six terrorists were all members of a fascist cell centered on Beijing—they were all students from the elite Peking and Qinghua universities. After we learned their identities, we kept it a secret and reported that they had died in an automobile accident, but not being given access to their bodies, for a while their parents raised a fuss. I’m telling you all this so you will understand that real fascism already has a firm foothold in China. For these university students to know about this secret chemical factory, they would have to have accomplices in the Party, the government, and the army. And these