Fat Years - Chan Koonchung [32]
Perhaps I should be thankful to Professors X, Y, & Z—especially to Professor X—because they were the ones who nominated me to be a member-in-waiting a year or so ago. Thus, I was finally able to become an official member today. Professor X brags that he’s the one who spotted me first. I let him think so, but in actual fact when I was studying first-year law, I investigated all my professors to see which one had the best future prospects, and which one would go the furthest in the shortest period of time. And I chose Professor X.
I made the right choice, too. Professors X, Y, & Z are the founders of the SS Study Group. Their position is that ideas and power should be united in order to make China stronger. Because they had already mastered the Western and Chinese classics, they were able to attract to the Group those government officials, army officers, and business executives interested in political thinking. X, Y, & Z want to become state tutors, and they believe that within ten years their ideas will control the fate of the nation. All this is in perfect accord with my own ten-year plan.
Of the three, X controls an important scholarly journal, has the widest circle of connections, and is the most popular with the media. He has the biggest mouth, too, and is rumored in the academic world to have a national security background. Y has the highest academic standing, is the leader in his field, serves as dean of a newly established faculty in a key university in the south, and is quite well-known in overseas academic circles. Z lectures to a research class on national security strategy at the People’s Liberation Army’s National Defense University in Beijing. This research class is made up of civil and military leaders and includes provincial officials as well as high-ranking officers.
Z is the more profound individual, farsighted in his views, and he is the one who understands me best. There were two particular initiatives of mine that I reported only to him, and when he didn’t respond at first, I was afraid that I had been mistaken about him and regretted being too impetuous. It was Z, however, who argued in the Selection Committee that they should ignore their rules and allow me to become an official member of the Group even though I hadn’t finished my studies. X also claimed credit for this, telling me that he and Z argued together on my behalf, otherwise I would have had to remain a member-in-waiting for another three to five years.
Youth is too valuable a commodity, so how could I allow myself to be so easily held back by them? I intend to actively accelerate the achievement of my goals. I discovered that Z was the key to my success, because he has a secret relationship with the one person whom every member of the Group calls big brother, Ban Cuntou. Ban Cuntou is a genuine Red aristocrat. On the surface, he is supposed to be an investor in overseas projects, but in point of fact he is intimately connected with all the legitimate and illegitimate activities of the Party, the government, and the military establishment. He is, as we say, able to “communicate with Heaven itself,” and I believe that he will eventually become one of our nation’s heads of state. Everyone in the Group is well connected, but they all exhibit reverence and fear when talking to big brother Ban Cuntou. Big brother Ban Cuntou and Z are the real souls of the Group—although I don’t believe in the soul. Unfortunately, it is not easy to get close to Ban Cuntou, and so far I have not figured out any way to attract his attention. So I’ll just keep working on Z for the time being.
When I was an undergraduate, I already did a lot of running around for X, Y, & Z. They all have different organizations and they control a great many resources. For example, they can allocate funds for research