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By Root 1284 0

self-sufficiency. We exported our manufactured goods to Russia, Angola, Brazil, Europe, and Canada and purchased oil, foodstuffs, minerals, wood, and other raw materials that our nation lacks. We also carried on mutual trade with Europe and America and bought their Boeing airplanes and their high-tech manufacturing tools. Aside from those things, whatever we can do ourselves we do—whatever we can grow ourselves, we grow it; whatever we can research and develop ourselves, we do; whatever we can consume ourselves, we do so, from potatoes to small-producer commodities to cell phones and automobiles. We are a huge country and so we are our own most important market. We’re no longer overdependent on the United States, but we’re no longer blindly practicing either mercantilism or Old Mao’s kind of isolationism. We still go in for plenty of foreign trade, but it does not amount to any more than twenty-five percent of our GDP. Isn’t this practicing relative self-sufficiency!”

He Dongsheng was quite animated while he was talking, but when he finished he went back to his deflated-balloon state. We knew that the lecture was over, so the three of us just drank our wine in silence. At midnight, as He Dongsheng went to the toilet, we were all set to go our separate ways.

“Shall we leave together?” he asked when he came back, and this time I replied, “Yes, thanks.” I didn’t want to stay behind and listen to Jian Lin’s maudlin ranting about Wen Lan.

I felt a little awkward as we walked down to the underground parking lot. He Dongsheng didn’t say anything and I didn’t want to start a conversation for fear of being rebuffed, so I just kept quiet.

He drove a black Land Rover SUV, a kind of foreign import that was so common in Beijing that it was quite unobtrusive. His licence plate was also an ordinary Beijing number—somebody had probably loaned him the car.

After he started the engine, He Dongsheng took a small electric instrument, like a TV remote, out of his shirt pocket. One touch and a small green light came on, and three seconds later two more green lights came on. He put the thing back in his pocket and said, “Nothing’s going on.”

I was hesitant to ask, but he came out with an explanation. “It’s an anti-bugging and anti-tracking device.”

“Who would dare to bug or track you?” I could not help asking.

“They all would!” he replied. “The Central Discipline Committee, State Security, Public Security, the People’s Liberation Army General Staff Department … There are so many organizations and so many people, who can say for sure? Who doesn’t have enemies? I monitor people and people monitor me. I know your secrets and you know mine, there’s a dossier on everybody, that’s the way the game is played.”

I was learning again. Even the Party and national leaders are afraid they’re being watched. As I fastened my seat belt, I acted so cool, pretending that I had seen it all before and nothing could shock me.

“Where do you live?” he asked.

“Happiness Village Number Two.”

He knew it well.

I asked him if he’d seen any of our Prosperous China Conference classmates. “No” was all he said.

I thought he was finished, but then he went on. “Shui Xinghua is a concerned capitalist. You know what I learned from that Prosperous China Conference?”

“What?”

“That was when I first realized,” he said, “that the intellectual elites of China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong think about things in completely different ways—their awareness, discourse, concepts of history, and worldviews are fundamentally different. And furthermore, not only do you not understand us, but we don’t understand you either, and, frankly speaking, we don’t have much interest in understanding. I mean real understanding—that’s virtually impossible. When I went to the Prosperous China Conference, I finally realized that if the intellectual elites of these three places are so different, the common people will be even more so. This was a great help to my later thinking about Taiwan and Hong Kong.”

I’d lived in all three of these places and understood what he was saying. It was rather remarkable