Fat Years - Chan Koonchung [57]
“Maybe so,” I said. “She is that second road I’ve just asked the tarot cards about.”
Part Two
1.
WANDERING BACK AND FORTH
The Age of Satisfaction
The Age of Satisfaction!”—Zhuang Zizhong, one of the venerable founding editors of the Reading Journal, often pondered this term. He heartily congratulated himself on having lived long enough to see this day, on having survived China’s various Ages of Trouble to bear witness to this Age of Happiness—China’s Golden Age of Prosperity and Satisfaction. He often told himself the most important thing in life was to live for as long as possible. All the other founding editors of the Reading Journal were dead and gone, and he was one of the few remaining greats. All the glory belonged to him now.
During the spring festival, the Politburo member in charge of cultural propaganda visited him at home and even brought along a CCTV reporter. Although this could not compare with earlier times when the celebrated Ji Xianlin received visits from the president, it was still a great event in the cultural and publishing world. Zhuang Zizhong was neither a great classical scholar nor a prize-winning novelist. A few years earlier, if you had heard that a Politburo member was going to visit the home of the aged founder of a scholarly journal, you would have said it was a joke. From this event, we could see how much importance this current Politburo attached to intellectuals and thinkers; this was something we had not seen since the end of the 1980s.
At the beginning of the Reading Journal New Year reception, Zhuang Zizhong modestly told everyone that all the honor was due to the Reading Journal itself. All the efforts of successive editors over more than thirty years had not been in vain, and the Reading Journal had finally received positive recognition from the leaders of Party Central. He recalled how the Party had for some time misunderstood the journal and censured it for its tone and direction, and later when they had patched things up with the Party, the latter still didn’t genuinely trust the journal. All that had changed in the last two years. First off, all the previous chief editors and assistant editors had miraculously and harmoniously been cooperating with one another. Then all the journal’s writers, who previously had held a variety of positions on how the nation should be ruled, suddenly reached a unified consensus. After the new joint editors organized a wide-ranging discussion seminar on “China’s New Prosperity” two years earlier, the Reading Journal again regained its briefly lost place as the leading scholarly journal of the nation’s cultural and intellectual world. It also came to be seen by the Party leadership as extremely important.
Zhuang Zizhong had made ten national policy suggestions concerning China’s New Era of Prosperity:
a one-party democratic dictatorship;
the rule of law with stability as the most important element;
an authoritarian government that governs for the people;
a state-controlled market economy;
fair competition guaranteed by state-owned enterprises;
scientific development with unique Chinese characteristics;
a self-centered harmonious foreign policy;
a multiethnic republic ruled by one sovereign ethnic group of Han Chinese;
post-Westernism and post-universalism as the nation’s chief worldviews;
the restoration of Chinese national culture as the world’s unrivaled leader.
All these positions, now firmly established principles, seemed like perfectly unexceptional common sense. But why did the Reading Journal have to argue them for so many years before reaching a favorable consensus? No matter what, Zhuang Zizhong believed, Reading had now received positive recognition from the Party, which meant he had the Party’s affirmation of his own devotion to the Party and the Nation. Zhuang Zizhong felt that to be the greatest achievement of his later years.
Now he was sitting in his wheelchair as his new young wife wheeled him toward his new car. Ever since the Politburo member had visited him during the