Fat Years - Chan Koonchung [66]
Late one Sunday afternoon, while her husband was in the kitchen cooking dinner and singing revolutionary songs, Hu Yan was in her study trying to figure out how to launch this research. Just then she received a call from Lao Chen. He needed her input on something. They arranged to meet for lunch at the Sichuan restaurant next to the Academy.
The following day, Lao Chen took Fang Caodi with him to see Hu Yan explaining that if he wanted to know the real situation in China, he could do no better than ask Hu Yan. “Nobody knows more about the lower strata of society than she does,” he told him. “If Hu Yan says she has not heard of something, then that something does not exist.”
“When I remember something,” Fang Caodi said peevishly, “no matter what anybody says, I won’t forget it.”
Lao Chen also had another important reason for seeing Hu Yan. A few days earlier, she had sent him an e-mail with a report about research on Chinese Christian underground churches, and he wanted to ask her what she thought about maizi busi, “the grain does not die.”
Over lunch, Hu Yan explained what she was working on: helping the government draft policies for the administration of agricultural cooperatives and rural financial institutions, and investigating the social effects of the circulation of goods and capital in rural areas.
“If you sum it up simply,” Lao Chen asked, looking for a straight answer, “is the situation in the countryside getting better or worse?”
“Of course there are still problems,” answered Hu Yan, “but overall we’ve entered a period of positive feedback.”
Having asked for and received this conclusive answer, Lao Chen was perfectly satisfied and content. He’d visited several cities in China and he knew that first-, second-, and third-level cities were all extremely prosperous, even county-level cities were all developing very nicely. The urban people were living well and the government’s goal of a moderately good standard of living had been easily achieved. What Lao Chen was not so sure about was the rural situation. He had visited only villages near major cities and had never lived in the proper countryside for any length of time. Every so often he would phone Hu Yan and ask her if the rural situation was getting better or worse, as if he were making a long-distance call home and gaining peace of mind on hearing that things were indeed improving. Secure in the knowledge that the rural situation was now better, Lao Chen told himself that on the whole China was constantly improving, and so he could go on living his good life with a clear conscience. As far as asking for the details of the positive feedback Hu Yan had mentioned, Lao Chen didn’t need information overload; he would leave that to the experts.
“Professor Hu,” Fang Caodi asked, interrupting Lao Chen’s musings, “what do you think about the time between when the world economy entered a new period of crisis and China’s Golden Age of Ascendancy officially began?”
Hu Yan looked like she didn’t quite understand what Fang Caodi was saying.
“I mean that month in between,” Fang went on, “twenty-eight days, to be precise.”
“The front page of the People’s Daily reported,” Hu Yan said very patiently, “that the world economy entered a period of crisis and China’s Golden Age of Ascendancy officially began on the same day. That was the day that the American dollar lost one-third of its value in one go, and the Chinese government announced its New Prosperity Policy, or NPP. Everybody knows this. I don’t know, Mr. Fang, how you arrive at this twenty-eight-day figure.