Fat Years - Chan Koonchung [88]
We all suddenly felt we were facing imminent disaster, they recalled. A roller-coaster ride of varying accounts appeared on the Internet and mobile phones. In the beginning, everybody cursed America for its runaway inflation and for the overnight 30 percent drop in the value of the dollar that caused the Chinese people to lose a vast amount of their hard-earned foreign-exchange reserves. Then we heard that the southern factories had closed down, the peasant workers could not return to the cities to work, and the Chinese economy was really going to collapse this time. Next came the news that the price of gold had risen to $2,000 an ounce, that the Shanghai and Shenzhen stock markets had completely shut down to avoid further losses, and that martial law had already been declared in Xinjiang and Tibet. The atmosphere in Beijing changed instantly. Office workers headed for home, causing a huge traffic snarl-up, while gossip of all kinds continued to circulate. By the afternoon, the people’s response was to start stocking up on food and everyday essentials.
Zhang Dou described how at that point he and Miaomiao had gone out immediately to buy dog and cat food, and a good thing too, because after it ran out there was none available for over a month.
In any system (especially an economic system), if everyone’s activity is duplicated and multiplied so that there is only one sort of feedback without any opposing message, that system will surely collapse, they concluded. Stocking up on food and essentials worked like that. At first everyone was afraid of prices rocketing, so they bought everything, cleaned out the shelves, and stockpiled stuff at home. When everyone did the same thing, the supply was soon insufficient to meet the demand, and then genuine panic buying set in.
It was equally strange that while Beijing’s official Central Television was broadcasting news reports of social chaos all around the world, no one came on to reassure the public that supplies of food and other essentials would be sufficient to meet people’s needs. Fang Caodi said the government could not simply have been so slow to act. He and Little Xi at the time both believed that there was something suspicious about the situation—there had to be another reason for the government’s inaction.
Little Xi remembered that she had phoned around all that afternoon to various intellectuals and media people she knew to see if they had any ideas about what to do, or if they wanted to get together to discuss the situation. Everyone was too busy stocking up on food and other supplies for their own families, and nobody had the time to talk about formulating a response. In the late afternoon, Little Xi and Big Sister Song decided to close the restaurant and go home. On the way home, they noticed how few people and cars there were on the streets, just as after June 4, 1989, and during the 2003 SARS epidemic. They were carrying food back from the restaurant when someone rode by on a bicycle and grabbed a big turnip right out of Big Sister Song’s hands.
Rumors circulated on the Internet, television, and mobile networks, while police car, ambulance, and fire-truck sirens could be heard howling outside. But no night curfew was announced, so people in the courtyard organized their own mutual defense squad.
Little Xi could still not remember the events of the second day. The effort of recalling gave her a headache and made her feel sick.
She knew only that one night when she came home she had shouted, “They’re going to crack down again!” She could not sleep all night and kept mumbling to herself. Early the next morning, she went out into the courtyard to curse the Communist Party, the government, and the neighbors, and shouted that the law courts were all bullshit. She fainted soon after, and when she woke up she was in a mental hospital. This was what her mother told her after she was discharged but, strangely enough, after a while even Big Sister Song could no longer remember any of it.
Fang Caodi said he was in Guangdong at the time, and the state