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By Root 1209 0

of anarchy lasted for seven days. For the first six, everybody was already terribly frightened because they had heard there was great chaos in various other regions. Fang Caodi had been in those areas, however, and they had not really been that chaotic. But he was given the third degree because he was an outsider. On the twelfth of the month, he slipped away to the border area where Guangdong, Jiangxi, and Hunan come together and stayed in a peasant’s house. Later on, he heard that the fourteenth had been the worst day because a riot, with looting and arson, had broken out. Many local residents tried to escape by going to the county seat, where they heard things were safer. Lots of people received the same message over and over again: “I have just had this news from the highest authorities—the country is in chaos, the government has lost control, take care of yourselves, everybody!”

Is China going to collapse? This was a question many had been asking for years. Will the Chinese government lose control? Fang Caodi had traveled all over the country, in the western regions, the central plains, and elsewhere, and he had always told everyone, “Relax, there’s no way for the disaffected to join forces; China will always experience small disturbances, but never complete chaos; the disturbances will be local in nature and will never spread to the whole country.”

During those seven days, however, the people felt like they were in purgatory; every day was too long, and by the seventh day they had put up with as much as they could stand and were about to go to pieces. As you can imagine, various criminal elements were keen to do their worst, so the population felt terrorized. There was almost mass hysteria. It looked as if total anarchy would soon break out—a fight of neighbor against neighbor to protect one’s life and property. People had just one hope in their minds—that the machine of state would soon go into action.

Fang Caodi had also begun to think by then that if the situation didn’t improve soon, China really would collapse into total chaos.

On the eighth day of the troubles, the fifteenth of the first lunar month, a small detachment of the People’s Liberation Army entered the township where he was and received an enthusiastic welcome from the populace.

Zhang Dou said this was the way he had heard it, too. On the fifteenth day of the first lunar month, two years earlier when the People’s Liberation Army entered Beijing to restore order, the people of Beijing turned out in full force on the streets to welcome them. That afternoon the Public Security Bureau, the armed police, and the People’s Liberation Army issued a joint communiqué that a crackdown had begun. Zhang Dou didn’t have a Beijing residence permit and didn’t dare go out on the streets; instead, he hid out at home for three weeks.

Little Xi wondered whether she herself had actually gone out to welcome the People’s Liberation Army troops. Then she really must have lost her marbles. Maybe it was because she heard a crackdown was coming that she lost control of herself and went berserk that afternoon.

Fang Caodi told Little Xi that once the crackdown started, any suspicious person would have been locked up. He himself was turned in by a peasant and taken to the local Public Security Bureau, where he was almost sentenced to death. Luckily for him, there had been a young female judge who stood her ground against her colleagues and insisted that they handle his case on the basis of the law and the constitution. She had saved his life.

Little Xi wept profusely that night as she recalled in sorrow everything she had been through. The crackdown of 1983, and the People’s Liberation Army tanks rolling into Beijing in 1989 to suppress the students, had frightened her to death and left her with an immense feeling of frustration that called into question her life choices and her abilities. But now she felt she could sense her original vitality returning. From her online disputes with those middle-aged “angry youths” where she expressed her own opinions about the government,