One day, two of Qi’s friends dropped by chattering with news of some legal battle against Beijing won by Hong Kong advocates. The three Chinese discussed this in a mix of Chinese and English, the English a concession to Fred’s presence, he could see; even so he couldn’t follow the details, and didn’t want to ask for explanations. Despite his reticence they tried to tell him about it. Hong Kong had been a British city, built on land seized from the Chinese Empire, until Britain ceded it back to China in 1997. But that handover had come with a fifty-year period of semiautonomy attached to it. So now the time to submit to full control from Beijing had come, the turnover had happened just a month before: July 1, 2047. The uproar over reunification was still ongoing, with another umbrella revolution testing the rules Beijing had announced. Things were going to change one way or another. During the fifty-year interval period, the Beijing government had agreed to let Hong Kong keep some representative government of its own. One country two systems, this had been called. That made the city something like the Special Administrative Regions that had been set up elsewhere in China, but with its own particular history. This was true all over. Macau the stupid casino, Tibet the weirdo Buddhists, the moon and its band of technolunatics, they were all varieties of SAR. Long ago the offer had been made to Taiwan to become a new SAR, and supposedly they were considering this offer, although who would be so stupid as to take it; but because they might, Beijing had treated Hong Kong better than it would have otherwise, because it wanted to show Taiwan how good it was to its SARs, with the hope that Taiwan would then volunteer to rejoin the mainland. This meant that Hong Kong and Taiwan had had a relationship closer than what might have existed otherwise, as each helped the other stay a little freer of Beijing’s heavy rule. Now that too would change.
North Korea was another kind of client state, they said, like some kind of really fucked-up SAR. Singapore, having been founded by Chinese expats, was some kind of cousin or nephew to China, with a distant resemblance to the SARs. Tibet was too big to be normal—so big, high, and weird that it was not an SAR but rather a province of the nation, in theory the same as any other province. So it didn’t get discussed in the same way Hong Kong and the other city-states did. That said, it was in fact a specially administered region. As was Inner Mongolia, and the western regions like Xinjiang, where ethnic minorities were still numerous despite the government having deliberately flooded these regions with Han, so the locals were no longer majorities even in their own home regions.
“The moon,” Qi remarked at one point, “is like a miniature Hong Kong in a giant Tibet.”
“The question is which one is it like politically,” one of their visitors said.
Qi shrugged. “It’s so different up there that it will be a new thing. That’s what I liked about it.”
“Why did you go there again?” Fred asked.
She shrugged. “I wanted to get away.” She looked around the room. “This kind of hiding—this is how I live all the time. It’s gone on for years. So I tried to get away from that. I guess it didn’t work.”
She fell into a brooding silence, and after a while her friends left.
One evening, when they were chopping up the makings of a salad, Fred said hesitantly, “So who are those people helping us? And what was that group you met in that cellar in Shekou? And what did you say to them?”
“They were migrants, there in Shekou,” she said, chopping faster than Fred could imagine chopping. It was alarming: chopchopchopchopchop! “Migrants, and migrant advocates.”
“They looked Chinese to me.”
She stared at him. “Internal migrants.”
“How do you mean?”
“Do you know about the hukou system?”
“No. Tell me.”
She sighed at his ignorance. “In China, where you are born determines your whole life. You’re assigned a household registration tied to your birthplace, and that’s the only place you can legally live, unless you get registered somewhere else by getting a registered job, or getting into a school. But those are hard things to get, and most people have to stay where they were born. So if you’re born out in the country, that’s it. And life there is so hard it’s almost like the Middle Ages. Subsistence farming, not much money, not much to do. People go hungry there, sometimes. So lots of people leave their legal residence and come to the cities to find work. Those are the migrants.”
“Are there a lot of them?”
She gave him one of her hard looks. “Five hundred million people, is that a lot?”
“Um, yes.”
“One-third of all Chinese. More than all the people in America.”
“Really?”
“Really. And the thing is, since these people aren’t in the cities legally, they can’t get health care or put their kids in school. And their employers can exploit them, pay them crap and not provide any worker safeguards. When they get sick they have to go home to where they are registered. Same when they lose their jobs. If they get robbed, they can’t go to police.”
“That sounds bad.”
“Yes! It’s part of what’s called the crisis of representation, and maybe the biggest part. Lots of people in this world have no real representation in government. Not just China, but everywhere. America too. So now, in China, all kinds of migrant networks have developed as work-arounds. Groups from the same region, or groups sharing information by word of mouth, so that they can find out where the informal pay is highest. They also try to protect each other, like with private security or militia. And there are foremen who hire them who are better than others. But even so, they’re vulnerable. They’re second-class citizens. Sometimes the Party has tried to reform the system, but it’s too big, and the urban Chinese who have a good hukou have advantages they don’t want to share. They’re like the middle class anywhere. With so many poor people in this world, can the middle class afford to share? If they do, won’t they become just as poor as the poor? So a lot of privileged Chinese, and a lot of Party members, are not in any hurry to reform. Why get rid of such a big pool of cheap labor? And so five hundred million people live like illegal immigrants in their own country. It’s like the caste system in India! They’re not untouchables, but no one touches them. And all because they were born in the back country. Waidiren means people from outside the city. Nongmingong means peasant workers, but now it’s another word for these people. So is diduan renkou, the low-end population.”
“So what did you say to them?” Fred asked, remembering their faces.
“I told them they’re a force! They’re the workers, the people. Renmin! The Chinese revolutions were all won by the masses. So these words in Chinese are very powerful politically. Renmin, that’s the people. Qunzhong, that’s the masses. Dazhong, that’s like the common people. Now people are using these words again, and sharing sayings from the 1911 revolution, and the war against Japan, and the Communist revolution. Lots of people are quoting Mao again, and not just baizuo, white leftists that means, meaning people like you from the West telling us what to do.”