“I never did that.”
She laughed. “I should hope not, you know so little! But that doesn’t always stop people.”
“So they’re organizing?”
“Yes. But offline. It’s not a netizen thing. The netizens are mostly urban youth, content to live in their wrists and get by in the gig economy. They’re not working-class, they’re the hollowed-out middle class. Often very nationalistic. They’ve taken the Party line, and they don’t see how much they have in common with the migrants. They’re the precariat, do you know that word? No? Everyone’s precarious now, you should know that word. You’re the precariat. For us here, it’s the withouts. The two withouts, the three withouts, there are all kinds of variations on the withouts, but the main without is a hukou registration where you actually work. Those are the people you saw in that room.”
“And are you their leader?”
“I’m one of them,” she said after thinking this over for a while. “It didn’t make sense at first, because I’m a princeling and a woman, and I’ve lived abroad, and my dad is in the Party leadership. But all that might be part of it. I work well as a figurehead. But I want to be more than a figurehead, so I help organize things. Chinese revolutionary movements have often had woman leaders. There was the one in the White Lotus revolt, and the one who fucked things up at Tiananmen Square. And Jiang Qing for that matter, Mao’s wife. Or Empress Dowager Longyu, who ran things at the end of the Qing dynasty. And there’s been various other empresses who seized power when their husbands died.”
“How did a woman fuck things up at Tiananmen Square?”
“She wanted bloodshed more than reform. And she got it.” She chopped up a carrot as if she were beheading this person. It was truly impressive how fast she could chop vegetables. “Anyway it doesn’t matter what happened in the past. Now is now. Now, Chinese women are fed up. We’ve always been second-class citizens. As Confucius recommends! That’s one reason I like the Maoists, they at least pretended to be feminists. Women hold up half the sky! But for most of Chinese history women have been internal migrants. They migrate from father’s family to husband’s family, and work like donkeys while keeping the whole thing going. Social reproduction they call it but really it’s everything. And for a long time with their feet squished to little balls so they couldn’t even walk. Now they’re workers too along with everything else, twelve hours a day in a factory sewing or running robots, then go home and do all the rest of it, and it’s just too much.” Chopchopchopchopchop! “We’re all mad. A lot of them are madder than I am! Because they’re the ones in the sweatshops. Sweet little Chinese girls all into their cloud games and pop stars, I tell you, they will jump out of their phones and kill you dead if they get a chance.”
“So… you’re doing a kind of united front?” Fred ventured.
“Exactly!” She stared at him, surprised. “Where did you get that? Are you pretending to be stupider than you really are?”
“No,” Fred said promptly.
She laughed at this promptness.
“So,” he said, pleased to have made her laugh in the midst of her chopping the world to bits, “all this happens offline?”
“Yes. It has to. But there are spies everywhere, of course. So the security agencies know what’s going on, and they’re trying to stop it. But the migrants use guanxi networks and word of mouth. It’s like a big family, and if you don’t trust someone with your life, you don’t talk to them about this stuff. The old cell structures have come back too, so if a cell gets penetrated it can’t bring down more than that one. And it helps a lot that the security agencies overlap, and they fight each other.”
“Why are there overlapping systems?”
She shrugged. “That’s China. The street council decides things, then the district, the town, the province, then the various economic agencies, all the way up to the top. So surveillance isn’t any more coordinated than resistance. And we’ve got the numbers. There’s about a hundred million Party members, and about five hundred million internal migrants. That’s too many to control. Half a billion people—they can’t put them all in prison!”
“But they could put the leaders in prison,” Fred pointed out. “Then hope that that messes things up enough to keep a lid on dissent.”
She nodded, looking grim. “Right. So here we are.” She shrugged. She was back in hiding again, her look said. No choice. Trapped. Everything on the cutting board was chopped. It was going to be the finest-chopped salad Fred had ever eaten. Lucky they were using chopsticks rather than forks. “Let’s eat.”
Another time they were sitting in their little living room after eating a meal, sweating in the heat, both half-asleep. When they roused from this torpor, there was nothing to do. They had been in the apartment for nineteen days, by Fred’s count. Qi was bigger than ever. Her belly was growing day by day. She had cooked three meals already, and there was still time to kill.
“Tell me a story,” she demanded of him.
“I don’t know any stories,” he said, alarmed.
“Everybody knows some stories.”
“Not me.” Then he added, “What about those Swiss boarding schools? Why did you keep running away from them? I thought they were supposed to be nice.”
“No.”
“So you ran away, how many times did you say?”
“I don’t know. I can hardly remember.”
“Hard to believe.”
She laughed at this. “I guess that’s right. I remember.”
She sat there thinking for a while. There was no hurry. Finally she said, “When I was first sent to Switzerland, I was really mad. Hurt. It was my father’s doing, of course, although my mother went along with it, I’m sure. But he wanted me out of China, mostly to get an international education. Learn English, all that. He was probably right,” she added, nodding to herself. “So he sent me, and I was young enough that I decided it was because he didn’t love me.”
“How old were you?”
“About eleven or twelve, I guess. It was 2026 I think? So wait, I was nine. Wow, I had it wrong. That’s interesting. Anyway, I loved my father, and I thought he loved me, so he explained and explained why he was doing it, but I still felt betrayed. I was very mad at him. And at my mom too, for not defending me. But, you know. They bundled me off. And as it turned out, they sent me to a boarding school they had never been to, called Nouvelle École de l’Humanité, in the lower Alps, above Bern. I don’t know how or why they chose that one, because my mom wouldn’t have approved if she had known what it was like. But I think a friend of theirs raved about it, said it had been great for their daughter, another Party princess. So they sent me there sight unseen.”
“And it was bad?”
“I thought so at first. It was some kind of weirdo alternative education, based on Pestalozzi, or Steiner, or Piaget, I mean really who knows. The Swiss can be very theoretical. The couple who founded it were hippies of some kind, pretty crazy from the sound of it.”
“Baizuo?”
She laughed. “No, they just loved nature. The Alps in particular. So, we always got up before dawn and took cold showers to start the day, and then we cleaned out the stables, and then we farmed, and we killed and chopped up chickens, and climbed some Alps, and cooked and cleaned, and did lots of exercises, and like that.”
“And you hated it?” Fred guessed.
“Of course I did! At least at first. But then, just as I was getting used to it, my parents finally paid attention to the letters I was sending home. I had to write them on paper and send them by mail, it was like throwing them into the Aare in a bottle. None of us ever heard back from anyone. We had been forgotten. We were stuck in a hippie gulag. But finally my parents came for a visit, and they were horrified. Politely and without saying a word, I mean they were perfectly inscrutable Orientals to the people in charge there, but I could see it no problem. Oh my God, their princess getting her hands dirty! Their precious daughter shoveling horseshit! All of their Chinese elite instincts were appalled. The whole point of joining the Party is to get off the farm! So they got me out of there as fast as they could and put me in another boarding school near Geneva, in Lausanne. Beautiful place, looking across the lake at Mont Blanc, all that. But the girls there, this was a girls-only school, they were from all over, with money leaking out of every pore. And there weren’t any boys around to distract them and make them be nice. Very soon I hated those girls with all my heart. They were the ones who made me into a Maoist.”