So maybe it was a protest after all. And the content of these slogans was startling to Ta Shu, as he had been under the impression that young urban people were almost entirely molded by their social media. These netizens usually parroted the Party line, exuding an intense nationalism and rejecting any talk of the rule of law as nothing but baizuo, white left nonsense. The rule of law was self-interested pseudo universalism, they often said, promulgated by the West in its usual imperialist attempt to take over the world. A very convenient opinion from the Party’s point of view, and vigorously reiterated by many supposedly independent voices who were actually in the Party’s pay. But it had also gotten into many people’s heads who did not think of themselves as Party hacks. Even in Hong Kong a youthful attack on “leftards” was common, and to Ta Shu’s way of thinking, a discouraging sign of the mind-wiping conformism of cloudpolitics. Not that Ta Shu was a New Leftist; he was an old leftist. Laozi was his favorite political theorist.
In any case now here they were, long lines of young people snaking through the crowds singing joyfully, intensely, looking eerily like the young faces seen in photos from the time of the Cultural Revolution, or the Communist revolution, or the 1911 national revolution. No doubt if there had been cameras on hand during the White Lotus revolt they would have captured the same look, because it was always the same feeling bursting into the world: the return of the repressed. Or even dynastic succession. Perhaps the wheel had come around again.
Ta Shu hoped not with all his heart. He could not imagine China without the Party in charge. It would surely collapse into the most horrible chaos. If democracy came to China they would end up electing idiots, as in America. Best of a bad situation to let professionals work on these matters, meaning engineers, technicians, bureaucrats. Maybe.
Or maybe not. Now he began to see that many or even most of these lines of young people snaking through the crowd were not urban youth, not the netizen precariat with their wristpads and part-time service jobs. These marchers were workers, looking weather-beaten even though young. They were the hardened and hungry internal migrants, the three withouts, the billion. Many of them had to have come to Beijing from far away, although quite a few looked as if they had arrived directly from work sites. Quite a few looked like they owned little more than the clothes they stood in. Usually one saw such people in one’s peripheral vision, on work sites or through factory windows, or in the subway intent on their own lives. Now that Ta Shu had noticed them, he saw they were a big part of the mix here. They had come to Beijing to do this. A line of young women, slight and stylish, busy as sparrows, slipped forward chanting something. Factory girls, shoving people out of the way in trios or quartets of cheerful minor mayhem, moving in time to their chant, ready to gang up on obstructions. Who would oppose these dangerous young people?
His wristpad vibrated his forearm with its little electrocution, reminding him that he was still shackled to this moment of the world. He had been thinking that the cloud had probably shut down. But his wrist was vibrating insistently, and he checked it. Peng Ling wanted to talk to him.
“Hello, Ling!” he said into his wristpad. “I’m glad you called!”
“I need to see you,” she said peremptorily. The tiny image of her face on his wristpad looked unusually serious. “Can you come to me?”
“I’m caught in traffic on the south side of town,” Ta Shu told her. “Something’s going on down here.”
“It’s going on everywhere!” Peng exclaimed. “Your friend Chan Qi has triggered a march on Beijing.”
“Oh no.”
“Oh yes.”
“Why don’t you tell her to stop it?” Ta Shu asked.
“She’s disappeared. She and her American friend slipped out of Fang Fei’s place on the moon.”
“How did it happen? When?”
“Fang likes to be friendly. I don’t blame him. The whole idea of house arrest is weak to begin with. There were some visitors there who probably smuggled them out. I’ve just heard from Zhou Bao that their rover may have been spotted near Petrov Crater. Chan Qi has to have reached the near side if she’s sending laser messages home, isn’t that right?”
“I don’t know.”
“Can you get over here to talk?”
“I’m not sure. Is Tiananmen Square really closed?”
“Yes.”
“It could be hard to get to the north side.”
“That’s true. How about meeting at that waffle shop?”
“That would be easier. I can try.”
“Meet me there in two hours. That should give us both time to get there.”
“I’ll try.”
Ta Shu walked his bike east, which proved to be somewhat easier than pushing north, as he could skirt the back side of every crush. Geomancy of crowds, feeling the dragon arteries and the tangled knots. Now that this one was confirmed to be some kind of demonstration, Ta Shu could not help but think of May Thirty-fifth, also known as April Sixty-fifth, or any of the other dates that the Great Firewall had created by its ban on any mention of June Fourth, infamous for the deaths that had occurred in Tiananmen Square on that day in 1989. In that crisis some kind of pro-democracy, pro-reformist demonstration had been finally suppressed and dispersed, on Deng’s orders. They had done it by way of an influx into the city of a huge number of soldiers from all over China, moving them by train into the capital, after which some of them had fired on the crowd of students and their supporters filling the great national square. A disaster in China’s history—nothing much in terms of deaths, compared to the Cultural Revolution or any other of the earlier disasters, but undeniably it had been a moment when Chinese authorities had killed Chinese, with no involvement or incitement from outsiders. In this case it had not even been a civil war against reactionaries, but a case of civil unrest that could have been resolved without violence. The idea could not be avoided that the situation had had better solutions than to order the Chinese army to kill Chinese people. Such an act had no ren, Confucius’s central notion of ruler benevolence. Very little intelligence either. In retrospect it didn’t seem that desperate of a moment for China, or even for the Party. The leadership had probably overreacted to events elsewhere in the world, in particular the ongoing collapse of the Soviet empire. Seeing the trouble in Moscow they had panicked in Beijing, and so a number of idealistic protesters had died.
Now he was caught in a crowd of such people. Workers and urban precariat, the three withouts and the two maybe withouts, some exploited by their hukou status, some by the gig economy, some simply unemployed. The so-called billion, converging on Beijing to support the rule of law, but also, Ta Shu thought, just a decent living. The return of the iron rice bowl, or maybe even the whole work unit system, which had given several generations some stability in China’s constantly shifting economy.
Around Ta Shu people were energetically shouting. There was no way to be sure what had caused all these people to come out. They looked ready and willing to charge at tanks should those appear. But this time it wouldn’t be tanks, he thought. This time it would be drones from the sky, and what would they do then? Fear of this made him lean hard on his bike’s handlebars. But the people around him were not afraid. They had a project, a collective project, and maybe that’s what had caused this to happen, because people craved a project. Chinese history was full of them, and now one had sprung up again. Out of nothing, out of material conditions, out of the cloud—it might be very hard to find out how this had started. Although Peng Ling had all the resources of the government to look into it. But as he jammed his bike into the narrow gaps between people, Ta Shu knew for sure that this was not just one person’s doing. This was mass action, this was what mass action looked like, felt like. Despite his age, he himself had never seen it.