“And you were among these people?”
“No.” The professor looked exhausted. “I was first held after a different disturbance, in 1995. I was accused of discussing a riot in Xinjiang in class. One of my students was a spy and he reported me. I know who this was. Luckily I had said very little. Luckily my activities have never properly been exposed. I was treated badly in captivity, I was beaten and kicked, but as nothing compared to others. I am, after all, a Han.” Joe experienced a strange, sadistic desire to see the scars on Wang’s body and hid his shame in a cigarette. He offered one to Wang, who refused. “I also have influential colleagues who were able to pay for my release and clear my name. I was soon back at work. Others were not so lucky. One Han doctor was arrested recently for treating the wounds of an alleged separatist following a riot in Kashgar. Three Yining shopkeepers who discussed the demonstration I have described with a foreign journalist were sentenced to fifteen years in the gulag. For a single conversation. In Xinjiang now, even to think about separatism is to be jailed.”
“You mentioned a second riot in Kashgar,” Joe said, and realized that either Lee or Sadha was moving around in the kitchen. How long had they been there? He heard a pan being filled with water, then the closing of the bedroom door as privacy was restored.
“Mr. Richards, there are riots all the time in China. Surely you are aware of this? They simply go unreported. What I am here to tell you today is the intensity, the frequency of these riots in Xinjiang. The people are ready for revolution.”
“And that’s why you’ve come?”
“That is one reason I have come, yes.” Creases appeared at the edge of Wang’s eyes. “Perhaps Governor Patten’s staff will be interested in the political implications of revolution in north-western China, yes?” The tone of the question seemed deliberately to mock Joe’s denials that he was involved in intelligence work. Wang now took the cigarette he had been offered and drew out the silence as he lit it with Sadha’s plastic lighter. “But it is of course primarily because of what has happened in the prisons that I have come to see Governor Patten.”
“What has happened in the prisons?”
Wang inhaled very deeply. He was now entering the final phase of his long exhortation. “Two men were released,” he replied. “They came to me, because I am known in the underground as a safe outlet, a haven. Once I see Governor Patten I can explain more about this.”
Joe was aware of contradictions emerging in Wang’s story. He had earlier said that he was a political undesirable, that he had been jailed alongside his fellow students for inciting revolution, then stripped of his chair at the university. But where was the evidence of this? “Who are these men?” he asked.
“Their names are Ansary Tursun and Abdul Bary. Ansary had been arrested for ‘reading a newspaper,’ Abdul for swearing at his Chinese boss.”
“That’s all?”
“That is all. And like the others they received no trial, no habeas corpus, no lawyer. Instead they were sent to the Lucaogu prison in Urumqi by a judge who presided over-what do you call it in English? — a kangaroo court. Before his escape, Ansary was locked up in a cell with eight other men, Abdul with seven. The cell was so crowded that the prisoners had to take it in turns sleeping. You see there was not enough space for everybody to lie down. All of the men told Ansary that they had been beaten and kicked by the guards, just as I was two years before. At some point Ansary was taken into what he believes was the basement of the prison. His left arm and his left leg were handcuffed to a bar in a room of solitary confinement. He was left to hang like this for more than twenty-four hours. He had no food, no water. Remember that his crime was only to read a newspaper. Perhaps you look at me and think that this is not so bad, that these sorts of violations are acceptable. Perhaps your own government abuses human rights and tortures prisoners from time to time. When they have problems with the Irish, for example.”
Joe wondered what had caused Wang to become more aggressive. Had he failed to look suitably distraught? “Let me reassure you,” he said, “that the British government takes the greatest possible-”
The professor held up his hand to stall his predictable rebuttal.
“Fine, fine,” he said. “But let me reassure you about what happened to my friends. Then you can decide if the treatment of prisoners in China is compatible with Western values. Because Abdul Bary was also taken into solitary confinement, and the largest toenail of his right foot removed by a pair of pliers held in the grip of a guard who laughed as he did this, who was so drunk on the power and the humiliation of what he was doing that he found it funny.”
“I am so sorry,” Joe said.
“Other prisoners, we later learned, had been attacked by dogs, burned with electric batons.” Wang’s cigarette was shaking as he spoke. “Another had horse’s hair, that is the hard, brittle hair of an animal, inserted into his penis. And through all this, do you know what they were forced to wear on their heads, Mr. Richards? Metal helmets. Helmets that covered their eyes. And why? To create disorientation? To weigh them down? No. Ansary later learned from another prisoner that there had been an instance when an inmate had been so badly tortured, had been in so much pain, that he had actually beaten his own head against a radiator in an attempt to take his own life. This is the extent of what they had done to him. This is the extent of human rights abuses in so-called reformist, capitalist China. When I had finished protecting these two men, I knew that I had to come to Hong Kong. When I heard this I knew that our only salvation lay in England.”
Joe allowed a silence to develop in which he gathered his thoughts. It was almost two o’clock in the morning. The streets outside were quiet now and he heard only the occasional barking of a neighbourhood dog, the distant sound of a police siren. So much information had been spilled over the course of the interview that he was finding it difficult to pick his way through it. Joe knew that it was his job to report the uprising in Yining, and the extent of separatist fervour across Xinjiang was certainly valuable intelligence. But he could not piece together Wang’s role in the struggle and felt that there were holes in his story. And what of the human rights issues? To Joe’s shame, he was surprised by how little impact the news of the torture had had on him. The suffering of these jailed men was somehow an inchoate thing, a nebulous concept around which he could not assemble sympathy. Only when Wang had spoken of the man beating his head against the radiator had he felt even the faintest tremor of discomfort. What was wrong with him? Had he grown immune to human suffering already? Had three years in SIS turned him into a machine? How was it possible to sit in a room with a man like Wang Kaixuan and not weep for the state of his country?