The Year of Rice and Salt

He would go on to explain Zhu's theories of society, how for many long dynasties a system of extortion had ruled China and most of the world, and because the land was fecund and the farmers' taxes supportable, the system had endured. Eventually, however, a crisis had come to this system, wherein the rulers had grown so numerous, and the land so depleted, that the taxes they required could not be grown by the farmers; and when it was a choice of starvation or revolt, the farmers had revolted, as they had often before the Long War. 'They did it for their children's sake. We were taught to honour our ancestors, but the tapestry of the generations runs in both directions, and it was the genius of the people to begin to fight for the generations to come – to give up their lives for their children and their children's children. This is the true way to honour your family! And so we had the revolts of the Ming and the early Qing, and similar uprisings were happening all over the world, and eventually things fell apart, and all fought all. And even China, the richest nation on Earth, was devastated. But the necessary work went on. We have to continue that work, and end the tyranny of the rulers, and establish a new world based on the sharing of the world's wealth among all equally. The gold and silver come from the Earth, and the Earth belongs to all of us, just like the air and the water belong to all of us. There can no longer be hierarchies like those that have oppressed us for so long. The fight has to be carried on, and each defeat is simply a necessary defeat in the long march towards our goal.'

Naturally anyone who spent every hour of every day making such speeches, as Kung did, was quickly going to get in serious trouble with the authorities. Beijing, as the capital and biggest manufacturing city, undamaged in the Long War compared to many other cities, was assigned many divisions of the army police, and the walls of the city made it possible for them to close the gates and conduct quarter by quarter searches. It was, after all, the heart of the empire. They could order an entire quarter razed if they wanted to, and more than once they did; shantytowns and even legally allowed districts were bulldozed flat and rebuilt to the standard work unit compound plan, in the effort to rid the city of malcontents. A firebrand like Kung was marked for trouble. And so in the Year 3 I, when he was around seventeen, and Bao fifteen, he left Beijing for the southern provinces, to take the message to the masses, as Zhu Isao had urged him and all the cadres like him to do.

Bao followed along with him. At the time of his departure he took with him a bag containing a pair of silk socks, a pair of blue wool shoes with leather bottoms, a wadded jacket, an old lined jacket, a pair of lined trousers, a pair of unlined trousers, a hand towel, a pair of bamboo chopsticks, an enamel bowl, a toothbrush, and a copy of Zhu's 'Analysis of Chinese Colonialism'.

The next years flew by, and Bao learned a great deal about life and people, and about his friend Kung Jianguo. The riots of Year 33 evolved into a full revolt against the Fifth Military Assemblage, which became a general civil war. The army attempted to keep control of the cities, the revolutionaries scattered into the villages and fields. There they lived by a series of protocols that made them the favourite of the farmers, taking great pains to protect them and their crops and animals, never expropriating their possessions or their food, preferring starvation to theft from the very people they had pledged themselves to liberate.

Every battle in this strange diffuse war had a macabre quality; it seemed like a huge gathering of murders of civilians in their own clothes, no uniforms or big formal battles about it; men, women and children, farmers in the fields, shopkeepers in their doorways, animals; the army was merciless. And yet it went on.

Kung became a prominent leader at the revolutionary military college in Annan, a college headquartered deep in the gorge of the Brahmaputra, but also spread through every unit of the revolutionary forces, the professors or advisers doing their best to make every encounter with the enemy a kind of education in the field. Soon Kung headed this effort, particularly when it came to the struggle for the urban and coastal work units; he was an endless source of ideas and energy.