The Year of Rice and Salt

The Fifth Military Assemblage eventually abandoned the central government, and fell away into a scattering of warlords. This was a victory, but now each warlord and his little army had to be defeated in turn. The struggle moved unevenly from province to province, an ambush here, a bridge blown up there. Often Kung was the target of assassi nation attempts, and naturally Bao, as his comrade and assistant, was also endangered by these attacks. Bao tended to want vengeance against the attempted assassins, but Kung was imperturbable. 'It doesn't matter,' he would say. 'We all die anyway.' He was much more cheerful about this fact than anyone else Bao ever met.

Only once did Bao see Kung seriously angry, and even that was in a strangely cheerful way, considering the situation. It happened when one of their own officers, one Shi Fandi ('Oppose Imperialism'), was convicted by eyewitnesses of raping and killing a female prisoner in his keeping.

Shi emerged from the jail they had kept him in shouting 'Don't kill me! I've done nothing wrong! My men know I tried to protect them, the bandit that died was one of the most brutal in Sechuan! This judgment is wrong!'

Kung appeared from the storeroom where he had slept that night.

Shi said, 'Commander, have mercy. Don't kill me!'

Kung said, 'Shi Fandi, don't say anything more. When a man does something as wrong as you have, and it's time for him to die, he should shut up and put a good face on it. That's all he can do to prepare himself for his next time around. You raped and killed a prisoner, three eyewitnesses testified to it, and that's one of the worst crimes there is. And there are reports it wasn't the first time. To let you live and do more such things will only make people hate you and our cause, so it would be wrong. Let's have no more talk. I'll make sure your family is taken care of. You be a man of more courage.'

Shi said bitterly, 'More than once I've been offered ten thousand taels to kill you, and I always turned them down.'

Kung waved this away. 'That was only your duty, but you think it makes you special. As if you had to resist your character to do the right thing. But your character is no excuse! I'm sick of your character! I too have an angry soul, but this is China we're fighting for! For humanity! You have to ignore your character, and do what is right!'

And he turned away as Shi Fandi was led off.

Afterwards Kung was in a dark mood, not remorseful about the condemnation of Shi, but depressed. 'It had to be done but it did nothing. Such men as he often come out on top. Presumably they will never die out. And so perhaps China will never escape her fate.' He quoted from Zhu: Vastterritories, abundant resources, a great population – from such an excellent base, will we only ever go in circles, trapped on the wheel of birth and death?"'

Bao did not know how to reply; he had never heard his friend speak so pessimistically. Although now it seemed familiar enough. Kung had many moods. But in the end, one mood dominated; he sighed, leapt to his feet: 'On with it, anyway! Go on, go on! We can only try. We have to occupy the time of this life somehow, we might as well fight for the good.'

It was the farmers' associations that made the difference in the end. Kung and Bao attended nightly meetings in hundreds of villages and towns, and thousands of revolutionary soldiers like them were conveying Zhu's analysis and plan to the people, who in the country were still for the most part illiterate, so that the information had to be conveyed by word of mouth. But there is no form of communication faster and more certain, once it reaches a certain critical point of accumulation.

Bao learned every detail of farming existence during that time. He learned that the Long War had stripped away most of the men who had been alive, and many of the younger women. There were only a few old men around no matter where you went, and the total population was still less than it had been before the war. Some villages were abandoned, others were occupied by skeleton crews. This made planting and harvesting crops difficult, and the young people alive were always at work ensuring that the season's food and tax crops would be grown. The old women worked as hard as anyone, doing what they could at their age to help, maintaining at all times the imperial demeanour of the ordinary Chinese farmwife. Usually the ones in the village who could read and do accounts were the grandmothers, who as girls had lived in more prosperous families; now they taught the younger folk how to run the looms, and to deal with the government in Beijing, and to read. Because of this they were often the first ones cut down when a warlord army invaded their region, along with the young men who might join the fight.