The Year of Rice and Salt

In the Confucian system the farmers were the second most highly regarded class, just below the scholar bureaucrats who invented the system, but above the artisans and merchants. Now Zhu's intellectuals were organizing the farmers in the back country, and the artisans and merchants in the cities largely waited to see what would happen. So it seemed Confucius himself had identified the revolutionary classes. Certainly there were many more farmers than city dwellers. So when the farmer armies began to organize and march, there was little the old Long War remnants could do about it; they had been decimated themselves, and had neither the means nor the will to kill millions of their countrymen. For the most part they retreated to the biggest cities, and prepared to defend them as if against Muslims.

In this uneasy stand off, Kung argued against any all out assaults, advocating more subtle methods for defeating the city based warlords that remained. Certain cities had their supply lines cut off, their airports destroyed, their ports blockaded; siege tactics of the oldest kind, updated to the new weapons of the Long War. Indeed another long war, this time a civil war, seemed to be brewing, though there was no one in China who wanted such a thing. Even the youngest child lived in the wreckage and shadow of the Long War, and knew another one would be catastrophe.

Kung met with White Lotus and other revolutionary groups in the cities controlled by the warlords. Almost every work unit had within it workers sympathetic to the revolution, and many of them were joining Zhu's movement. In reality there was almost no one who actively and enthusiastically supported the old regime; how could there be? Too much bad had happened. So it was a matter of getting all the disaffected to back the same resistance, and the same strategy for change. Kung proved to be the most influential leader in this effort. 'In times like these,' he would say, 'everyone becomes a sort of intellectual, as matters so dire demand to be thought through. That's the glory of these times. They have woken us up.'

Some of these talks and organizational meetings were dangerous visits to enemy ground. Kung had risen too far in the New China movement to be safe making such missions; he was too famous now, and had a price on his head. I But once, in the thirty second week of Year 35, he and Bao made a clandestine visit to their old neighbourhood in Beijing, hiding in a delivery truck full of cabbage heads, and emerging near the Big Red Gate.

At first it seemed everything had changed. Certainly the immediate vicinity outside the Gate had been razed, and new streets laid out, so that there was no way they could find their old haunts by the Gate, as they were gone. In their place stood a police station and a number of work unit compounds, lined up parallel to the old stretch of city wall that still existed for a short distance on each side of the Gate. Fairly big trees had been transplanted to the new street corners, protected by thick wrought iron fences with spikes on top: the greenery looked very fine. The work unit compounds had dorm windows looking outwards, another welcome new feature; in the old days they were always built with blank walls facing the outside world, and only in their inner courtyards were there any signs of life. Now the streets themselves were crowded with vendor carts and rolling bookstalls.

'It looks good,' Bao had to admit.

Kung grinned. 'I liked the old place better. Let's get going and see what we can find.'

Their appointment was in an old work unit, occupying several smaller buildings just to the south of the new quarter. Down there the alleys were as tight as ever, all brick and dust and muddy lanes, not a tree to be seen. They wandered freely here, wearing sunglasses and aviator's caps like half the other young men. No one paid them the slightest attention, and they were able to buy paper bowls of noodles and eat standing on a street corner among the crowds and traffic, observing the familiar scene, which did not seem to have changed a bit since their departure a few packed years before.

Bao said, 'I miss this place.'

Kung agreed. 'It won't be long before we can move back here if we want. Enjoy Beijing again, centre of the world.'