Tag: O

Chapter Nine – Passage Four

Occasionally, I smoke.  It’s not a typical habit but sometimes I’ll light up a cigarette when I’m feeling particularly tense or stressed out.  Over the horizon, dawn’s about to break and in another hour The Silver Dragon will arrive at Urumqi.  Our first appointment of the day is a nine o’clock meeting with Governor Wu at his offices in the city town hall.  He’ll be expecting a status report and an outline of next steps and how we plan to proceed.  Every time you walk into a client meeting, the hope is that you’ll be able to deliver wonderfully good news.  That you’ve met every objective for the quarter and really knocked it out of the park.  But then, sometimes, you’ll be in the situation like we’re in now.  Where the news is less than stellar.

In our defense, we’ve been consistently sending periodic status updates to the governor’s office:  Daily and weekly dashboard snapshots of the situation on the ground in Urumqi.  So at least we’re not surprising anyone with bad news.  (That’s always the first lesson in the business:  Surprises are bad.  Clients can (well, relatively) ingest bad news when they’re warned (repeatedly) ahead of time and made well aware of the risks along the way.   But if things suddenly go pear-shaped and once-theoretical risks suddenly reify with very severe, very real-world consequences, this is when you’ve got a problem.)

But things had been steadily going downhill for the past six weeks.  While our initial efforts had at first appeared promising, after the second week, incidents of petty crimes such as theft and vandalism had rebounded and climbed even higher than their previous levels.  And ever since, all of our charts had been going in the wrong direction.

I hear the garden car door open behind me and turn.  It’s Kristen.

“Up early, are we?” she asks.  The garden car is one of the more quixotic in The Silver Dragon.  Normally, China’s pretty warm and doesn’t get the deep autumn seasons.  So a clever engineer somewhere along the way decided to install a “greenhouse” car on the train to emulate foliage and fauna that the Chinese don’t normally see.  For urban folk –namely, the wealthy who could afford passage on The Silver Dragon— the garden car was a wonderous marvel.  Most of the urban wealthy in China spent their days in soaring, airconditioned office towers all of their waking hours.  To be able to enjoy nature for, even for a few hours, on a long train trip was a welcome reprieve from the pedestrian daily grind of one’s mundane Chinese life.

I’m in the garden car just because it had the proper ventilation systems to vacuum away all of my cigarette smoke though.  Gotta find some way to get rid of all of the evidence, after all.

Kristen walks over and sits next to me on the garden bench.  She’s wearing a dark blue suit pants; a beige, cashmere turtleneck; and golden hoop earrings. I’m pretty sure she’s also wearing heels because she seems taller.  It reminds me that we’re all going to need to get dolled up when we see the governor.  (And I’m suddenly reminded that I’ve spent the past two months in sweatpants in the basement of the JFL.)

“Big day, today,” I say, taking another drag on my cigarette.  “We’re not exactly going in to deliver the best of news.”

Kristen shrugs.  “Good news is easy.  Anyone can deliver good news.  It’s needing to deliver bad news and convince them to keep us around– that’s where we really earn it, right?”

I chuckle.  “True, true.  So very true.”

“Besides,” Kristen says brightly.  “We’ve got a full-proof plan!  It’s bold!  It’s daring!  They’re going to love it!”

“Our plan involves fabricating and maintaining a wild lie to feed to millions,” I say, sighing.  “In order to strike fear and worry into the lives of millions of Chinese citizens, many of whom poor farmers and common folk who are already struggling enough as it is to make ends meet and just get by.”

Kristen clasps me on the back.  “C’mon!  Don’t be like that.  It’s for the greater good.  Isn’t that what we always tell ourselves?  Follow the data?  Trust the numbers?  Instead of dwelling on all of the negative side effects, think about the good parts!  The decrease in sectarian violence!  All of the suicide bombings in the Sunday morning markets that’ll be averted!”

“Yeah, they’ll be averted because there won’t be a Sunday morning market.  We’ll be asking tens of thousands to go into voluntary quarantine when this whole thing begins.  Maybe even hundreds of thousands if we expand beyond Phase I.”

“You know what your problem is?” Kristen suddenly says, turning to look at me.  “You, Dexter Fletcher, worry way too much.”

“Jesus Christ, woman.”   I stand and flick away my cigarette, lighting another.  “How can you not worry about what we’re about to propose? To the CCP, of all people?!“

“Relax,” she says.  “We’re just giving a run-of-the-mill update and gently suggesting an idea.  No one’s pulling the trigger on anything yet.  We’re just introducing an idea into the ether.”

“An idea built on lies!”

“So what?  Geez, grow up, Dexter.  Look around you.  I may be Australian but I’ve slaved away my fair share of man-months deep in the salt-mines of America.  Where has all that free-flow of information gotten you, exactly?”

Kristen’s retort brings me short.  I want to protest, but there’s a part of me that knows she’s right.  America’s holiness around first amendment, free speech rights hadn’t exactly done the country any favors in the online age either.  Our indices for civil unrest, crime rates, and unhappiness stood, after all, among the highest in the developed world.

“I sleep fine at night,” says Kristen, “because ultimately you need to look at the ends that we’re trying to achieve.  So a few tens of thousands of people get stuck at home for a few months.  Is anyone hurt or dying?  No.  Will some people get cabin fever?  Sure, they’ll get restless and bored, probably.  But you know what?  Bored is better than dead.

“Additionally,” she continues.  “Mom and pop businesses won’t shutter.  We’re proposing that the CCP step in with one-time loans and grants after ‘the virus’ strikes.  This will build gratitude in the Uyghur populations, at least among the merchant class.  That in their time of need, when an Act of God unfortunately struck, that Xi’s government was there!  That the Chinese Communist Party saved the day!  That the Chinese National Guard built hospitals at record speed!  Only in a time of emergency and desperation does everyone suddenly become fans of big government. In times of great need, everyone’s suddenly a Democrat.”

Chapter Five – Passage Eight

“Okay, guys.  Seriously.  This isn’t working.” 

Kristen leans back in her oversized beanbag chair and rubs her eyes tiredly.  It’s late in the evening and we’re all exhausted.  In the preceding weeks, we’d taken the liberty of special-ordering a king’s ransom-worth of office furniture to our little lounge here in Building 11.  So now at least we were able to work in more relative comfort.  Though it’d been necessary to convince Yu-Law that these items were “crucial” to the Uyghur suppression effort and so all of the expenses had gone blithely onto the Corporate AmEx.

Kristen flips through various charts and dashboard on her monitor; we see a projection of it all on the wall.

“Clearly, this is not what we want,” she says, frustrated.

On all the graphs, the amount of turmoil and discontent in Urumqi has only increased since we’d joined the project several weeks ago.  This is bad.  When you’re a data scientist and your sole value towards a project is measured only in bar graphs, there’s literally nowhere to hide.  No beautiful storytelling to obscure the total lack of results or excuses to explain away the abysmal outcomes.  The numbers and charts are all there, in the harsh light of day, for all to see.

We were failing.

We’d tried running an advertising campaign in the city promoting good behavior.  Building on top of China’s Social Credit System, Uyghurs would be rewarded with additional food rations if they ratted out on their fellow neighbors who were planning protests.  So far, no full-scale riots had exploded in the city yet, but acts of vandalism on public, government property were definitely on the rise.  There was a giant banner of Xi Jinping that hung from the public court house in Urumqi which had been defaced by spray paint last weekend and other miscreants had similarly defiled one of the statues celebrating The Great Mao in Hongshan Park in Hongshancun district.  So far, none of the vandalism done was irreversible, but the offenses were becoming increasingly brazen.

Despite our campaign to promise more food to good citizens, the program had generated very few leads though.  The only thing we could recommend was increase the number of “peace security officers” that were on patrol.  But again, that was bad optics and the last thing Yu-Law wanted.  So that idea was quickly scrapped.

“The problem,” Deepak says from his table, “we don’t have someone on the inside.  We need to better understand why they’re protesting in Urumqi.  What they’ve unhappy about.”

“Are you suggesting we go in undercover?”  Coleman looks dubious.  “I don’t know, man.  I think I’d kinda stick out.”

“Obviously, not you, genius.”  Deepak turns to Alan.  “Could you go in?  Infiltrate their ranks?”

Alan shifts uncomfortably in his office swivel chair.  “Me?  Really?”

Asians are generally a skinny folk.  For whatever reason, whether due to genetics or severe childhood malnutrition, Chinese people, were usually on the thinner, shorter side.

But Alan Chen is most definitely an exception.

Alan has a boyish face with bubbly cheeks and a short, rotund stature.  This was not exactly the look of a man who had suffered the great privations of the proletariat.

“Ostensibly, I know you’ve all been told that you’re being brought onboard to help consult for The Echelon 2 Project.  And this is accurate.  It’s true we could use your expertise in suppressing the free flow of information within China’s borders and stomping out any hint of dissent or assembly that we’re able to detect within our population of 1.4 billion.”

No one blinks an eye.  We know why we’ve been summoned.  We all know we have particular skills and how our unique skillset can be used.

“But the truth,” Yang sighs, “is that mere suppression of information is unfortunately no longer sufficient.  There needs to be, shall we say, a more proactive means of prevention.”

I raise an eyebrow.

“As you all well know,” Yang continues.  “The plague of western liberalism is slowly but surely sweeping the world.  Here in China, we’ve more successfully resisted its effects.  But the internet is vast. Despite our glorious government’s best efforts, our citizens are increasingly being seduced by dangers like ‘democracy’ and ‘independent thought’.”

Yang shakes his head sadly.

“It may work in the west.  Though I personally don’t think it has.  But I’ll tell you this– as certain as the sun rises in the east, western liberalism and democracy unequivocally will not work here in China.  The clear majority of our citizens still live in the rural hinterlands and are uneducated.  Corruption would be rampant, even more than it already is.  And society and civilization would devolve into chaos.  One day, we might be ready.  But today is not that day.  And thus, today, freedom-loving people everywhere within our borders must be stopped.  They are like a disease that threatens the health of the greater whole, all of China.”

The blonde woman speaks up.  “Alright, that’s a nice speech.  But can you just tell us what you’re asking for? From us?  Specifically?”

Yang smiles.  “Ah, Ms. Henley.  Always one to cut to the chase.  Very admirable.”

Hearing her name and seeing her face suddenly stokes a long-dormant neuron back in my brain somewhere.  The woman in the armchair is Katherine Henley, previously a fast-rising star at the social media search giant, Foogle, back in the United States.  Just less than a year ago, she’d been the media darling of Silicon Valley and on the cover of every news glossy in the Bay Area.  I hadn’t followed events closely, but apparently at some point she’d made some waves, sparked controversy, and there’d transpired a spectacular fall from grace.  And now here she was, it appeared, in China.

The skinny young black guy also raises his hand, speaking up.  “Wait, hold up a sec.  Yang, man, you made about seventeen different leaps of logic in your opening statement there.  Clarify for us for a moment– why exactly are the legions of Chinese poor unworthy of voting?”