It was Li who established the regime for their conversations: Mandarin when they were sufficiently away from the possibility of other Chinese joining in, English when they were among people, but loudly spoken and with many official references, proclaiming his escort function to create the block against the frequent Chinese eagerness to practise the language with a foreigner. At the beginning in Zhengzhou, Snow had feared the usual approach from money-changers, convinced from the outset that Li would have summoned a plainclothes policeman or detained the man himself, but so obvious was Li’s authority that they were never once solicited.
Li was also a diligent questioner, but too eager. The man started, with seeming innocence, by praising Snow’s command of Chinese but alerted Snow at once by asking why he had perfected the language and why he was in China. In Beijing, which had appointed Li his escort, all those details were listed on his Foreign Ministry accreditation, to which the Chinese would have had access.
Because they were known, Snow talked easily of being a priest – even of his particular Order – but quickly insisted on his contentment at currently teaching English.
‘How can you be content, having abandoned your calling?’
‘I believe the need for what I am doing now is as much a calling,’ said Snow, wishing he had a stronger answer.
Li missed the opportunity to press the point, instead trying to hurry a comparison between Western theology and Mao’s version of Marxist-Leninist philosophy. Snow agreed that religion was a philosophy sometimes obscured by complicated mysticism but asked in return if the two thousand years of Western religion and the even longer Confucian, Buddhist and Taoist philosophies in China hadn’t proved more durable than the communism now abandoned in the Soviet Union and its former satellites. From someone so clearly – so proudly – a Party zealot, Snow expected the recorded-message response of Mao’s interpretation being the pure creed to continue forever, not the corrupted doctrine of self-serving criminals in Moscow. Instead Li accepted that Christianity and Confucianism and Buddism and Taoism were formidable persuasions to be respected, pointing out that the three Asian philosophies were recognized in China, as was Catholicism. Snow considered making the point that Confucian and Buddhist and Taoist temples existed more as tourist attractions than as places of worship. He was glad of his restraint when Li asked, still in open-faced innocence, if Snow believed communism was a philosophy as doomed in China as everywhere else. Snow at once insisted he was apolitical. Li abandoned the conversation, as if it were of no importance, but tried to re-introduce it on four further occasions, each time phrasing differently the questions which, responded to wrongly, could have brought against Snow accusations of a counterrevolutionary attitude. Snow did not once respond wrongly.
By the second day of their travelling together Snow accepted that Li was assembling a file upon him. He confronted the awareness without undue concern: Father Robertson had openly warned of such a possibility, when Snow had talked of being officially escorted for more than half the journey. Snow believed he handled the personal questioning as smoothly as he had everything else, disclosing nothing he did not think the authorities already knew and had on record about him. Li expertly extracted the information by comparison, offering facts about himself to get responses from Snow, and although the priest was not sure Li would ever become someone of sufficient importance he mentally created a matching file on the Chinese, in the event of his emerging at any level in the Gong An Ju security service, to which he was convinced the man aspired if he was not an already overly enthusiastic member.
It transpired that they were the same age. Li volunteered an education at Shanghai University, identifying himself as the only son of parents who dutifully obeyed the government edict on the correct size of the family unit. Snow ignored the invitation to criticize the penalty-enforced method of Chinese birth-control, saying that he, too, was an only child. He avoided disclosing that his now dead father had been a general whose career culminated as NATO second-in-command of land-based forces in Europe, knowing that would elevate the importance of whatever information Li was gathering upon him. Li said he was married, with a son of three: it would, of course, be the only child he and his wife would consider having. When Snow said priests in his Order did not marry, the Chinese nodded and remarked that celibacy was a Buddhist tenet as well. It was after that particular exchange that Li made one of his other attempts to get an ill-considered response from Snow about the future of Chinese communism. Snow completed his file on the other man by manipulating a typical vacation photograph session, posing the escort in three different settings in Anqing, around the middle of the tour. Li responded at once, producing from a rucksack a camera of which Snow had, until that moment, been unaware. The Chinese seemed to have a problem getting someone of Snow’s height into the frame, bending and twisting for a final elevation.
Snow had given the authorities in Beijing a vacation as the reason for his travelling throughout the country, and although it would also have been listed on the paperwork held by Li the Chinese still asked, in more than one way and on more than one occasion, why Snow was making such an extensive tour. Snow said that he saw it as essential to his teaching work in China to travel as widely as possible, to increase his understanding and perfect his command of the language. It was the cue for another entrapment attempt. Li asked openly – his first crude demand – if Snow saw his work as converting people to his faith. Snow insisted he did not live and work in China to practise as a priest but as a teacher of English. His faith was his own: he did not seek to preach it to others. What did he do if someone asked about his religion? Explain it. To convert? To reply to a question. How many people had asked for an explanation during his current journey? None. Was he disappointed? He felt nothing to be disappointed about: the purpose of his journey was to see and better understand the country and this he was doing. He was not a practising priest. Li industriously cleaned his spectacles, a gesture which over the course of several days Snow had come to recognize as a mark of frustration at having failed in whatever he was trying to achieve.
And Snow won, succeeding – although not to the degree of detail he would have wanted, such as developing another source like Zhang Su Lin – in his information-gathering mission. He had not expected to, in the first two days of their meeting in Zhengzhou. During those early days he had, in fact, been despondent at the control he was now under, refusing to weigh the undeniable successes before he’d met Li against the futility of achieving anything worthwhile afterwards.
And then he realized Li would identify for him anything he wanted to isolate as officially restricted, in any of the closed areas through which they moved.
All he had to do was ask.
If Li agreed, then where Snow wanted to go did not have anything the authorities wanted to keep hidden. If Li refused, it was a specifically designated high-security area, the best possible map coordinates of which were memorized or actually written down, in confused or apparently meaningless fashion, in the journal Snow was officially keeping of his travels, to be passed on to Walter Foster on his return to Beijing, possibly for some satellite aerial reconnaissance if the information was considered sufficiently interesting to be pursued further.