‘Even today, the Party still has no idea how many of them there actually are. Sometimes they think they’re dealing with dozens, sometimes just a few. A cancerous ulcer in any case, one which will eat away at our magnificent, happy and healthy People’s Republic from the inside.’ Tu hacked up some phlegm and spat it in front of his feet. ‘Now, we know what comes out of Beijing, predominantly rumours and very little of anything that makes sense, so how big do you think the organisation really is?’
Jericho thought about it. He couldn’t remember ever having heard of a Guardian being imprisoned.
‘Oh sure, now and then they arrest someone and claim that person is one of them!’ said Tu, as if he had read Jericho’s thoughts. ‘But I happen to know for certain that they haven’t made one successful arrest yet. Unbelievable, isn’t it? I mean, they’re hunting an army, so you’d think there’d be prisoners of war.’
‘They’re hunting something that looks like an army,’ said Jericho.
‘You’re getting close.’
‘But the army doesn’t exist. There are only a few of them, but they know how to keep slipping through the investigators’ nets. So the Party exaggerates them. Makes them seem more dangerous and intelligent than they really are, to distract from the fact that the State still hasn’t managed to pull a handful of hackers out of the online traffic.’
‘And what do you conclude from that?’
‘That for one of Beijing’s honourable servants you know a suspicious amount about a bunch of internet dissidents.’ Jericho looked at Tu, frowning. ‘Is it just my imagination, or are you playing some part in the game too?’
‘Why don’t you just come out and ask if I’m one of them?’
‘I just did.’
‘The answer is no. But I can tell you that the entire group consists of six people. There were never more than that.’
‘And Yoyo is one of them?’
‘Well.’ Tu rubbed his neck. ‘Yes and no.’
‘Which means?’
‘She’s the brains behind it. Yoyo brought the Guardians to life.’
Jericho smirked. In the distorting mirror of the internet, anything was possible. The Guardians’ presence suggested they were a larger group, potentially capable of spying on government secrets. Their actions were well thought out, the background research always exemplary. It all created the illusion of being an extensive network, but in actual fact that was thanks to their multitude of sympathisers, who were neither affiliated to the group nor possessed knowledge about their structure. On closer inspection the Guardians’ entire activism boiled down to a small, conspiring hacker community. And yet—
‘—they have to be constantly up to date,’ murmured Jericho.
Tu jabbed his elbow into his ribs. ‘Are you talking to me?’
‘What? No. I mean, yes. How old is Yoyo again?’
‘Twenty-five.’
‘No twenty-five-year-old girl is cunning enough to outmanoeuvre the State Security in the long term.’
‘Yoyo is extraordinarily intelligent.’
‘That’s not what I mean. The State may be limping behind the hackers, but they’re not completely stupid. You can’t get past the Diamond Shield using conventional methods, so sooner or later you’ll have the Internet Police knocking at your door. Yoyo must have access to programs which enable her to always be a step ahead of them.’
Tu shrugged his shoulders.
‘Which means that she knows how to use them.’ Jericho spun the web further. ‘Who are the other members?’
‘Some guys. Students like Yoyo.’
‘And how do you know all this?’
‘Yoyo told me.’
‘She told you.’ Jericho paused. ‘But she didn’t tell Chen?’
‘Well, she tried. It’s just that Chen won’t hear any of it. He doesn’t listen to her, so she comes to me.’
‘Why you?’
‘Owen, you don’t have to know everything—’
‘But I want to understand.’
Tu sighed and stroked his bald head.
‘Let’s just say I help Yoyo to understand her father. Or, that’s what she hopes to get from me in any case.’ He raised a finger. ‘And don’t ask what there is to understand. That has nothing whatsoever to do with you!’
‘You speak in puzzles just as much as Chen does,’ boomed Jericho, aggravated.
‘On the contrary. I’m showing you an excessive amount of trust.’
‘Then trust me more. If I’m going to find Yoyo, I need to know the names of the other Guardians. I have to find them, question them.’
‘Just assume the others have gone underground too.’
‘Or were arrested.’
‘Hardly. Years ago I had the opportunity to get a close look at the cogs of the State welfare services, the places where they look inside your head and declare you to be infested with all kinds of insanity. I know those types. If they had arrested the Guardians, they would have been boasting about it at the tops of their voices for a while now. It’s one thing to make people disappear, but if someone’s running rings around you, making you look like a fool in public, then you put their head on a spear as soon as you catch them. Yoyo has caused the Party a great deal of grief. They won’t stand for it.’
‘How did Yoyo even get into all this?’
‘The way young people always get into things like this. She identified with zi you, with freedom.’ Tu poked around between his shirt buttons and scratched his belly. ‘You’ve been living here for a good while, Owen, and I think you understand my people pretty well by now. Or, let’s put it this way, you understand what you see. But a few things are still closed off from you. Everything that takes place in the Middle Kingdom today is the logical consequence of developments and breakthroughs throughout our history. I know, that sounds like something from a travel guide. Europeans always think this whole yin and yang business, this insistence on tradition, is just folklorist nonsense intended to disguise the fact that we’re just a band of greedy imitators who want to make their stamp on the world, continually damage human rights and who, since Mao, have no more ideals. But for two thousand years, Europe was like a pot which continually had new things thrown into it; it was a patchwork of clashing identities. You’ve all overrun each other, made your neighbours’ customs and ways your own, even while you were still fighting them. Huge empires came and went as if in time-lapse. For a while it was the Romans having their say, then the French, then the Germans and the Brits. You talk of a united Europe, and yet you speak in more languages than you can possibly understand, and as if that weren’t enough, you import Asia, America and the Balkans too. You’re incapable of understanding how a nation that for the most part was entirely self-sufficient and self-contained – because it felt the Middle Kingdom didn’t need to know what was outside its borders – finds it hard to accept the new, especially when it’s brought in from the outside.’
‘You guys certainly know how to brush that one under the carpet,’ snorted Jericho. ‘You drive German, French and Korean cars, wear Italian shoes, watch American films; I can’t think of any other nationality that has turned more to the outside in recent years than yours.’
‘Turned to the outside?’ Tu laughed drily. ‘Nicely put, Owen. And what comes to light when you turn to the outside? Whatever’s inside. But what is it that you see? What exactly are we turning towards the outside? Only what you recognise. You wanted us to open up? We did that, in the eighties under Deng Xiaoping. You wanted to do business with us? You’re doing it. Everything that Chinese emperors didn’t want from you over the centuries, we’ve bought from you in a matter of a few years, and you sold it to us willingly. Now we’re selling it back to you, and you buy it! And on top of all that you have a fancy for a good portion of authentic China. And you get that too, but you don’t like it. You get all worked up about us walking all over human rights, but in essence you just don’t understand how anyone can be imprisoned for his opinion in a land that drinks Coca-Cola. That doesn’t compute to you. Your ethnologists lament the disappearance of the last cannibals and plead for the preservation of their living space, but woe betide them if they start to do business and wear ties. If they did, you’d want them to downgrade back to chicken and vegetables in the blink of an eye.’