Death of a Red Heroine

with it.’ So this ‘nephew’ immediately gets his quota on a fax signed by the minister, and sells it to us for a million Yuan. You call this fair? In our company, one-third of the workers are being laid off, with only one hundred and fifty a month of so-called ‘waiting for reassignment’ pay—not enough to buy a moon cake for their kids at the Mid-Autumn Festival!”
    “It’s much more than quotas, young man,” another man said. “They get those high positions like they were born to be way above us. With their connections, power, and money, what can’t they do? Several well-known actresses were involved in the case, I’ve heard. All of them stripped naked, as white as lambs, scratching and screeching all night long. Wu has not wasted his days.”
    “Well, I heard that Wu Bing still is in a coma in Huadong Hospital,” an elderly man cut in, apparently not comfortable with the direction of the discussion.
    “Who is Wu Bing?”
    “Wu Xiaoming’s father.”
    “Good for the old man,” the man in the white T-shirt said. “He will be spared the humiliation of his son’s downfall.”
    “Who cares? The father should be responsible for his son’s crime. I’m glad, for once, our government has made the right decision.”
    “Come on, you think they’re serious? It’s just like the old saying, ‘Kill a chicken to scare monkeys.’”
    “Whatever you say, this time the chicken is an HCC, and I would like to make a stew of it, delicious, tender, plus a pinch of MSG.”
    As he stood listening to the discussion, the various aspects of the case came together.
    It was so politically complicated, this homicide case. In the inner-Party struggle, Wu’s execution was a symbolic blow to the hard-liners, so that they would not continue to stand in the way of reform, but it was also a message modified by Wu’s father being sick and away from the center, so that it would not upset those still in power to the point of shaking the “political stability.” In terms of ideological propaganda, the case was conveniently presented as the consequence of Western bourgeois influence, which protected the Party’s credit. And finally, to ordinary Chinese people, the case also served as a demonstration of the Party’s determination to fight corruption at all levels, especially among the HCC, a dramatic gesture demanded by China’s politics after the summer of 1989.
    The combination of all these factors had made Wu Xiaoming the best candidate for an example. It was possible that failing Wu Xiaoming, another HCC with a similar background would have been chosen for such a purpose. It was proper and right that Wu should be punished. No question about it. But the question was: Had Wu been punished for the crime he had committed?
    So Chief Inspector Chen had played right into the hands of politics.
    The realization came to him as he left the hotel and walked slowly along Nanjing Road with heavy steps. The street was as crowded as ever. People were walking, shopping, talking, in high spirits. The sun cast its brilliance over the most prosperous thoroughfare of the city. He bought a copy of the People’s Daily .
    In his high-school days, he had believed in everything published in the People’s Daily , including one particular term: proletarian dictatorship. It meant a sort of dictatorship logically necessary to reach the final stage of communism, thus justifying all means toward that ultimate end. The term proletarian dictatorship was no longer used. Instead, the term was: the Party’s interests .
    He was no longer such an unquestioning believer.
    For he could hardly believe in what he himself had done.
    Wu Xiaoming had been executed at the moment when he had been sleeping with Ling. What had happened between Ling and him was, by the orthodox Communist code, another instance of “Western bourgeois decadence.” The same crime Wu had been accused of—”decadent lifestyle under the influence of Western bourgeois ideology.”
    Chief Inspector Chen could tell himself, of course, a number of convenient things—that things are complicated, that justice must be upheld, that the Party’s interest is above everything else, and that the end justifies the means.
    But it was more than that, he realized: the end could not but be transformed by the use of certain means.
    “Whoever fights monsters,” Nietzsche said, “should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.”
    His thoughts were interrupted by a request