Of course. You said it yourself, we have thousands of lifetimes of work to do. But it's working.

Don't generalize. It could all slip away.

Of course. But back we go, to try again. Each generation makes its fight. A few more turns of the wheel. Come on – back with a will. Back into the fray!

As if one could refuse.

Oh come on. You wouldn't even if you could. You're always the one leading the way down there, you're always up for a fight.

… I'm tired. I don't know how you persist the way you do. You tire me too. All that hope in the face or calamity. Sometimes I think you should be more marked by it. Sometimes I think I have to take it all on myself.

Come on. You'll be your old self once things get going again. Idelba, Piali, Madam Sururi, are you ready?

We're ready.

Kirana?

… All right then. One more turn.

I. Always China

Bao Xinhua was fourteen years old when he first met Kung Jianguo, in his work unit near the southern edge of Beijing, just outside the Dahongmen, the Big Red Gate. Kung was only a few years older, but he was already head of the revolutionary cell in his work unit next door, quite an accomplishment given that he had been one of the sanwu, the I three withouts' – without family, without work unit, without identity card – when he turned up as a boy at the gate of the police station of the Zhejiang district, just outside the Dahongmen. The police had placed him in his current work unit, but he always remained an outsider there, often called 'an individualist', which is a very deep criticism in China even now, when so much has changed. 'He persisted in his own ways, no matter what others said.' 'He clung obstinately to his own course.' 'He was so lonely he didn't even have a shadow.' This is what they said about him in his work unit, and so naturally he looked outside the unit to the neighbourhood and the city at large, and was a street boy for no one knew how long, not even him. And he was good at it. Then at a young age he became a firebrand in Beijing underground politics, and it was in this capacity that he visited Bao Xinhua's work unit.

'The work unit is the modern equivalent of the Chinese clan compound,' he said to those of them who gathered to listen. 'It is a spiritual and social unit as much as an economic one, trying its best to continue the old ways in the new world. No one really wants to change it, because everyone wants to have a place to come to when they die. Everyone needs a place. But these big walled factories are not like the old family compounds that they imitate. They are prisons, first built to organize our labour for the Long War. Now the Long War has been over for forty years and yet we slave all our lives for it still, as if we worked for China, when really it is only for corrupt military governors. Not even for the Emperor, who disappeared long ago, but for the generals and warlords, who hope we will work and work and never notice how the world has changed.

'We say, "we are of one work unit" as if we were saying, "we are of the same family", or 'Ve are brother and sister", and this is good. But we never see over the wall of our unit, to the world at large.'

Many in his audience nodded. Their work unit was a poor one, made up mostly of immigrants from the south, and they often went hungry. The postwar years in Beijing had seen a lot of changes, and now in the Year 29, as the revolutionaries liked to call it, in conformity with the practice of scientific organizations, things were beginning to fall apart. The Qing dynasty had been overthrown in the middle years of the war, when things had gone so badly; the Emperor himself, aged six or seven at the time, had disappeared, and now most assumed he was dead. The Fifth Assemblage of Military Talent was still in control of the Confucian ureaucracy, its hand still on the wheel of their destiny; but it was a senile old hand, the dead hand of the past, and all over China revolts were breaking out. They were of all sorts: some in the service of foreign ideologies, but most internal insurgencies, organized by Han Chinese hoping to rid themselves once and for all of the Qing and the generals and warlords. Thus the White Lotus, the Monkey Insurgents, the Shanghai Revolutionary Movement and so on. joining these were regional revolts by the various nationalities and ethnic groups in the west and south – the Tibetans, Mongolians, Xinzing and so on, all intent on freeing themselves from the heavy hand of Beijing. There was no question that despite the big army that Beijing could in theory bring to bear, an army still much admired and honoured by the populace for its sacrifices in the Long War, the military command itself was in trouble, and soon to fall. The Great Enterprise had returned again to China: dynastic succession; and the question was, who was going to succeed? And could anyone succeed in bringing China back together again?

Kung spoke to Bao's work unit in favour of the League of All Peoples' School of Revolutionary Change, which had been founded during the last years of the Long War by Zhu Tuanjie kexue ('Unite for Science'), a half-Japanese whose birth name had been Isao. Zhu Isao, as he was usually called, had been a Chinese governor of one of the Japanese provinces before their revolution, and when that revolution came he had negotiated a settlement with the Japanese independence forces. He had ordered the Chinese army occupying Kyushu back to China without loss of life on either side, landing with them in Manchuria and declaring the port city of Tangshan to be an international city of peace, right there in the homeland of the Qing rulers, and in the midst of the Long War. The official Beijing position was that Zhu was a Japanese and a traitor, and that when the appropriate time came his insurgency would be crushed by the Chinese armies he had betrayed. As it turned out, when the war ended and the postwar years marched by in their dreary hungry round, the city of Tangshan was never conquered; on the contrary, similar revolts occurred in many other Chinese cities, particularly the big ports on the coast, all the way down to Canton, and Zhu Isao published an unending stream of theoretical materials defending his movement's actions, and explaining the novel organization of the city of Tangshan, which was run as a communal enterprise belonging equally to all the people who lived within its embattled borders.

Kung talked about these matters with Bao's work unit, describing Zhu's theory of communal creation of value, and what it meant for ordinary Chinese, who had for so long had the fruits of their labour stolen from them. 'Zhu looked at what really happens, and described our economy, politics, and methods of power and accumulation in scientific detail. After that he proposed a new organization of society, which took this knowledge of how things work and applied it to serve all the people in a community and in all China, or any other country.'

During a break for a meal, Kung paused to speak to Bao, and asked his name. Bao's given name was Xinhua, 'New China'; Kung's was Jianguo, 'Construct the Nation' – they knew therefore that they were children of the Fifth Assemblage, who had encouraged patriotic naming to counteract their own moral bankruptcy and the superhuman sacrifices of the people during the postwar famines. Everyone born around twenty years before had names like 'Oppose Islam' (Huidi) or 'Do Battle' (Zhandou) even though at that point the war had been over for twenty years. Girls' names had suffered especially during this fad, as parents attempted to keep some traditional elements of female names incorporated into the whipped up patriotric fervour, so that there were girls their age named 'Fragrant Soldier' or 'Graceful Army' or 'Public Fragrance' or 'Nation loving Orchid' and the like.