"When did this start?" he asked.

"This afternoon. They have already started fighting!"

"Has anyone been hurt?"

Huang said Danian's gang beat up the section chief in charge of accounts in the finance office and broke the man's ribs when they kicked him. It was because he had a capitalist family background. The cadres who showed support for his faction have all been threatened. Huang's background as a petty trader was also bad, even though he had been a Party member for almost twenty years.

"If you can't protect the cadres who are supporting you, your faction will be crushed!" Huang was agitated.

"I withdrew from the command unit a long time ago and only do survey work," he said.

"But everyone wants you to come and take charge. Big Li and the others don't realize that they have to protect the cadres. Everyone is from the old society. Whose family or relatives don't have some problem? They have announced a big meeting to haul out and denounce Old Liu and Comrade Wang Qi. If your crowd doesn't stop them, none of the cadres will dare to join forces with your crowd. I'm not the only one who thinks this, and Old Liu and a number of middle-ranking cadres have sent me to find you. We all have faith in you and support you. You must come forward to hold them off!"

The cadres were also forming their alliances behind the scenes, and the struggle for power had resulted in everyone forming gangs and factions just to survive. He had been chosen by the cadres behind his faction, and was again being pushed center stage.

"My wife also asked me to talk to you. We've got a small child, and, if we're branded as something or other, what will happen to our child?" Huang looked hopefully at him.

He knew Huang's wife. She worked in the same department, and it was hard not to be sympathetic. Maybe he was upset about having lost Xu Qian. Her being intercepted, and the humiliation he imagined she would have to suffer, had again triggered off his feelings of righteous indignation. His innate feeling of sympathy and compassion for the powerless or threatened generated an impulse that drew on his lingering heroism. Probably because his spine hadn't been broken, he refused to allow himself to be defeated. That night, he sought out Little Yu and persuaded him that the cadres supporting them had to be protected. Yu immediately went off to see Big Li. That night, he didn't sleep, but went out to enlist several other youths.

Early the next morning, at five o'clock, he went to the hutong where Wang Qi lived, and checked out the number of the house. The nail-studded old-style gate was shut tight. It was quiet in the hutong, and no one was around, although the breakfast vendor at the entrance to the hutong was already open for business. He drank a bowl of very hot soy milk and ate a fried bun, fresh out of the oil, but still didn't see a familiar face. It was only after he had bought his second bowl of soy milk and eaten another fried bun, that Big Li arrived on his bicycle. He waved and called out to him. Big Li got off his bicycle and shook his hand like an old friend.

"You're back? We really need you," Big Li said, then went up close and said quietly, "Old Liu's been relocated, he's been hidden. When they get there, they won't find anyone."

Looking quite haggard, Big Li was obviously sincere; their former rivalry had suddenly vanished. Their relationship was very much like that of the children's gangs in the lanes and alleys, but with an additional element of loyalty. However, the hypocrisy that existed in comrade relationships was absent. In this chaotic world, gangs and groups had to be formed so that there was something for people to rely on.

Big Li added, "I've contacted a fire-fighting detachment, the chief is a good friend, if there's a fight, I'll only have to make a phone call, and a whole bunch of firefighters will be there in their fire engine.

They'll turn their hoses on what goes hard between the legs of those guys!"

At about six o'clock, Little Yu and six or seven youths from the workplace arrived at the entrance of the hutong, and they went up together to Wang Qi's gate where they stood leaning on their bikes and dangling cigarettes in their lips. Two small cars entered the hutong and stopped more than thirty meters away, they were cars from the workplace but no one got out. They confronted one another like this for four or five minutes, then the cars reversed, turned around, and drove off.

"Let's go in and see Comrade Wang Qi," he said.

Big Li hesitated and said, "Her husband's a reactionary."

"It's not her husband we're coming to see." He led them in.

The former bureau chief came out to greet them and said over and over, "Thank you for coming, comrades. Come in and sit down, come in and sit down!"

Wang Qi's husband, former theorist for the Party and now an anti-Party reactionary rejected by the Party, a small, thin, old man, acknowledged them with a nod. The doors of the two adjoining rooms had seals pasted on them, and there was nowhere for him to go, so he just paced back and forth, chain-smoking and coughing.

"Comrades, you probably haven't eaten. I'll go and make some breakfast," Wang Qi said.

"There's no need, we've just eaten at the entrance to the hutong. Comrade Wang Qi, we've only dropped in for a visit. Their cars have gone, and they won't be coming back," he said.

"Then let me make some tea for all of you…" She was a woman, after all; this former bureau chief held back tears as she quickly turned away.

Just like that, things inexplicably changed, and he was protecting the wife of an "anti-Party reactionary." When Wang Qi was in her job, she had cautioned him for having too close a relationship with Lin, but that pressure had dissipated long ago, and, compared with the string of events that had happened since, hardly counted as anything. Nevertheless, he was grateful to her for being lenient and not following up on his affair with Lin. Now, it could be said, he had repaid her.

While he, Big Li and the others drank tea made by the revolutionary cadre Wang Qi, the wife of a reactionary, they held a meeting on die spot and resolved to establish a dare-to-die group with those present forming the core members. If Danian's crowd tried to haul out and denounce their cadres, they would go forth and protect them.

Nevertheless, when armed fighting broke out, Wang Qi was hauled out by Danian's mob, and was to be denounced in the office. The corridors were crammed, and the office turned into a battlefield, with people jumping onto the desks and shattering the plate-glass covers on them. He couldn't retreat and was pushed inside, so he also stood on a desk to confront Danian.

"Drag him down, that fuckin' offspring of a bitch!" Danian ordered his mob of old Red Guards, not attempting to disguise their genealogical enmity.

He knew that if he showed any sign of weakness, they would set upon him and beat him up until they had maimed him. They would then dig up everything in his father's unsettled case to trump up a charge of class revenge against him. The people in his faction, inside and outside the office, were mostly gentle, frail, elderly bureaucrats and intellectuals, and most of the cadres were also from literary backgrounds. All of their families had problems, like his own. They certainly wouldn't be able to save him and moreover, wanted young people like him to come forward to oppose Danian's faction.

"Hey, listen! Danian, I'm warning you, we've got a gang, too, and the guys in our gang aren't short of fuel to burn. Any of you dare to make a move, and we'll serve up the whole lot of you on a platter tonight! You can believe us or not!" he, too, roared out.

When people become animals, their primitive instincts return; wolves and dogs both bare their teeth. He had to be menacing, his eyes had to look fierce, and he had to make this quite clear to the other party. He was a desperado who was capable of anything, and, at that time, he probably looked very much like a bandit.