Typhoon. Charles Cumming
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limitations of Western intelligence. With all their money, all their resources and know-how, SIS and the CIA had been blindsided by a massacre in China. Joe thought that he should be seen to write something down, to give Wang the impression, however false, that the safe house was not wired for sound. But the professor was in the sweat of a sustained revelation, apparently paying little attention to how Joe was behaving.
‘A curfew was imposed,’ he said. ‘You must have learned of this. All airports and railway stations in Xinjiang were shut down for weeks. All foreign journalists were expelled from the region. The entire area was sealed. This is what they do in China when they have a problem. Nobody comes in, nobody gets out. In the wake of the Yining riot, house-to-house searches were conducted and another five thousand arrests made. Five thousand. And at the end of this, thirty-five of the so-called ringleaders were sentenced to death. They were taken to the outskirts of the city and simply shot through the back of the head.’ Wang joined two fingers on his right hand and stabbed them into the base of his neck. Bang. ‘Of course these bodies were never returned to their families, just as the parents and relatives of the thousands of Uighur men and women who have been illegally imprisoned on false charges in the past several years have no idea where their loved ones are being held. And after the executions, as if to taunt the other prisoners, to make a spectacle of them, other so-called ringleaders were then paraded through the streets of Yining at a mass sentencing rally, already so drugged and physically damaged by their brief experience of prison that many of them, exposed in open trucks, were unable to stand or even to communicate with the crowd. I saw this with my own eyes, Mr Richards, because I happened to be in Yining for a conference. I saw that their hands and feet were bound by wire as they knelt in the trucks. Many of the prisoners had been forced to wear placards around their necks, proclaiming their crimes, their sins, like something from medieval times. When one of the prisoners found his strength and shouted a slogan against the Communist Party, in full view of the crowd he was forced to the ground and beaten around the head by two policemen. I saw this with my own eyes.’ Wang’s voice briefly tightened to an enraged pitch. ‘A gag was then forced into his mouth to prevent him from shouting further. When certain supporters in the crowd complained about this, they too were arrested by plain-clothes officials who had surrounded them.’
‘And you were among these people?’
‘No.’ The professor looked exhausted. ‘I was first held after a different disturbance, in 1995. I was accused of discussing a riot in Xinjiang in class. One of my students was a spy and he reported me. I know who this was. Luckily I had said very little. Luckily my activities have never properly been exposed. I was treated badly in captivity, I was beaten and kicked, but as nothing compared to others. I am, after all, a Han.’ Joe experienced a strange, sadistic desire to see the scars on Wang’s body and hid his shame in another cigarette. He offered one to Wang, who refused. ‘I also have influential colleagues who were able to pay for my release and clear my name. I was soon back at work. Others were not so lucky. One Han doctor was arrested recently for treating the wounds of an alleged separatist following a riot in Kashgar. Three Yining shopkeepers who discussed the demonstration I have described with a foreign journalist were sentenced to fifteen years in the gulag. For a single conversation. In Xinjiang now, even to think about separatism is to be jailed.’
‘You mentioned a second riot in Kashgar,’ Joe said, and realized that either Lee or Sadha was moving around in the kitchen. How long had they been there? He heard a pan being filled with water, then the closing of the bedroom door as privacy was restored.
‘Mr Richards, there are riots all the time in China. Surely you are aware of this? They simply go unreported. What I am here to tell you today is the intensity, the frequency of these riots in Xinjiang. The people are ready for revolution.’
‘And that’s why you’ve come?’
‘That is one reason I have come, yes.’ Creases appeared at the edge of Wang’s eyes. ‘Perhaps Governor Patten’s staff will be interested in the political implications of revolution in north-western China, yes?’ The tone of the question seemed deliberately to mock Joe’s denials that he was involved in intelligence work. Wang now took the cigarette he had earlier been offered and drew out the silence as he lit it with Sadha’s plastic lighter. ‘But it is of course primarily because of what has happened in the prisons that I have come to see Governor Patten.’
‘What has happened in the prisons?’
Wang inhaled very deeply on his cigarette. He was now entering the final phase of his long exhortation. ‘Two men were released,’ he replied. ‘They came to me, because I am known in the underground as a safe outlet, a haven. Once I see Governor Patten I can explain more about this.’
Joe was aware of contradictions emerging in Wang’s story. He had earlier said that he was a political undesirable, that he had been jailed alongside his fellow students for inciting revolution, then stripped of his chair at the university. But where was the evidence of this? ‘Who are these men?’ he asked.
‘Their names are Ansary Tursun and Abdul Bary. Ansary had been arrested for ‘‘reading a newspaper’’, Abdul for swearing at his Chinese boss.’
‘That’s all?’
‘That is all. And like the others they received no trial, no habeas corpus, no lawyer. Instead they were sent to the Lucaogu prison in Urumqi by a judge who presided over – what do you call it in English? – a kangaroo court. Before his escape, Ansary was locked up in a cell with eight other men, Abdul with seven. The cell was so crowded that the prisoners had to take it in turns sleeping. You see there was not enough space for everybody to lie down. All of the men told Ansary that they had been beaten and kicked by the guards, just as I was two years before. At some point Ansary was taken into what he believes was the basement of the prison. His left arm and his left leg were handcuffed to a bar in a room of solitary confinement. He was left to hang like this for more than twenty-four hours. He had no food, no water. Remember that his crime was only to read a newspaper. Perhaps you look at me and think that this is not so bad, that these sorts of violations are acceptable. Perhaps your own government abuses human rights and tortures prisoners from time to time. When they have problems with the Irish, for example.’
Joe wondered what had caused Wang to become more aggressive. Had he failed to look suitably distraught? ‘Let me reassure you,’ he said, ‘that the British government takes the greatest possible –’
The professor held up his hand to stall his predictable rebuttal.
‘Fine, fine,’ he said. ‘But let me reassure you about what happened to my friends. Then you can decide if the treatment of prisoners in China is compatible with Western values. Because Abdul Bary was also taken into solitary confinement, and the largest toenail of his right foot removed by a pair of pliers held in the grip of a guard who laughed as he did this, who was so drunk on the power and the humiliation of what he was doing that he found it funny.’
‘I am so sorry,’ Joe said.
‘Other prisoners, we later learned, had been attacked by dogs, burned with electric batons.’ Wang’s cigarette was shaking as he spoke. ‘Another had horse’s hair, that is the hard, brittle hair of an animal, inserted into his penis. And through all this, do you know what they were forced to wear on their heads, Mr Richards? Metal helmets. Helmets that covered their eyes. And why? To create disorientation? To weigh them down? No. Ansary later learned from another prisoner that there had been an instance when an inmate had been so badly tortured, had been in so much pain, that he had actually beaten his own head against a radiator in an attempt to take his own life. This is the extent of what they had done to him. This is the extent of human rights abuses in so-called reformist, capitalist China. When I had finished protecting these two men, I knew that I had to come to Hong Kong. When I heard this I knew that our only salvation lay in England.’
Joe allowed a silence to develop in which he gathered his thoughts. It was almost two o’clock in the morning. The streets outside were quiet now and he heard only the occasional barking of a neighbourhood dog, the distant sound of a police siren. So much information had been spilled over the course of the interview that he was finding it difficult