The Fat Years by Koonchung Chan

around for X, Y, & Z. They all have different organizations and they control a great many resources. For example, they can allocate funds for research projects to scholars who are willing to be allied with them; they can obtain the support of wealthy foundations to fund high-level academic conferences, support like-minded people, and set up united fronts; they can organize twice-yearly conferences for outstanding graduate students in the humanities, to train the next generation of the academic elite. All expenses paid for. The food and entertainment are superb, but the mentally intensive brainwashing is also terrific; that’s why the conferences have been dubbed the Devil’s Training Camp, orthe New Whampoa Academy.
    With so many activities, X, Y, & Z naturally have to divide up the work. For example, only Y and Z lecture at the Devil’s Training Camp, while leaving the organizational work to X. X does not appear up front as the organizer. The nominal organizer is Q, because Q is best at shaking things up and at influencing young people, especially passionately enthusiastic new MA students. Q has a very high opinion of himself, and he also aspires to become a state tutor, but X, Y, & Z look down on him. They say his academic qualifications are insufficient, he’s had no scholarly publications, and his position keeps changing. In private they call Q the Pied Piper—like the Pied Piper of Hamelin in the German fairy tale who played the flute so bewitchingly that he enticed all the children away from home. X, Y, & Z are clearly aware that in an intellectual revolution—and what the SS Study Group is promoting is nothing less than an intellectual revolution in which the contemporary Chinese worldview will triumph—there are many roles to be played, and a Pied Piper to lead away the children is indispensable.
    The first time I confided in Z about my activities was about the first time I implemented the Group’s concept thatpolitics is the art of distinguishing between the enemy and ourselves. I told him that from my sophomore year on, I’d organized my classmates to systematically refute reactionary discourse on the Internet, and to denounce reactionary Web sites to the authorities. After that, we moved on to simultaneously observing the virtual world and the real world. We would report to the university president and the Communist Party Secretary any professor in our university who was promoting the Western system of values or liberalism in class. Our working model spread like a virus and was soon being copied in many other colleges and universities. This clearly made known my operational abilities and demonstrated that many university students listened to me and even worshipped me—I am the charismatic leader of today’s youth generation.
    After Z listened to all this, he didn’t say much, but I knew that he had taken it all in. That’s because not long after that meeting he nonchalantly asked, “Have you attended any of Professor Gong’s lectures at your faculty?” I immediately understood what he wanted, and, after making some inquiries, I learned that Gong had openly criticizedthe politics of the ancient Confucian Gongyang School in his class. I brought together all the students who had taken Gong’s classes and incited them to denounce him to the university president for slandering traditional Chinese culture. They also launched an online petition demanding that a thorough investigation be carried out and that Gong be fired. This process is not yet complete, but we’ve given Gong so much trouble he can hardly take it anymore. I’m quite certain that Z is very satisfied with my performance.
    What I didn’t tell Z was that my yearlong denunciation activities have finally beenappreciated by the government. First the Internet Monitoring Department of the State Council Information Office and then the Ministry of State Security formally contacted me—this amounts to saying that I am now an official informer for