The study is on the south side of Zhongnanhai, the window onto the lake the dynasty arranged. Tian Jiaying brings the folders to the desk in the evening, the working hour. The folders today are the provincial production returns and the daily summaries Tian Jiaying has aggregated. They are on the desk in the order the secretary has arranged them, with the Henan folder on top because Henan's grain yields have been the highest in the country this autumn.
The reports come up the chain. The brigade reports its yield to the commune, the commune reports its aggregated yield to the county, the county reports to the province, the province reports to the State Statistical Bureau. The Bureau collates and produces the national figure. The provincial first secretaries compete to send up a higher figure than the last period, because the figure is the proof of the commune's success and the success is the protection of the first secretary. The figure I read tonight is the figure the chain has produced. The procurement targets the Bureau issues, set at Beidaihe in August of last year and upward-revised after Lushan, are calculated on the chain's figure. The state requisition apparatus, 统购统销, takes grain at the rate the figure justifies. The county granaries open to the state's trucks. The trucks leave for the state's storage. The villages whose yields the chain has inflated do not have the grain the figure claims they grew.
The Xinyang folder is in the stack. Xinyang is in Henan, the prefecture in the south of the province where the recorded grain yields this autumn are at the top of the national table, and the prefecture is under Wu Zhipu's first secretaryship. The yields recorded for Xinyang are not the yields the brigades produced. The grain in the brigades was short of the recorded yield by half at the time the brigades reported. The requisition has been calculated on the recorded yield. The trucks have come at the recorded rate. A peasant family in Guangshan county in Xinyang prefecture, the father and the mother and the three children, has the ration the commune mess hall is now issuing, which is the ration the commune calculated when the requisition had taken what the requisition was to take. The ration is the ration of starvation. The youngest of the three children, who is two, has stopped crying because the crying is no longer the body's response to the absence the body now is.
The Anhui folder is in the stack too. Anhui is under Zeng Xisheng, and Zeng's province has been among the most enthusiastic in the reporting of high yields. The famine counties of Anhui this autumn are Fengyang and Wuwei and Suxian, where the deaths have begun and will rise through the winter, and the brigade cadres of Wuwei county were instructed by the provincial deputy party secretary Zhang Kaifan to record the true yield and stop the requisition the false yield had authorised. Zhang Kaifan broke with Zeng Xisheng over the falsification, and Zhang Kaifan was removed from his position after Lushan as a right-deviationist and his name added to the file of cadres who have departed from the line. A peasant family in Fengyang county, the grandmother and her son and his wife and their two children, has the same ration the family in Guangshan has, which is the ration of starvation, which is what the requisition has left.
The Sichuan folder is in the stack. Li Jingquan's province has reported figures matching Henan's, and the famine in the eastern Sichuan basin this autumn is beginning the way the famine in Xinyang began. The reports from Sichuan match Henan's because the apparatus has been trained. The trained apparatus does not file a figure the chain above it cannot use. The villages whose yields the chain has inflated are eating the husks of the rice plants where the rice plants had husks.
The reports reach this desk because the chain above them has been corrected. The correction was at Lushan in July and August. Peng Dehuai wrote a letter on 14 July of this summer, the letter of opinion that named the policy as the cause of the difficulties in the countryside, and the letter went to the chairman, and the chairman read it, and the letter was the one document of the conference that broke the line. The chairman did not accept the letter. The chairman gave the letter to the conference and the conference was reorganised against the letter, and Peng Dehuai was named a right-opportunist and removed, and Huang Kecheng was removed with him, and Zhang Wentian was removed with him, and Zhou Xiaozhou was removed with him. The reports that have reached this desk since the conference are reports the chain knows the chairman accepts.
Lin Biao took the defence ministry on 17 September. Lin's appointment placed in the working circle a man whose loyalty was not in question and whose silence about the countryside was not in question. The other members of the circle are Liu Shaoqi, Vice Chairman and State Chairman from 27 April of this year, Zhou Enlai, Premier, and Deng Xiaoping, General Secretary of the party. The four are at the centre of the day's meetings. The four read the same reports that reach this desk. None of the four has named the reports as the corrected chain's product. Chen Yun is not at the day's meetings. Chen Yun's grain-policy work was the work the post-1958 line removed, and Chen Yun is this autumn a member of the Politburo whose advice has been set aside, which is the position the line requires of him. Chen Boda is at the secretarial level beside Tian Jiaying, drafting the texts that explain the line to the line's audience.
I read the figures. I sign the procurement orders. I approved the campaign that produced the procurement orders. I gave the letter to the conference that produced the line the apparatus has trained itself to. The procurement targets are the targets I issued. The Lushan purge is the purge I conducted. The reports are the reports my chain has produced because the chain knows the chairman accepts them. The famine that the procurement is producing in Xinyang and Fengyang and the eastern Sichuan basin is the famine the procurement orders that bear my approval are producing. The cognition is the cognition of a man at a desk reading the figures the apparatus he runs has produced, signing the orders they justify, and not interrupting the chain because the interruption is the work of cadres the chain has removed.
The folders are on the desk. The lamp is on the folders. Tian Jiaying is at the door waiting to take the signed orders down to the office, and the signed orders will go down the chain in the morning, and the chain will deliver the requisition the orders authorise, and the trucks will come to the granaries, and the families in Xinyang and Fengyang and the eastern basin will eat what the trucks have left. Tomorrow's folders are at the office. The work tomorrow will be the work today is. The chain runs.
