In Tiananmen Square, twenty-eight days before the ceremony commemorating the Party’s anniversary, a bee changed China and the world.
The more tightly monitored the society, the stronger the backlash.
The smallest crack can break the biggest dam.
The newest political thriller from Wang Lixiong, the author of Yellow Peril.
The Party is busy with preparations for its anniversary celebration and the World’s Fair, expecting the two events to be emblems of the Party’s achievements. Every Party bureaucrat from the chairman on down is focusing on making these two events even better. One member of the National Security Committee, looking to advance his career, raises the warning level of a flu epidemic. On the top levels of the party, epidemic prevention efforts are being leveraged to bring down political opponents. These machinations result in the intervention of the World Health Organization, whose investigation eventually shows that no unusual mutations of the influenza virus are present. Director Su of the National Security Committee Office seems to have been a hero throughout the effort, but in truth he has become a common target for all sides. Even the Chairman has started to distance himself from him. Director Su knows that he will become a scapegoat after the celebrations. Backed into a corner, he decides to leverage high-tech internet monitoring technology orchestrate to assassinations of the Party’s top brass, helping him get out of his difficult situation and come back stronger than ever…
There are no ambitious antiheroes in The Ceremony, no conspiracies, no mutinies, no sign that everything is about to come crashing down. One bureaucrat trying to save himself, one policeman out on the border, and one politically unaware engineer is all it takes to bring down an immense authoritarian machine. As the power of dictatorships grow ever-reliant on new technology, the dictators are less and less capable of either understanding the technology or using it directly. They can only rely on the professionals and delegation to their inferiors. The people who on the intersection between technology and the authoritarian apparatus find themselves wielding outsize power. No one knows who they are, and yet they can bring the political system down to its knees.
With modern technology, authoritarians today can do what authoritarians in the past could not; resistance fighters in the past could do what resistance fighters today cannot. The Ceremony begins with China as it is today, extrapolating to a world when dictatorship has grown so overreaching, and the opposition so weak, that authoritarianism seems never-ending and impervious to change. And yet the rulers of The Ceremony are fragile: just a few people, acting in their own self-interest, can easily bring it down. A empire that seems solid and unshakable can crumble under a single well-calculated blow.