Tomorrow in Shanghai

Zhang Xiaobing would not have called himself a bad person, should anyone have been given the opportunity to pose such a question to the prisoner. In fact, if you asked anyone other than the court-appointed defense attorney whose main function in the trial was to enter Zhang's guilty plea, the prosecutor and the panel of three judges, who had found him guilty and sentenced him to death, very few people who knew Zhang would have said he was a bad person—wicked, evil, corrupt, a low-born thing, a turtle's egg, a nonhuman devil whose crimes would merit the ultimate punishment.

Friends and acquaintances alike might merely have said, "Young Zhang, ah? He's all right. He can get things done." Or, "If you need some business finished, Young Zhang can help you." Or even, "Heavens! That Zhang Xiaobing, he saved my son's life. Brought a doctor from the county seat all the way in that truck of his. He's really something. A real Han. Such a kind man."

But of course of the 274 villagers he'd helped in the nearly two decades that he'd served as an official in his hometown, slowly moving up the ranks since his days as a man in his early thirties just returned from a stint in the PLA after injuring his leg—so that his career as a soldier was effectively ruined—not one was asked what they personally thought of Assistant Village Head Zhang. And if any of them had offered, unprompted, their personal opinion of the man who was uncle, great-uncle, nephew, cousin, second cousin, third cousin once removed to almost every male surnamed Zhang in the village, the official police report did not record these. Instead the report contained the diverse and often contradictory accounts from other villages of the crimes that had led to his arrest, detention and sentencing.

Officially he was a snake, a xue tou, a "blood head" who had illegally collected and sold the blood bought from the poor, illiterate peasants throughout the province, causing the deaths of more than thirty-seven persons (thus far) and the infection of more than a thousand (and counting) others in the myriad remote villages nestled in the mountains and plains just south of the Yellow River. The province had once been the cradle of Chinese civilization, where giant Buddhas carved into mountainsides gazed serenely heavenward, as though such crimes could not possibly occur here.

Certainly, no one asked Zhang's wife, Tang Tianyi, what she felt of the matter. She had died of a protracted and expensive illness, leaving nothing but debts. As for his young son, the boy had simply disappeared, along with Zhang's parents, just before Zhang had been arrested some three months earlier. The authorities suspected that the brazen criminal Zhang Xiaobing had sent them to a city on the coast—just three more peasants with thick provincial accents to hide amid the floating population of China's mega cities. Impossible to track down, although the provincial authorities had used whatever connections they could—uncles or brothers in the military, other police chiefs, people who owed them favors—to try to find them. Naturally, their city connections merely rolled their eyes at the naïveté of their country cousins, all the while promising, "Sure, sure, I'll ask around. Terrible. It's terrible what this man Zhang has done." Then they promptly forgot about the three missing peasants. They had business to conduct. Life in the City. Aiya! You had to stay on your toes. No time for village nonsense.

The police and county officials remained concerned about Zhang's parents and the missing son. Leaving relatives alive and guiltless could cause trouble in the future. But the wizened old man with the high cheekbones, his round, doughy-faced wife and the slightly myopic but otherwise quite able twelve-year-old son of Zhang had gone missing and were now needles in the giant haystack of urban China's migrant-worker population. Like all peasants, they could not possibly blend in yet were completely...