The Great Leap Forward

By Armand Burke

Imagine that Kafka, Borges and Wittgenstein, after binging on Fu Manchu novels and the Illuminatus trilogy, all sat down to write a spy thriller, with a little help from Lewis Carroll. Set the novel in China in 1978—an isolated empire of conspiracy, deception and delusion—and tune in to Radio Beijing for the astonishing announcement: China will unilaterally disarm. Is this a Great Leap Forward for mankind—or a plot to take over the world?

Into this surreal landscape, this garden of forking paths, steps Number Five, a master spy of undisclosed nationality. What he finds in China is so shocking, so strange, so far beyond the usual categories of fact or fiction, that he returns a changed man, and the story of his mission must be passed off as fantasy for thirty-five years.

Chairman (now called Chairperson) Mao has passed on, leaving the nation torn between the Gang of Four and the shadowy Red Lotus Clique—and buzzing with rumors of a secret weapon to be unveiled when the disarmament is complete.
Five has two weeks to save the West from annihilation. He finds himself stumbling into a shadow show of Foreign Devils, Puppet Emperors, Eunuchs, Revisionist Bandits and Running Dogs of the Imperialists. With help from the beautiful Wild Thing, he gropes his way toward the truth; but first he must face down the dreaded Chinese Olympic ping pong team and the mysterious Doctor who may be the mastermind of all this anarchy.
Die-hard fans of thrillers and spy novels beware: Don’t buy this book unless you’re prepared to suspend your expectations in favor of a story that’s funny, literary and trans-genre’d. On one level this is a spy novel, on another a literary and political satire, on another a philosophical investigation into the limits of knowledge and personal identity. Espionage (as John Le Carré taught us) is about deception, disguise, and the attempt to wrestle knowledge from ambiguous and deceptive appearances.

Does Five ever find the truth? The history of China in the past 25 years proves that given enough time, the surreal becomes the real. Who in 1978 could have foreseen that the Chinese Communist Party would become the world’s leading exponent of capitalism? Who could have predicted an opera about Richard Nixon?

Fans of the Fu Manchu novels by Sax Rohmer, the fictions of Jorge Luis Borges (particularly The Garden of Forking Paths), the film The Last Emperor by Bernardo Bertolocci, and Theravada Buddhism (particularly the Milinda Panha or 100 Questions of King Menander to Nagasena) might find a special interest in this novel.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Armand Burke
• Release date: Dec 11, 2012
• ISBN: 9781301611775

Armand Burke

Armand Burke was born in the 1950s in a place whose name he does not care to remember. In his early twenties he found himself living in New York City and increasingly baffled by an obsession with China. At that time the Middle Kingdom was off-limits to Western travelers and in the midst of a political upheaval. After countless hours in the Far Eastern Collection of the New York Public Library, Burke realized that he would never find the truth about China in any of the usual places, least of all in China itself. Like Joseph Conrad describing a continent he had never visited, or Pierre Menard recreating Don Quixote word by word, he relocated his search, beyond outward appearances, to the deepest recesses of his own imagination. Sensing correctly that his discoveries in that chaotic region would be suppressed by the military/industrial/publishing complex, he wrote on the run—in an apartment in the Bronx, a basement in Colorado, a farmhouse in Vermont—while working as a bank messenger, an investigator and a storekeeper and reading the Illuminatus trilogy. The result was The Great Leap Forward, which has been called “unequalled,” “unparalleled” and “extraordinary,” among other things. Today, except after a night of heavy drinking, he denies having written it. He lives on an island off the coast of Maine with two Siamese cats, three dogs, four pot-bellied pigs, and a Komodo dragon.

Book preview

The Great Leap Forward

a novel by

Armand Burke

Edited with a Preface by

Karl Rossmann

Adrian D. Poffenbarger Professor of Far Eastern Studies

University of Eastern West Virginia at Keyser

China is a sleeping giant. Let him sleep! If he awakes, he will shake the world.

— Napoleon Bonaparte.

Copyright 2012 by Armand Burke

All Rights Reserved

Smashwords Edition

License Notes:

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This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to reality of any character, event of place mentioned in this book is entirely coincidental.

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Table of Contents

Table of Contents

Preface

Chapter 1 - In Xanadu

Chapter 2 - The Information Ministry

Chapter 3 - Wild Thing

Chapter 4 - Wild Thing’s Story (Continued)

Chapter 5 - Wild Thing’s Story (Concluded)

Chapter 6 - Class Enemies

Chapter 7 - The Fortune Cookie

Chapter 8 - An Old China Hand

Chapter 9 - The Third Man

Chapter 10 - Mistaken Identities

Chapter 11 - Inside the Hexagram

Chapter 12 - The Great Leap Forward

Chapter 13 - Adieu

About the Author

Questions for Book Club Discussion

Preface

The year is 1978.  China is an isolated empire of conspiracy, deception and delusion.

From Radio Beijing comes an astonishing announcement:  China will unilaterally disarm.  Is this a Great Leap Forward for mankind—or a plot to take over the world?

The spectacular rise of China in the past two decades has opened Western eyes to China but has obscured, if not erased, our memory of the Sleeping Giant in the years before it awoke.  Few today can imagine the degree of isolation, political delusion and unintentional surrealism that characterized Chinese society in the Mao Zedong era.  To fill that imaginative gap, we need look no farther than The Great Leap Forward, Armand Burke’s fantastic tale of a spy’s mission to China in the bizarre interval between Mao’s death and the reforms of Deng Xiaoping.   In the late 1970s, China was still an alien universe to most Europeans and Americans.  Undaunted by this challenge, Armand Burke set about creating, through sheer force of mental concentration, a picture of China which could stand beside any contemporary eyewitness account.  It is a work of extraordinary historical imagination. 

From a distance of thirty-five years, The Great Leap Forward  reads almost like a fairy tale, or one of those Oriental tales beloved of Western writers two centuries ago.  We offer it here in its original form (with a few minor edits, such as conformity to contemporary spelling conventions), as it appeared in 1978.  With the passage of time we may shudder at its most serious flaws—the conspiracy theories, the aura of Yellow Peril, the obsession with Fu Manchu—and yet still marvel at some of its predictions.  Who in 1978 could have foreseen that the Chinese Communist Party would become the world’s leading exponent of capitalism?   Who could have predicted an opera about Richard Nixon?

Karl Rossmann

Adrian D. Poffenbarger Professor of Far Eastern Studies

University of Eastern West Virginia at Keyser

THE GREAT LEAP FORWARD

Radio Beijing’s announcement that China would disarm unilaterally hit the world like an earthquake.

They say Headquarters went into a state of shock when the news came.  The Chief of the China desk had to be put under sedation, and most of the mid-level staff, with no contingency plan to turn to, simply sat tidying their papers or toying with their ballpoint pens.  G, the Director of Intelligence, who seldom does anything so productive as tidying papers even on his best days, locked himself in his office and refused to speak to anyone.  At four o'clock that afternoon he called to give me my instructions.  Ordinarily we avoid each other like the plague, but for the moment we laid our personal differences aside, too stunned by the Chinese announcement to think of anything else.  This was the gravest threat to world peace that either of us could remember.

I’ve sent for Number Five, said G.  He’s been instructed to report directly to you.

When should I expect him?

He’s on assignment in the Middle East, but he should be here by tomorrow afternoon.  That gives you twenty-four hours to choose his cover identity and devise a suitable plan of action.  Good luck.

Number Five was the best man we had, probably the best man we ever had.  In ten years of working together, he and I had developed a strong but peculiar sort of friendship. We shared the unique intimacy of espionage, yet neither of us knew the other's real name.  We embraced fondly when we met, but we never met outside my little office, which to the public is just a dingy storeroom in one of the seedier parts of the capital.  I had seen him a hundred times, and that night after G’s call I looked forward to seeing him again.  But until I went through my files and selected the cover identity he would use for this assignment, I could not imagine what he would look like.  To Five, a disguise was more than a disguise; it was a whole new self.  He lived his cover identity twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, observing its every nuance until the assignment had been completed.  And it was up to me—I suppose, as he often said, I had an awful power over him—to decide just who he would be.  In this case I knew what I wanted the minute I opened the file.  Before retiring for the night, I called Headquarters and told them to inform Five, who was still en route from the Middle East, that he had until the next afternoon to complete his metamorphosis into Cover No. 347B, the debonair, devil-may-care French journalist and international playboy, Luc ‘le Duc’ Duloup.

He showed up late the next afternoon in a sporty tweed jacket, with his dark wavy hair brushed straight back and a Gauloise drooping from the corner of his mouth.

Five! I shouted, hurrying over to greet him.  Good to see you!

There must be some mistake, he smiled.  My name is Luc ‘le Duc’ Duloup.

I stood back to take a better look.  Apart from the style and color of his hair, or such details as a mustache or a pair of glasses, his face never really changed; yet at times like this I could scarcely believe that he was the same man from one assignment to the next.  Illusion, not deception, was the secret of his impersonations.   And even to me, who knew what to expect, the illusion proved hard to resist: from the moment he came in the door I had been ignoring his rather ordinary face and concentrating my attention on features, like the droll sparkle in his eyes and the satirical twist given his mouth by the dangling cigarette, which belonged distinctly to Luc ‘le Duc’ Duloup.

The disguise is a good one, Five—one of your best, I said.  But don’t overdo it. You’re going to need more than a sense of humor for this assignment.

He laughed.  Yes, I understand we’ve been caught with our cloaks and daggers down again.

What do you know about this? I asked him.

Only what I read in the papers.

Then let me bring you up to date.  The Chinese have announced that they will disarm unilaterally on the first of May.  Their entire war apparatus, from the large nuclear weapons installations right down to the most insignificant provincial armories, will be dismantled, and the hardware melted into scrap.  The soldiers will be dismissed and sent home to their families.

Yes, said Five.  That’s exactly what I read in the papers.

Well, what do you think?

It’s about time somebody did it.

Come on, Five.  You know as well as I do that it’s some kind of a trick.  I stepped over to my desk and picked up the memorandum I had received from General Z. less than an hour before.  And this is no time for jokes.

At a secret meeting held that morning, our top military leaders had considered three possibilities: that the announcement was a hoax, and the Chinese had no intention of disarming; that they had a secret weapon which they planned to use as soon as they had lulled the other powers into complacency; and that they sincerely intended to disarm.  The solution proposed by the Generals, in all three cases, was the same—the immediate thermonuclear destruction of China.

Of course! Five muttered when he finished reading the memorandum.  We might have known.

Well, there’s nothing new here, I said, trying to sound cheerful.  The Generals are always coming up with proposals like this, and so far we’ve always been able to restrain them.  All you have to do is convince them that the balance of power is being maintained.  Frankly I don’t think we’ll have any more trouble than usual.  If the announcement is a hoax and the Chinese really have no intention to disarm, then no change in the balance of power has occurred, and as soon as the hoax is uncovered there will be no more justification for war than there was before the announcement.  And if they have a secret weapon they want to use against us, then all we have to do is find the secret weapon and expose the plot before May Day.  The pseudo-disarmament will be called off and we’ll all be right back where we started.

Five sat on the folding chair in front of my desk, his eyes downcast.  Another Gauloise had appeared at the corner of his mouth, though I could not recall seeing him put it there.  And what about the third possibility? he asked.

You mean, what if they really intend to disarm?

He raised his eyes to meet mine.  Precisely.

It’s not a possibility.

He stood up and started pacing around the room, turning every now and then to give me a sharp glance.  No one is going to invade China.  There isn’t an army in the world big enough to patrol its borders, let alone occupy all its territory.  He gestured with his forefinger like a professor.   If anyone attacked China it would be with nuclear weapons, and the People’s Army would be useless against such an attack.

So the People's Army would be useless, I said.  Is that any reason to abolish it?

To this point Five had been just the man I requested for the mission: Luc ‘le Duc’ Duloup, the excitable French reporter with the droll sparkle in his eye.  But now, as he came to the crux of his argument, he seemed to forget who he was.  He stopped pacing, stopped gesticulating, and stared blankly across the room.  A useless army is worse than useless, he said in a subdued voice.  If an army has no war to fight, it will start one; and if the government tries to prevent it from starting one, then it will take over the government.  He turned to face me, and I guessed from the look in his eyes that he was thinking the unthinkable.  The Chinese were the first nation to use gunpowder.  Isn’t it just possible that now they have been the first to realize that they don’t need their army any more?  And since they don’t need it, that they’d better get rid of it?

The prospect was a terrifying one.  I had been confident that we could handle the Generals if the disarmament was a hoax, or even if the Chinese had a secret weapon they wanted to use against us.  Indeed, I had believed that no provocation short of direct attack would have been so great that the Generals could not be restrained.  But now I realized that I was wrong.  Disarmament itself was the one provocation the Generals could never forgive.

Five, I said, we can’t let them go ahead with this disarmament.  We’ve got to find that secret weapon before the first of the month.

And what if there isn’t any secret weapon?

Then we just might have to invent one.

Number Five returned from China less than two weeks later.  Whether the Chinese ever had a secret weapon, and whether Five found it or not, whether they really meant to destroy the world, and whether Five saved it or not—these questions are still tossed around at Headquarters in the idle chatter of corridors and washrooms.  But officially the case has been closed.  All that remains is for me to submit my Final Narrative Report to G, the Director of Intelligence, who until now has kept himself steadfastly ignorant of all that happened in China.  Every time I try to tell him anything about it, he puts me off— Please! he implores.  Save it for your Final Narrative Report!—as if he were too busy and important a man to concern himself with the details of day-to-day operations.  In fact, as I know only too well, all that keeps him busy is the quart of whiskey and the reams of trashy escape fiction he consumes every day—and his only concern in refusing to listen is that I might give the plot away and spoil the Final Narrative Report.

G is a former interior decorator whose only qualifications as Director of Intelligence are his boyhood friendship with a certain high government official and his lifelong addiction to spy thrillers.  He is the sort of man who at the age of fifty-five, though he is bald and morbidly obese, with a pasty complexion and permanently bloodshot eyes, still manages to be vain about his appearance.  Since he knows next to nothing about intelligence work, his approach to his job as Director has been to have as little to do with it as possible.  He spends the day sequestered in his office drinking and reading spy thrillers, and when a mission has been completed he makes us write these ridiculous Final Narrative Reports.  This requirement is typical of G; it illustrates why the staff has come to resent him so much.  Quite soon after his arrival, he realized that if he was to survive he would have to keep himself informed about our activities, which he is expected to discuss with the very highest officials.  He ordered detailed reports on every current or recently completed mission, intending to read them before his first high-level meeting.  Needless to say, our reports were long and highly technical—and incomprehensible to G.  As the mountain of paper began to grow on his desk, he became increasingly despondent and took to drinking even more than before.  They say he would sit down and try to read the reports, but before he was halfway through the first one he would tear it up in exasperation and throw the rest in the shredder, sulking in his office until it was time to go home.  Predictably, he returned from his first high-level meeting deeply humiliated and determined to make a better showing at the next one.  He called everyone into his office and told us that the reports we had submitted were totally unacceptable.  In the future, he said, you will please write your reports in a more readable form, omitting needless technical detail, keeping bureaucratic jargon to a minimum, and using the techniques of fiction wherever possible, with particular emphasis on plot and characterization.  And he went on to describe exactly how the reports should be written.  What he wanted, in effect, were not reports but novels—and novels that he couldn’t put down.

Since then I have written a dozen reports for G, and every one of them has come back with notes scribbled in the margins criticizing it and suggesting how it could be improved.  He panned my last report so badly that I hardly slept for a week.  Needs more work, he wrote in the margin.  The plot is weak, the characters one-dimensional.  And the ending just doesn’t work for me.  Of course I’ve told him time and again that I can only dramatize my reports as far as reality will allow, that in fact espionage is a dreary business and spies are for the most part a shallow and unappealing bunch; but he refuses to listen to reason.  What good would it do, he asks, if all the reality in the world were in your report, but the report was so boring that no one could bear to read it?  Why, it wouldn't do any good at all, would it?  So from now on, please, just write your report so I can read it, and let reality take care of itself!

My present task is to write a Final Narrative Report on Five's mission to China.  In spite of G’s attitude I intend to give as true an account as I can of all that happened.  Ordinarily I could have relied on Five's cooperation in this, but the sad fact is that Five was not quite himself when he came back from China: he had a strange, glazed look in his eyes—prompting some speculation around Headquarters that he had been brainwashed—and a flippancy of manner that was most unlike him.  When someone asked him about his trip, he would answer in an insultingly offhand way, chuckling to himself as if it were all a big joke; and he seemed not to mind in the least that his stories were regarded as nonsense by everyone at Headquarters.  I shall never forget the shock I experienced when he came to my office for his first debriefing session.

Congratulations, Five! I cried.  You've done it again!

For the last time, I hope.

I thought it best to let this remark pass without comment.  He had been through hell in the last few days—singlehandedly taking on the People’s Army, the Gang of Four, and the entire Chinese Olympic ping pong team—and his face showed it: he looked ten years older than when he left just two weeks before.  I poured him a cup of coffee and offered him a seat.  Well, how was your trip?

He smiled.  It’s going to be hard to describe.

Five, let me assure you—I attributed his reticence to what he knew of my differences with G—that I intend to write an accurate account of your mission, no matter how unexciting it may have been.  I will not let G’s craving for diversion stand in the way of the truth!

At this he threw his head back and laughed so hard that he had to loosen his necktie to keep from choking.  Did I say something funny? I asked.

Oh, yes, you did, he gasped.  I’m sorry, I know you weren’t trying to be funny. You were dead serious, weren’t you?

Yes, I was.

I’m sorry, he repeated.  It’s just that there are some things I can’t take seriously anymore.  This conflict between you and G is really very funny, you know.  Truth versus Artifice, and all that!

I turned away in disgust.  Was this the man who had saved civilization more times than its enemies cared to remember?  The master spy who had become a legend for his courage, his intellect—and his dedication to the truth?   Had he finally succumbed to that glib cynicism, that proud moral cowardice, which has infected even the best minds of our age?  I confess I thought so at the time.  With the advantage of hindsight I realize that my judgment was unduly severe: it led me to misperceive the changes Five had undergone—and what was worse, it blinded me to their consequences.  For this I shall never forgive myself.  I think I could have saved him, could have kept him from returning to the Middle East until he was himself again.  We spoke briefly at Headquarters after our last session, just before he flew back to Amman.  He had already resumed his earlier cover identity, that of Henry Smith, alias Ahmad ben Hussein, the British expatriate who lived among the Bedouins on the northern Arabian frontier.  Yet even in sandals and burnoose he could not hide the cynical attitude he had brought back with him from China.  Ahmad ben Hussein had been a somber and slightly bedeviled man who seldom smiled and never laughed, a man who despite his quirks commanded respect and even inspired a certain kind of awe.  But he was not one whose character could withstand even the tiniest daub of cynicism; like the single careless brushstroke that can make a rogue out of a saint, it transformed him into the picture of a man about to confirm your worst suspicions.  I should have known better than to let Five return to the Middle East in that condition.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.  At the time of Five’s first debriefing session I could not foresee what would befall him on his next assignment; indeed, I was still largely ignorant of what had happened in China.  Even after he finished his story I had little sympathy for his new outlook on life, and no inkling at all that it would be his undoing.  My only concern was completing my Final Narrative Report, which I knew G would be hounding me for within the week.  Five’s attitude, that morning, seemed anything but cooperative.  I suppose you think I should just give G the kind of report he wants, I said when he finally stopped laughing, and let reality take care of itself.

That might not be such a bad idea.

Five!  What’s the matter with you?  What happened to you in China that changed you so much?

It was a tense moment.  I suddenly found some papers that needed shuffling and some drawers that needed to be opened and closed.  Five stepped to the window behind my desk, which might have afforded a splendid view of the alley if it were not all but opaque with dust, and stood with his hands in his pockets pretending to look outside.  After several minutes he sat back down in front of my desk and pulled two excellent Cuban cigars from his jacket pocket, offering one to me.  We smoked quietly for a minute or two before either spoke.

Poor Luc ‘le Duc’ Duloup! Five finally said.  I’m afraid his trip to China nearly did him in.  It’s a lucky thing he has only a few more days to live, don’t you agree?

Oh, yes. Yes, I stammered.  I knew what he meant to say, but it amazed me to  hear him put it that way.  Luc ‘le Duc’ Duloup, of course, would cease to exist in a few days when Five finished his debriefing and returned to the Middle East in the guise of Ahmad ben Hussein.  But though I had often heard Five speak of his past identities with this kind of detachment, in all our years of working together I had never heard him use the third person in talking about his present self.  Something was seriously amiss.  By the way, I said, pretending not to be alarmed, what was it that happened to Luc ‘le Duc’ Duloup over in China that had such a devastating effect on the poor fellow?

Oh, it wasn't any one thing in particular, Five answered.  "He was lied to, betrayed by his friends, kidnapped, drugged, and nearly assassinated.  Later he was knocked out, locked in an oven, and interrogated by an officer of the Chinese secret police.  He escaped, of course, but not before he managed to save the world from almost certain destruction.  In other words, it would seem to have been a typical week in the life of a spy.

"Yet to Luc ‘le Duc’ Duloup there was something about all this that made it seem quite extraordinary.  From the moment he stepped off the plane onto Chinese soil, he had the sensation that he had somehow left the earth. It was culture shock, he told himself, a natural reaction to so alien a culture; he would get over it.  But the sensation never left him the whole time he was there—it only intensified.  He felt as though he had landed in some enchanted realm where everything was exactly what it was and what it seemed to be, nothing more and nothing less, a just-so world that defied his understanding.  But his understanding would not be defied.  And so he gradually resorted to understanding it on its own terms, tying unrelated events together into ominous patterns, crediting ordinary people with superhuman powers, and most absurdly, searching what he knew to be lies for common threads that would lead him to