Su Ren
Su Ren was the deputy chief of the Nanhong Street police station. He was rich in investigative experience, yet never seemed able to win promotion. Once, residents of Building Seven in Yimin Residential Compound reported that Room C on the second floor was haunted: in the middle of the night there would be either a woman’s weeping or heart-rending howls. The officers who first received the report paid it no mind and decided the residents were talking nonsense. Su Ren, however, took it very seriously. After making inquiries, he reported the matter to the district public security bureau, conducted a surprise raid on Room C on the second floor of Building Seven, and arrested the owner. Sure enough, they seized five firearms and a number of prohibited weapons, cracking a major robbery-and-murder gang.
His colleagues asked Su Ren how he had managed to spot a lead in so improbable a call. Su Ren said, “If a ghost is disturbing the neighbors, there must be a reason. Either the dwelling has been occupied and the ghost appears to drive people away; or it is haunting the place to demand offerings; or some fierce ghost still has not exhausted its violent qi; or else the person himself has attracted ghosts through lust, murder, or resentment. I asked the neighboring residents. That household had always been quiet in the past, which means the dwelling had not been occupied by another spirit. The household had moved in from elsewhere, so it could not be their dead relatives demanding offerings. No one in that compound had ever died suddenly, so it could not be the haunting of some recently dead ghost. That left only one possibility: the residents themselves had drawn the thing in.” No one believed what he said, and in the end the credit for solving the case did not go to him.
Su Ren’s reasoning in itself was not wrong. His mistake lay in speaking such reasoning aloud in public. As the ancients said, “If speech is not guarded, one loses oneself.” If you frequently speak the thoughts of your heart at random, those who believe you will learn all your depths, while those who do not will come to doubt your character. In either case it brings a hundred harms and not a single benefit.
Red Ghosts
Red Ghosts is the name Chinese hackers use for themselves. The term reached its height in 1999 after the United States bombed our embassy in Yugoslavia, when countless Chinese Red Ghosts attacked tens of thousands of American websites and thousands of servers. In truth, in an age when computers are everywhere and internet technology is widely used, almost anyone with a bit of technical knowledge can call himself a hacker, or even a Red Ghost. Ordinary Red Ghosts usually gather on Red Ghost forums. They are enthusiasts of internet technology, exchanging knowledge and experience with one another, and organizing online flash actions such as defacing the homepages of foreign sites. Mid-level Red Ghosts follow current affairs. On their own initiative, or under assignment, they penetrate deep into foreign servers to obtain relevant materials, then expose them in the press or hand them over to the proper authorities. High-level Red Ghosts serve in state security departments, defending important servers and protecting national interests. Those individuals and organizations that launch attacks or carry out illegal theft for personal profit or commercial gain do not deserve to be called Red Ghosts at all.
In fact, the term Red Ghost has a long history and is an honorable title. Fewer than twenty people have truly dared to call themselves by it. Why are they called Red Ghosts? There are always certain places on the internet filled with mystery, where the ordinary rules of computing lose their force, and any attempt at probing summons a devastating retaliatory attack on one’s own machine. We usually call such places “haunted houses.” In reality these are all top-secret system servers of various countries, fitted with the most advanced offensive firewalls. In 1995 there was a young man code-named “Toe-less” who, while probing the server of a certain American department, came under an extremely powerful counterattack. He tried for three months straight and discovered that the program attacking his own machine bore the Hanyu Pinyin codename qinggui. Believing it might have been compiled by an ethnic Chinese scientist, Toe-less gathered a great many classical Chinese books in search of clues. At last he pierced the server’s defenses. The first code he broke was red ghost. From that moment on, Red Ghost became the exclusive code designation for China’s highest-level hackers.
Ancient China had a legend that if a ghost hanged itself while dressed in red, it could pass in and out of courtyards without being blocked by the door gods, because its grievance was too deep. Red is the most extreme and fearsome of colors: wedding feasts, examination successes, and festival days all use red, yet revenge, slaughter, and wrathful gods are also red. In modern times, revolution too adopted an intense red, meaning a flame that destroys all things. Now red has become the color of the national flag, the color of China. So those who carry the banner of Red Ghosts while doing illegal things should stop as soon as possible. And those who once fixed the home kit of the Chinese national football team in white would do well to ask themselves when exactly China’s national color became white.