"The Young Chieftain likes brocade, so naturally you know it is woven from silk threads. On the surface, brocade looks as smooth and lustrous as a mirror, without a gap to be found, but in truth it is a thousand ends and ten thousand threads, all tangled together. Our Great Qi is much the same. To outsiders, Great Qi is simply Great Qi, an undivided whole, solid as an iron plate. Inside, though, its relationships are intricate, and everyone has their own calculations..."
What Wang Yang had said was a piece of accurate nonsense.
It was accurate because that was indeed how things stood, and nonsense because replacing "Great Qi," the subject of his speech, with any other political entity would make it equally true. Intricate relationships? The more people, the more intricate the relationships. Everyone had their own calculations? Anyone with a pulse had calculations!
Yet the way Wang Yang presented it made it sound as though he were about to divulge some secret inside story! Especially to the young tribesman, it seemed both credible and sincere: the other man was actually willing to "expose his own weaknesses"! He could not help listening more closely.
Wang Yang continued "exposing weaknesses":
"For instance, we have the central government and the local authorities. The central government is in Jiankang, the Capital; the local authorities are the various provinces and commanderies. Their interests do not entirely coincide. The central government wants to concentrate power and strengthen its control over the local authorities; the local authorities want power dispersed, to strengthen their own authority. Those wishes clash. And the central government itself is not all of one mind! There are all the departments and offices-even the Secretariat alone has eight senior seats and twenty bureaus. There are factions everywhere..."
*Just as I thought.