Chapter 9: Alliance
To many people, 2002 might have been a year as still as an ancient well. To many others, it might have been a year of great upheaval. For all the college boys who loved football, perhaps the most memorable event that year was the World Cup hosted by South Korea and Japan: South Korea reached the semifinals, while China, led by Milutinović, qualified for the World Cup for the first time.
That year, people called those addicted to the internet "net bugs," and quite a few internet cafés took their names from the term. "Meimei," meaning "pretty girl," one of the first-generation internet slang terms abbreviated as "MM," had begun to catch on. South Korean films, culture, and music became fashionable alongside Meteor Garden, which was airing to great popularity on major satellite television channels.
That year, among the upper ranks of China's political and business circles, so-called "crony capital" began to reveal itself in the division of the great cake of state assets, accompanied by the slogan "the state retreats, the private sector advances." Mysterious operators with deep, complicated connections and fortunes running into the billions or tens of billions repeatedly maneuvered deftly through state asset reform, seeking to swallow up high-quality state capital.
Among them was someone Su Can knew: Zhan Hua. The news media covered these developments at great length. These various powerful players, connected to numerous interest groups, fought fierce and flourishing battles throughout 2002, which reached fever pitch the following year. Ordinary people might not have had much understanding of the aftershocks of this great battle, yet it affected every aspect of their lives, through the products they used, the houses they lived in, the subjects they discussed, and the policies the state issued.
Amid all this clamor and the surging tides