Chapter 4: Another year amid foreign dust, awaiting the king's army
The people left behind had wept their tears dry in foreign dust, looking south for the king's army for yet another year.
The day after the New Year's Day gala at Nanjing University, where the residents of Room 602 had watched a dazzling array of beautiful leading ladies from the School of Economics perform, Xiao Xu woke and, as usual, sat at his desk and opened his foreign-language textbook to the page he had reached the night before, then turned the last page of the old calendar. Seeing the bare tree trunks and branches standing in the thick fog outside, and the men and women in down jackets walking along the paths beneath them, something seemed to strike a nerve, pluck a string. After reciting those lines of poetry, he noticed that the red Arabic numerals on the new calendar read 2005.
The calendar had a new face, and another bitter winter of deepening fog had arrived. The brand-new thermoses they had carried in basins when they first entered the university were now stained and grimy. Everyone in Room 602 had moved together from junior to senior year. Just like that, another year had passed.
2005 had arrived.
According to statistics, the United Kingdom's GDP that year was US$2.05 trillion, while China's grew by 9.9 percent to US$2.24 trillion, making it the world's fourth-largest economy after the United States, Japan, and Germany. Including Hong Kong and Macau, it would rank third. After half a century of chanting the slogan of catching up with Britain and surpassing America, the Chinese finally achieved a historic breakthrough at this moment. Although foreign media competed to report the speed of this rise, perhaps to curb the growing domestic "GDP worship," China's official mainstream