August 7th, 1959Encrypted Orders wrote:1130 China Standard Time, August 7th, 1959
From: [REDACTED], National Bureau of Investigation and Statistics
To: [REDACTED]
ACTIVATE DIRECT ACTION BRIGADES.
Hangzhou, Republic of Zhejiang
The street still bore the scars of the fighting.
An isolated unit of the army had been caught out when the coup started. Song Hongxue couldn't have known if they had chosen loyalty to the democratically elected government over the army, or if they had simply not been aware of the coup itself.
It didn't matter, they had been outnumbered and outgunned, the clash had been short, and the loyalists had not gotten the better of their enemies.
Yet for all that the coup forces had triumphed in that little skirmish, they had clearly not won what come after. The instant the gunfire had stopped, the people had rushed out from every building, every side street, every alley. There were thousands of them, called out by the Direct Action Brigades to defend the fragile democracy of their republic, to show that while the coup forces might have control of the Navy and much of the Army, they did not hold the hearts of the people.
Song Hongxue had gotten warning earlier than most, but she had the furthest to go. Her staffers had spent an hour taking the BOWS insignia off their trucks before they loaded the Ningbo's Direct Action Brigades up and headed for the capital. By the time they had arrived, mobilisation was in full swing. The streets were already clogged with protestors, and she could see the columns of smoke rising as parts of the city burned. If the coup forces had wanted an orderly, smooth transfer of power, they certainly weren't getting it.
Now, three hours later, Song Hongxue was watching the plan come to full fruition. It had been enough to simply clog the streets with as many bodies as possible, to make it too difficult to allow the coup forces to circulate freely, to allow President Xia and any of her legitimate government to disappear into the crowds, if necessary. Now, it was a matter of time before the next part of the plan kicked into action.
"LONG LIVE DEMOCRACY! LONG LIVE THE REPUBLIC!" the crowd roared, over and over again. Overhead, the slogans fluttered, the ones which had been prepared in secret for months. The writing on them had been carefully chosen: "Freedom is Bulletproof", "The People Will Bow No More" and so on. Most of the organising groups didn't know that the words they were chanting and holding overhead had been selected by the Juntong nearly a year ago. They could not know that the enterprising members who had shown up to their organising circles that morning with "hastily made" signs ready to go had been selected for the task through a long chain of intermediaries which eventually terminated in an RoC agent.
Of course, ninety-five out of a hundred of the people here were nowhere near as well-informed as they had thought. They weren't members of the Direct Action Brigades at all. No, they had come out of their own free will, with a little nudging. The handbills had evidently done their jobs, and when they saw the brigades in motion, they came out of their homes to join them.
The vast majority of the other five percent were periphery members. They showed up to the meetings, they did the civil disobedience courses, they took home the literature and some of them, Song imagined, actually bothered to read it. They were here because they enjoyed being part of a club, and they enjoyed the way their voices sounded when subsumed under ten thousand other ones shouting the same thing. She hoped their hearts were in the right place, but for the moment, they were still steady enough to do what they were told needed to be done, and that was good enough.
And it was the people standing around Song Hongxue who were doing the telling. Some of them were joining in the chanting, others were standing quietly, waiting for what to do next. They were the centre groups, the hard core of every Direct Action Brigade. Most had military training, either in Zhejiang or the Republic. Many were BOWS members. Some, Song suspected, were deep cover Juntong agents. The important thing was that all of them were fully prepared for how bad things might get. They had, as the fashionable saying went, "drunk the iced-tea": swallowing what they were told to swallow no matter how foul or unwholesome.
They were also the distributed nerve centres of each brigade. The protests had already become self-sustaining, but it was the centre groups who prodded them in the right direction, and right now, Song Hongxue decided it was the time for some prodding.
"Forward," she muttered, under her breath so that only those around her could hear her, but it was enough. The centre group began to shuffle forward, and as they did, so did the periphery group, and that was enough to send the whole mass going, pressing in towards the cordon of mutinous coup forces. The rest of the protestors moved without too much resistance. True, the coup forces had guns, and Song Hongxue saw the low, squat shapes of armoured vehicles behind the cordon, but they were also surrounded and outnumbered twenty to one. The mass pressed in inexorably. The people of Zhejiang had possessed that comforting belief that the common soldier would not fire on the people from whence he came from.
If that belief proved to be mistaken, then there would be a bloodbath in the next few minutes. thousands might die, hundreds of thousands might be cowed into submission....
But hundreds would be radicalised. Hundreds would come to the conclusion that if the army meant to kill them, then it was only fair they be killed back.
And as for the those willing to embark on any other popular initiative, the Benevolent Order of the White Sun had literature, resources, and materials available to help them too.
The mass of protestors shuffled forward, pressing in on the soldiers. It would only be a matter of time now...
