If the following day he had got up early and gone to work, nothing would have happened. But as he was about to get out of bed, his wife reminded him that today was a Sunday, meaning that he might as well sleep in a bit longer. Sleeping late was a bad idea. That bad idea caused all sorts of trouble! When he finally woke up it was past ten o’clock and the house was empty, both his wife and son having gone out. He knew why his wife wasn’t there: this was a Sunday and so all the wives living in the compound would have taken the bus provided by our unit to go to the nearest town to shop. They went once a week because that was their only chance, and if they didn’t go food, and indeed other necessities of life, would be a real problem the following week. Mostly the wives wouldn’t take their children, and in this case Zhang Guoqing was at home and could look after the boy. But perhaps because his wife wanted him to be able to sleep in peace and quiet, she took the child with her. The boy was only seven and had just started primary school, and in the past every time his father came back he had brought presents. This time his father had come back in the middle of the night, so he didn’t know what presents he had brought: therefore he decided to search his father’s briefcase. His mother had gone to the canteen to buy buns, his father was still asleep, there was no one else at home, and so he opened his father’s briefcase and immediately found his present: a paper bag of sweets and a box of biscuits. He twisted a sweet out of its wrapper and ate it while he carried on looking. He then flipped through a folder of confidential documents. The child was not at all interested in the contents of the documents, but he was attracted by the paper, so white, so shiny, he just had to feel it, and having felt it, so stiff and smooth, he knew it was the perfect stuff to make paper planes out of …

It was at that moment that Zhang Guoqing’s life started to go seriously wrong. His son noticed that there were loads of papers in the folder, bound into individual documents. Given that there were dozens of documents, would anyone notice if he took one? So he put one in his school bag. After breakfast his mother told him to come with her, and he thought that he could play with paper planes when they went out, so he went to pick up his school bag. His mother said, ‘You’re not going to school – we’re off to town to shop, so why have you got your school bag?’