He said, ‘I have some homework to do, so while you are shopping I will sit in the bus and do it.’ When his mother heard that she was pleased to see her son being so good.

Two hours later when Zhang Guoqing got up, he immediately noticed that his briefcase was standing open. He was a confidential documents courier, more than a decade of experience made him exceptionally sensitive to the material that he carried, and the moment he looked he realized at once: one document was missing! He was pretty sure that his seven-year-old son was responsible, so he rushed out to find him. He searched the compound and asked all the neighbours, but they had not seen hide nor hair of the child. Then someone suggested that he might have gone with his mother into town. That scared Zhang Guoqing practically witless, because if his son really had got hold of one of these documents, it was going to be crucial whether he had left the compound or not. In the end it was that point that condemned them all.

I will cut a long story short. When Zhang Guoqing met his wife and son coming back from town, the boy was clutching a paper plane made out of half a sheet of paper. Going by what the boy said later, because the sheets were so big (A3 size), he tore them in half so that each page could make two paper planes. When his mother went shopping he did not go with her but stayed at the bus station under the pretext of doing his homework. In fact he was playing with one of the other children from the compound. Since that document consisted of four pages, they had the wherewithal to make eight planes. And that’s what they did. As it happened, each of the two children had one paper plane left; as for the rest, some had got stuck on roofs, some had just disappeared into the crowds of people, some had been stolen by boys from the town. When we searched the bus station and surrounding area, we found four of the planes, which really is not at all bad. But we never found the other two, and that kind of loss was as serious as if they had been real aeroplanes. Every member in Unit 701 was deeply scared by this development, and it was discussed in the most alarming terms.

Punishment was unavoidable, and it had to be severe.