A couple of years later, the division had been sent off to South China in 
a panic. Trouble had been brewing there since Zhang Han Hua had gone on his 
Long Ride and forced the merchants to kowtow. Zhang had personally liberated 
several
lao gai camps, where slave laborers were hard at work making trinkets for 
export to the West, smashing computer display screens with the massive 
dragon's-head grip of his cane, beating the overseers into bloody heaps on the 
ground. Zhang's "investigations" of various thriving businesses, mostly in 
the south, had thrown millions of people out of work. They had gone into the 
streets and raised hell and been joined by sympathetic units of the People's 
Liberation Army. The rebellion was eventually put down by PLA units from the 
north, but the leaders had vanished into the "concrete countryside" of the 
Pearl Delta, and so Zhang had been forced to set up a permanent garrison state 
in the south. The northern troops had kept order crudely but effectively for a 
few years, until, one night, an entire division of them, some 15,000 men, was 
wiped out by an infestation of nanosites.