At this point Zhang had no job title, being nominally retired—an 
ironical conceit that the Chinese premiers of the late twentieth century and 
early twenty-first had perhaps borrowed from American Mafia bosses. Perhaps 
they recognized that job titles were beneath the dignity of the most powerful 
man on earth. People who had gotten this close to Zhang claimed that they never 
thought about his temporal power—the armies, the nuclear weapons, the 
secret police. All they could think about was the fact that, during the Great 
Cultural Revolution, at the age of eighteen, Zhang Han Hua had led his cell of 
Red Guards into hand-to-hand combat with another cell that they deemed 
insufficiently fervid, and that, at the conclusion of the battle, Zhang had 
feasted on the raw flesh
of his late adversaries. No one could stand face-to-face with Zhang without 
imagining the blood streaming down his chin.