After his death in the line of duty, Zhou Haiyan was posthumously awarded a first-class commendation.

As one of the most universally recognized, most dangerous professions of peacetime, the average age of China’s narcotics officers stops at forty-one—yet Zhou Haiyan died the year he turned thirty-one.

The fight against drugs has never been a war without gunsmoke—it’s only that some people forge themselves into blades with their own lives, casting their flesh and blood into swords, building a wall of peace with their own bodies.

In 1992, police badge number 013626 was issued.

In 2012, police badge number 013626 was sealed.

In 2017, police badge number 013626 was reactivated.

In 2023, police badge number 013626 was permanently sealed.

[To seal is to remember. To activate is to carry forward. When the badge was reactivated, I became you.]

Many years later, the story of the Zhou father and son began to spread far and wide. Only then did the people of Ping’an Alley learn that the street punk they’d once feared and looked down on had, all along, been a narcotics police officer.

Some came from afar, drawn by his story, to visit the place where the hero had once lived, only to find it long since changed beyond recognition, standing empty and desolate.

Others made their own way to the cemetery to pay their respects.

As long as there are still people who remember their sacrifice, there will still be people who remember the evil of drug trafficking and abuse, and China’s fight against drugs will still have hope.

…

The early morning sky hung gray and dim, the world utterly still, mist of varying thickness drifting through the cemetery grounds like a thin veil cast over everything.

Bouquets of flowers, brought by those who’d come to pay respects, covered the ground before two stone gravestones.

Red string had been tied around each stone by visitors of their own accord, wishing that in their next lives, the two pairs would never again be separated.

One read: Grave of Martyr Qiao Yibai and His Wife Zhou Jiqiu.

The other read: Grave of Martyr Zhou Haiyan and His Wife Tang Heqing.

A quiet crowd stood before the graves—children as young as three, adolescents of ten, from the young to the middle-aged to the elderly, every face solemn.

In the eastern sky, the sun slowly began to rise, and the first ray of morning light pierced through the thick mist, falling across that stretch of Chinese red—the five-starred red flag rising slowly alongside the dawn.

The glow of the red stars lit up the entire sky.

Tears instantly filled the eyes of everyone gathered there. Along the long march against drugs, without anyone quite noticing, new hands had already picked up where the last left off, and generation after generation would go on defending this land, each in their own way.

China’s fight against drugs—this shared cause of all humanity—will, without question, achieve its final victory.

—END—