Out of Mao's Shadow: The Struggle for the Soul of a New China (20 page)

The stories about Shenyang infuriated the Liaotie workers. They were convinced that the situation in Liaoyang was no better than in the provincial capital, and that party officials forced their factory into bankruptcy to cover up similar crimes. They noted that Governor Zhang, who ordered the liquidation of Liaotie, had previously served as the party chief in Shenyang and promoted the mayor and many of the officials now going to prison there. “They’re all in it together,” Xiao said. “The money that was stolen from our factory wasn’t just for Fan himself. He had to pay off city officials, and they had to pay off provincial officials, and they had to pay off national officials.” He believed the party itself had become a criminal organization, and he wanted to do something about it.

His wife and children thought it was a foolish impulse, one that would only lead to trouble. His wife especially wanted him to stop. Xiao responded by hiding what he was doing from her. “If I discussed it with her, it would be all over. She would never agree. So I never mentioned it to her,” he said. His friend Yao faced similar resistance from his wife. Sometimes she refused to let him out of the house, and he had to communicate instructions to the workers by passing notes to Xiao when he visited the convenience store.

Almost all the labor protests occurring in the rust-belt cities were staged by employees from a single company, in a single city, with narrowly focused financial demands. The demonstrations that Xiao, Yao, and their colleague Pang had organized were no exception. But huddling in the convenience store during the Spring Festival, they discussed the shortcomings of this approach. As long as the political system remained unchanged, they agreed, those with positions of power could always abuse it, and workers could hope only for marginal improvements in their lives. For real progress, they thought democratic reform was necessary, and they believed that most workers supported such a goal. But they also knew that persuading workers to participate in a protest advocating democratic change would be all but impossible. The workers had internalized the lesson of the Tiananmen massacre. Everybody knew that the party would quickly crush a direct challenge to its authority, and nobody wanted to go to prison. People were too afraid.

A better strategy, the three men decided, would be to rally the workers against corruption. Here was a vulnerable spot in the party’s armor, an issue that not only inflamed public passions but also hinted at the deeper systemic shortcomings of one-party rule. Most important, it was a problem the party itself acknowledged and claimed to be trying to fight. That made it safer for people to protest against, because the party could not arrest them without hurting its moral authority on the issue and risking a greater backlash. “It was a question of tactics,” Xiao said. “We were trying to promote democracy, but we couldn’t say it. So we decided to protest against corruption. We wanted to use the corrupt behavior of factory and city officials to motivate people and wake them to the cause.”

As Xiao and his comrades prepared to escalate the workers’ movement, they shifted the focus of their rhetoric from unpaid wages to official corruption. It was a small adjustment, but the consequences would be dramatic.

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party officials from across the country gathered in Beijing for the opening of the annual session of the National People’s Congress. On paper the parliament is the highest organ of state power in China, but in reality it is just another tool of the party. Its meetings, held in the Great Hall of the People on Tiananmen Square, are a ritual of Communist politics. Year after year, delegates from the provinces listen patiently to long-winded speeches by government ministers and vote overwhelmingly to approve the party’s policies. The exercise is intended to showcase the party’s democratic nature to the public and to the world, but the event is carefully staged, and there is rarely any real debate.

On the same day that the Congress convened, more than a hundred workers crowded into a conference room in one of the old buildings of the bankrupt Liaoyang Ferroalloy Factory. On their agenda was a daring plan. While the Congress was in session, the Liaotie workers intended to stage a major demonstration in Liaoyang in an attempt to attract the attention of the party chief, Jiang Zemin, and other national leaders. Some workers believed that party leaders would sympathize with their plight, while others had lost faith in the party and considered the leadership as bad as the party men in Liaoyang. But they all agreed that drawing the central government’s attention to their factory would put pressure on city officials to pay them and perhaps prompt an investigation into the bankruptcy. With a show of hands, the workers voted to stage the protest in thirteen days. Then they elected a dozen representatives to negotiate on their behalf with the government. Xiao, Yao, and Pang were among them.

Later in the meeting, Pang stood to speak. A tall, slender man who resembled an elderly professor but had only a high school education, he read to the workers a series of letters that he had written on their behalf and opened the floor to suggestions for improvements. Xiao noticed that Pang had crafted the letters carefully. There was no mention of their dissatisfaction with the political system nor of their support for democratic reform. Instead he positioned the workers as loyal supporters of the party leadership and repeatedly emphasized that their grievances were in line with the party’s laws and policies. One letter addressed to Jiang Zemin resorted to flattery, citing the party chief’s empty political theories and speeches approvingly and referring to him as a “beloved” leader and “respected elder.” Another appealed to a new provincial governor, Bo Xilai, for help, describing him as a “well-known virtuous official and excellent party member.” At the same time, the letters attacked Fan and city officials in vivid and unsparing terms:

Xiao realized that Pang was trying to drive a wedge between national leaders in Beijing and local officials in Liaoyang. His approach put party leaders on the spot, demanding they live up to their own rhetoric and laws, while also giving them an out, a chance to distance themselves from corrupt behavior that hurt the government’s image, even if they condoned such behavior elsewhere or engaged in it themselves. In effect, the letters were asking party leaders to sacrifice their underlings in Liaoyang to bolster the party’s reputation and strengthen its grip on power.

But there was also another motive behind Pang’s choice of words. He and the other worker leaders understood that their chances of success were limited if they were alone. They had already staged several protests, yet local officials had ignored their demands and the central government had shown no interest in intervening. By focusing on corruption instead of just their economic grievances, they wanted to build a larger movement and draw support from workers suffering similar abuses at other factories. They planned to post the letters in neighborhoods across the city and they hoped to inspire others to join them. They hoped that workers would read about the corruption that shut down Liaotie and think of what had happened to their own enterprises, that they would read about Fan Yicheng and think of the behavior of the party officials who had ruined their lives.

Xiao knew it was a long shot. There were reasons why workers in Liaoyang had not come together before. Conditions at each factory were different, so each workforce had its own grievances. A payment that would satisfy workers at one factory might be dismissed as insignificant at another, and what some workers considered an important complaint others might see as secondary. By focusing on corruption, the Liaotie workers wanted to bridge these divisions. But they were cautious, too. They did not want to alert the authorities, so they reached out only to people they trusted. If a Liaotie worker was married to a worker from another enterprise, they would ask the spouse to spread the word. If they met workers protesting outside a government building, they might ask for their help. But it was difficult to establish the trust necessary to build alliances, especially with distant factories scattered across the city, and so there was no attempt to establish a citywide organization. The Liaotie workers tried to notify other factories of their plans, but it seemed too dangerous to do much more.

The effort might have failed if not for a blunder by one of the workers’ enemies. A day or two after the opening of the National People’s Congress, Xiao was at home watching television coverage of the event when he saw Gong Shangwu, the city’s former mayor and party chief, speaking to a reporter about the city’s economic situation. “There are laid-off workers in Liaoyang, but there are no unemployed workers,” he declared. “Laid-off workers receive a living stipend of 280 yuan per month.” Xiao was stunned. It was a ridiculous statement, and it infuriated workers across the city. How could a senior official, the chairman of their local legislature and a delegate representing them in Beijing, make such a claim with a straight face? The hundreds of thousands who had lost their jobs and were struggling to make ends meet in Liaoyang, a city of two million, were in no mood to hear a portly party boss tell them that they were not really unemployed. The blatant lie about the living stipend was even worse. It was as if Gong expected workers to play along with the fiction, just so he could brag to the nation about what a good job he was doing.

The outrage in the city’s working-class neighborhoods was palpable, and the Liaotie worker leaders gathered at Yao’s store and decided to move up their protest by a week. That left them just a few days to get organized and mobilize the workforce. Another meeting of the workers at Liaotie was called, and this time more than six hundred people showed up, forcing the group to find a bigger room. The police must have noticed such a large gathering, but the workers didn’t care. They were angry, and after all, they said to themselves, what crime was there in holding a meeting? Xiao proposed a new slogan—“Impeach Gong Shangwu, Liberate Liaoyang”—and Pang drafted a new letter with the same title. Committees were set up and tasks were assigned. One group was assigned to make banners. Others were organized to take charge of morale, safety, and emergency medical care during the demonstration.

One of the worker leaders, a stocky carpenter named Chen Dianfan, proposed that they carry a portrait of Mao during the protest. He volunteered to get one and build a large frame for it. Xiao immediately agreed. He considered Mao a disastrous leader, but he knew that some of the old workers, in their nostalgia for socialism and equality among the classes, overlooked the suffering he caused. Xiao was not beyond tapping into such sentiment if it meant drawing more workers into the streets. If the party could use Mao to defend its corrupt ways, he thought, why couldn’t the workers use his image to fight back? Marching under Mao’s portrait would also help position the workers as loyal citizens, making it easier for those anxious about getting arrested to join them and more difficult for the authorities to suppress the demonstration.