Out of Mao's Shadow: The Struggle for the Soul of a New China (26 page)

“I signed a contract with the state. I didn’t sign any contract with Hua Jianmin, but Hua Jianmin keeps giving me trouble,” Chen said. “She accuses me of occupying her family’s land. She’s French. She talks like a French person with me, a Chinese businesswoman…. I don’t care if you’re French or what country you’re from. I’m going to use local, reasonable, and legal methods to relocate your family. The state gave me permission to do that…. She shouldn’t be bothering me. She should go to the government.”

Again and again, Chen emphasized that she did everything according to the law. She didn’t seize private property; she followed the law and bought land-use rights from the government. She didn’t court party officials at the Chang’an Club for special privileges; she went to government agencies seeking information and studied their regulations. She didn’t use connections to move to Hong Kong; she immigrated legally after “visiting relatives.” She didn’t bully journalists; she asserted her legal rights and complained when they printed lies. She had an answer or evasion for every question, and she looked flustered only once, when I asked about Gao Zhisheng, who by then had been arrested. When I said his name, Chen seemed stricken and her face blanched. She said she had never heard of him.

Chen also fumbled a bit when I asked what entrepreneurs like her thought of the authoritarian political system. She mumbled something about foreign investment in China before I pressed her to express a preference for a one-party or multiparty system. “I think the one-party system is good for China, because it’s always been like this through the generations,” she said. “I don’t know what will happen in the future, but I hope it’s still the one-party system we have now. There are many benefits of the one-party system. It means there will be somebody to rule the country, to give it direction….” I reminded her of the devastation that resulted from one-party rule under Mao, including her own suffering during the Cultural Revolution. “That was before reform and opening. Since reform and opening, things have been quite good,” she replied. She paused and smiled blankly. “I’m just a simple person.”

T
he residents of Wangying Village woke on the morning of April 3, 1994, to the sound of police sirens and a voice on a crackling loudspeaker ordering them not to leave town. It was not an entirely unexpected development for the villagers, many of whom had been engaged for months in a tax revolt against local officials and had heard a crackdown was imminent. But few were prepared for the sight of the eight military trucks, each mounted with machine guns, that rumbled into their dusty hamlet in Anhui Province, or the battalion of more than one hundred police officers in full riot gear piling out of the vehicles. Even before the police began beating people, most of the peasants grabbed their children and fled in terror, running through their scallion fields toward the nearby provincial border. Those who remained in the village assumed they had nothing to fear because they were elderly or infirm or had not participated in their neighbors’ protests against illegal taxes. But they were wrong. When the police left Wangying, an old man lay dying in the dirt and several other residents were bleeding or bruised. About a dozen other men and women, none of whom had been involved in the tax protests, were taken to the local police station, where they were whipped and tortured. Police poured a pot of scalding tea on one man’s head, and forced others to run laps around a courtyard while wearing iron shackles around their ankles.

Zhang Xide

Wang Xiangdong, one of the Wangying Village peasant leaders

There was little doubt among the residents of Wangying Village who was behind the raid and what message it was meant to send. The most powerful man in Linquan County, the party secretary, Zhang Xide, was upset with them. A month earlier, a hundred villagers had traveled to the county seat in tractors and trucks and confronted Zhang outside his office, demanding a refund of illegal taxes that his underlings had collected. The villagers had already challenged his authority in late 1993 by going over his head and petitioning for help in Beijing. When the police stormed the village, officers went looking for the men who had led that appeal. All of them had fled, so police ransacked and trashed their homes, taking everything of value and smashing the rest. One of the men returned to find that they had even dumped a stock of rat poison into his grain silo, mixing it in with shovels and rendering a season’s harvest worthless.

The party later investigated the events in Wangying Village and confirmed that Zhang ordered the police raid. But one official report after another declared he had acted properly. The party referred to the episode as the “April 2 Incident,” because in the official version of events, the police were sent to Wangying to rescue an officer who had been taken captive and lost his gun the night before. “The response to the April 2 Incident was timely and handled correctly,” the authorities said in an open letter to residents. “There should be no criticism. This should be fully regarded as positive. The county committee gave careful consideration and acted according to the law. On this subject…the provincial and local leadership have all given their full approval.”

For years, the residents of Wangying Village lived quietly with this verdict, and few outside the remote and poverty-stricken community heard about the April 2 Incident. As the villagers buried their anger and suppressed their outrage, the police went unpunished and the party boss won a promotion. But in 2003, the story of what happened in Wangying Village was published in a literary magazine, and then in a book. Across the country, people shook their heads in sadness and frustration as they read about Wangying Village and the party boss Zhang Xide. The villagers, it seemed, had gotten the last word.

A
SHORT, SQUAT MAN
with a receding hairline and small, narrow eyes, Zhang Xide was working in the party leadership of the city of Fuyang, not far from his old turf of Linquan County, when the story was published in the literary magazine. “You should read it,” one of his colleagues told him. “They wrote some terrible things about you.” At the time, he was vice chairman of the city’s People’s Political Consultative Conference, a ceremonial government body that did little more than hold banquets and convene meetings. The job gave Zhang access to a research library, so he ordered the staff to get him a copy of the magazine. At the time, he wasn’t very worried. The magazine was printed by a state publishing house, and the censors were pretty good at hiding the party’s misdeeds from the public, so how bad could it be?

Zhang had spent almost his entire adult life serving the party in the rural counties around Fuyang where he was born and raised. At the age of fifty-eight, he could look forward to retirement on a government pension and back on a comfortable if unexceptional career in the apparatus. The places where he worked remained poor but he believed he had helped promote economic growth and improved the lives of the peasants in the area. His parents had been illiterate wheat and bean farmers, but he had made something of himself, and now he had a son who was a judge and a daughter who worked in the tax bureau. In many ways, he was a typical party official, one of millions of loyal and anonymous cadres who believed in the one-party state, benefited from it, and helped sustain it.

So Zhang was understandably upset when he saw how he was portrayed in the magazine story, “The Slow Petition Road,” which was scheduled to be published as a chapter of the book
An Investigation of China’s Peasantry.
Near the start of the piece, the authors wrote that Zhang “bore undeniable responsibility and played an extremely dishonorable role” in the April 2 Incident. Then, it got worse:

The article told the story of the villagers’ campaign to seek redress against high taxes between 1993 and 1996—and of his efforts to stop them. With each page, Zhang grew angrier. He had no regrets about his tenure as the party chief in Linquan County. He felt he had done a good job, and he considered himself one of the best leaders the county ever had. Now he was being painted as a vulgar tyrant, held up for the nation to mock and condemn, and it was infuriating. He recognized the authors’ names. He had had a run-in with one of them before, and he was sure the writer was trying to get back at him. But there was more to his outrage than that. These writers had gone too far, he thought. Their article wasn’t just an attack on him, it was an attack on the Communist Party, on the political system that he had devoted his life to and believed had made China a great nation. The way they portrayed the party as incapable of responding to people’s concerns, the way they accused local officials of taking advantage of the peasants and covering up one another’s crimes, the way they depicted the police as thugs who engaged in torture—to Zhang, it was all an attempt to discredit one-party rule and pander to those who believed China needed democracy.

“The book incites the masses by publicizing all these things,” Zhang told me after it was published. “It clearly has an anti-Party tendency…. It catered to this kind of thinking, that’s why it became so popular. This is all obvious.

“I can’t understand it,” he continued. “Rationally speaking, during these years of reform and opening, there have been great changes. The planned economy has opened up, and there has been great progress in the environment for speech, in the construction of democracy and rule of law. What I can’t understand is why people fall for this book…. It’s clear that it rejects the Communist Party’s leadership.”

After reading the article, Zhang flew to Beijing and went to the magazine’s offices. He tried to persuade the editors to retract the story. When they resisted, he went to see the editor in chief of the publishing house, and urged him not to release the book, or at least to revise it and edit his name out. He invited the editor to send people to Linquan County and see for himself if the book was accurate. He offered to open up the county’s archives and to cooperate fully with their investigation. But a few days later, the editor called him and said he had consulted with the book’s authors. They stood by the book and provided evidence to back up the Wangying Village story. And so the publishing house was standing by it, too.

“I listened and was filled with anger,” Zhang said. “I told him, ‘See you in court.’ And then I hung up.”

L
INQUAN
C
OUNTY SITS
on the flatlands of central China between the Yellow and the Yangtze rivers, in the far northwest corner of Anhui Province. A rural backwater afflicted by sandy soil and frequent flooding, it is one of the most populous and impoverished counties in the nation, with nearly two million residents who make on average barely $250 a year, less than a sixth the national average. The villages of Linquan, scattered amid the rice paddies and wheat fields, have a meager, disorderly look, and there is a quiet emptiness about them, because many residents make ends meet by spending part of the year working in cities hundreds of miles away. Yet the rhythms and traditions of rural life seem to resist change. Pearl S. Buck’s 1931 novel,
The Good Earth,
was set not far from Linquan, and in much of the county the peasants continue to till the land the way they did in the book—with their hands, simple tools, and the occasional ox.

More than a half century ago, it was the anger and frustration of peasants in places like Linquan that fueled the Communist Revolution and catapulted Mao to power, much more than the party’s early efforts to mobilize industrial workers. Yet the party’s policies have always favored industry and the cities over agriculture and the countryside, where most Chinese live. When the party did focus on rural issues, Linquan and the other counties of Anhui felt the extremes. As many as eight million people died in Anhui during the Great Leap Forward, almost a quarter of the population. But the peasants in Anhui were also among the first to demand a return to household farming after Mao’s death, a change that Deng Xiaoping then endorsed and implemented across the country. By dismantling the communes, leasing land to peasant families, and reintroducing the profit motive, the party sparked an agricultural boom that lifted the national economy and fueled double-digit growth in rural incomes through much of the 1980s. In the 1990s, though, rural growth slowed, and the party’s long-standing bias toward the cities again weighed heavily on places like Linquan.

The party has always categorized residents of the countryside as
nongmin,
or peasants, and maintained policies that treat them as second-class citizens. Peasants are forced to sell grain to the state at artificially low prices to keep food costs down in the cities, and their children sometimes must score higher on exams than urban kids to get into college. They make up a majority of the population, but the state invests less in the countryside and spends less on services there—only 20 percent of all health-care funding, for example. At the same time, the government limits the ability of peasants to move to the cities, requiring them to apply for permits and restricting or denying them access to urban schools, health care, and other social services, as well as many jobs. On top of it all, through the 1990s and beyond, peasants have been forced to pay higher taxes. City residents only began paying taxes in 1994, and only if their monthly income exceeded 800 yuan, or about a hundred dollars, but peasants—hardly any of whom earn that much—paid taxes no matter how little they made. During the 1990s, taxes grew faster than incomes across the countryside, and by the year 2000, a peasant paid on average four times more in taxes than an urban resident despite earning six to seven times less.

The rising rural tax burden was the most conspicuous symptom of a political structure in which local officials never had to answer to the public. The party was a parasite, living off the peasants and giving them little in return and no way to fight back. Local officials raised rural taxes to boost their own pay, and in many places they spent the entire budget on salaries and administrative expenses with nothing left over to fund services. As a result, they demanded more fees from peasants who wanted to send their children to “public” schools. Many officials used tax money to finance projects they hoped would impress superiors and lead to promotions. But the projects were often ill conceived and wasteful—factories that never made a profit, palatial government buildings full of empty offices, roads that went nowhere. Even when projects did make sense, peasants were resentful because they had no way to know whether officials were spending their money wisely. In the late 1980s, some officials even began diverting funds meant for grain procurement to their boondoggles and paying peasants with IOUs.

The demand for taxes continued to rise as party officials created new jobs for friends and relatives. The process began in the 1980s, when the nation’s 56,000 communes were dismantled and replaced by 96,000 townships, creating an entirely new layer of government between the counties and villages that would have to be financed with money from the peasants. Over the years, every level of the bureaucracy expanded faster than the rural population. At the township level, the ratio of officials to the rural workforce grew tenfold between 1982 and 2000. The rural party apparatus expanded so quickly that often there wasn’t enough money left over to pay the salaries of teachers and other civil servants.

As taxation without representation swelled the ranks of local bureaucrats, peasants complained about how these officials ate and drank at public expense. The authors of
An Investigation of China’s Peasantry
tell a story in the book about party officials who ran up an enormous tab at a restaurant in Anhui. After several years, the restaurant sued for payment and ended up taking ownership of part of the township government building. It was the third time, the authors discovered, that the township had been forced to sell a public building to cover the restaurant bills of its officials: