Out of Mao's Shadow: The Struggle for the Soul of a New China (27 page)

Nationally, the authors wrote in 2003, government officials spend $10 billion to $13 billion in public money every year on eating and drinking, enough to host four Olympic Games.

Beijing tried to rein in waste by reducing funding for local authorities in the mid-1990s, but rural officials responded by spending villages and townships into debt and squeezing peasants for even more in taxes and fees. I once visited a village named Xiaoeshan in a remote and mountainous part of Sichuan Province, a town so poor it had no paved roads, one telephone, and limited electricity. Peasants there ate most of what they harvested, and by selling the rest, they earned about $25 a year each on average. But local officials demanded about $37 from each resident in annual taxes and fees. The only way to pay the taxes, residents told me, was to supplement their farm income by pulling their children out of school and sending them to find work in the cities.

When peasants resist paying taxes, local authorities send in “shock teams” of officials to collect, and if cash is not forthcoming, the teams confiscate property—livestock, televisions, bicycles—often worth more than the amount owed in taxes. In the 1980s and through the ’90s, resentment against the rising tax burden and against the government’s demand that couples have no more than one or two children, fueled waves of riots and other violent clashes between peasants and party officials in the countryside. In some villages, peasants fashioned homemade bombs and destroyed the homes of local officials. Alarmed by the unrest, the party leadership tried in 1993 to set a limit on peasant taxes of 5 percent of average local incomes and issued a series of edicts ordering officials to stop levying arbitrary fees, but little changed. Local officials ignored the regulations or found ways around them, sometimes coming up with ingenious new tax schemes. In Linquan County, peasants were required to pay one fee if they slaughtered a pig, and another fee if they didn’t. In other counties, there was even something known as the “attitude tax”—a tax on peasants who resisted paying their taxes.

W
HEN THE WRITER
Chen Guidi first met Zhang Xide in the summer of 1994, he didn’t think he was such a bad guy. On the contrary, the party chief of Linquan County made an excellent impression. He seemed more open-minded and honest than most party officials Chen had met in the countryside, more willing to speak frankly without worrying about the political ramifications or slipping into empty ideological jargon to protect himself. Chen was working for a party newspaper in Anhui’s provincial capital at the time, and he had traveled to Linquan to conduct interviews for an article about a local corruption case involving a businessman who had defrauded the county and escaped conviction by bribing the province’s top prosecutor and other officials. The story was a blockbuster but also a political minefield, and most officials would have been reluctant to discuss the subject. But not only did Zhang cooperate, he arranged for Chen to meet all the officials in Linquan he wanted.

In some ways, Chen knew, Zhang was acting in his own interests. It was under his leadership that Linquan County had solved the case and arrested the crook, and such an accomplishment could boost his chances for a promotion. But the provincial prosecutor who accepted the bribe and overturned the case was an official of much higher rank. By speaking out, Zhang was risking his career. Yet he seemed genuinely unafraid. “He’s just the provincial prosecutor!” Zhang told Chen at a banquet he hosted for the writer. “He’s not a big player behind the scenes at all!” Chen wasn’t sure if this was bluster or daring, but he admired Zhang’s guts. He was also impressed that unlike many rural officials in Anhui, Zhang had attended university in Beijing, earning a degree in agriculture. Here was a party official with a future, Chen thought, someone with the confidence to take risks to get things done. “A lot of officials I met at the time were cowards,” Chen told me years later. “They didn’t like to take responsibility for anything. But Zhang seemed different…. I thought he was a very good county party secretary.”

The first hint that all was not as it seemed came the next day, when Chen encountered a crowd of peasants outside the Linquan County courthouse. He asked them what was going on, and they explained they were protesting the arrest of fellow villagers. Then they handed him a stack of papers. It was the summer of 1994, not long after the April 2 Incident, and the peasants were from Wangying Village. The next day, Chen asked Zhang about the protest. The party boss laughed dismissively. “The peasants are running wild,” he said, complaining that they were always petitioning the government about one thing or another. Chen made a joke, too, and the conversation moved on. He continued working on the Linquan fraud story, filed away the papers from the villagers, and forgot about them.

A few months later, after the first part of his report on the Linquan corruption case was published, Chen received a late-night phone call from Zhang. The party boss sounded like a different person, nervous and timid. His voice was shaking as he told Chen that people were furious about the article, and that his job was in jeopardy. Even though he had been given an advance copy of the report and cleared it, Zhang pleaded with Chen not to publish the rest of it and to return any evidence that he had signed off on the article. Chen was upset. By backing down, Zhang was leaving him and his newspaper vulnerable to discipline by the propaganda department. “If you take the materials back, that’s like kicking me when I’m down,” Chen complained. In the end, the newspaper ignored Zhang and published the rest of the report, and Zhang saved his job by denouncing it. Chen concluded that Zhang was an ordinary official after all, more concerned about his career than the truth, and after some time, he forgot about him.

Six years later, in 2000, Chen and his wife, Wu Chuntao, began conducting research for a book about the peasantry. The couple lived in the provincial capital, but both had been born to peasant families. Chen was a native of Anhui, a tall, serious man with sharp features who had once labored on the docks of the Huai River. At fifty-seven, he was the more accomplished writer of the pair, the author of an award-winning book about pollution of the Huai, as well as a few plays and novels. Wu had also distinguished herself as a writer, but primarily in local literary circles. She was twenty years younger than him, a small, affable woman with a youthful face and a gentle manner. They met in a writing class and had been married for nearly a decade when they had a son in March 2000, and saw a young peasant couple in the maternity ward make a devastating decision. The man had brought his wife to the hospital because she was bleeding, but doctors would not deliver their child unless they paid 3,200 yuan, or nearly four hundred dollars, much more than they could afford. Forced to check out, they returned to their village, where it only cost 200 yuan to deliver a boy and 100 yuan for a girl. A few days later, Wu heard an anguished cry in the next room. The woman’s bleeding had continued, and she had been rushed back to the hospital, but it was too late. Both she and her baby died, and her husband was banging his fists on the floor in grief. It was then that Chen and Wu resolved to write
An Investigation of China’s Peasantry.

They began to hear stories about Linquan County soon after they started—about the punishing taxes that peasants had to pay, about an official who lived so well he hired nine nannies and maids, about a party boss who drove around in a Mercedes-Benz. Chen recognized the name of the party boss immediately—Zhang Xide—and then he remembered the papers that the peasants had given him outside the courthouse. When he dug them up and finally read them, he was moved by the plight of the residents of Wangying Village, and he realized just how wrong his first impression of Zhang had been.

When the couple finally visited Wangying Village in January 2001, the peasants were reluctant to talk. Though more than six years had passed since the April 2 Incident and Zhang Xide had long since moved on, the villagers were still afraid of provoking the government, and they doubted this couple from the city could do much to help them. But Chen and Wu persisted, slowly winning their trust. When villagers expressed concern about being caught talking to them, the writers drove them to another town and put them up in a hotel. When people important to the story were away working in the cities, the writers tracked them down or arranged to meet them back in the village on other trips. The couple collected a stack of documentary evidence—diaries, official reports, tax receipts. Gradually, over the course of eight visits to Wangying, they pieced together the story of the village’s tax revolt.

T
HE TAX REVOLT
began with a television set. In the autumn of 1993, a party “shock team” was collecting taxes in Wangying Village when an elderly woman refused to pay a new seventy-five-cent fee. The officials responded by seizing her television. That year, the villagers made an average of about thirty-four dollars for a year’s labor in the fields, less than usual because of a drought. But local officials reported figures four to five times higher to impress their superiors and demanded a total of about twenty-one dollars from each villager in taxes, far above the national limit of 5 percent of the average local income. The incident with the television set was just the latest outrage, and as word of what happened spread, residents began swapping stories about similar abuses and sharing information about their tax burdens. Three young men in the village, all of whom were surnamed Wang, emerged as leaders of a campaign to appeal for help. They began by taking their complaint to the township that governed their village, and when they were brushed off there, they moved up the bureaucracy and tried the government in Linquan County. After they were rebuffed again, the three Wangs decided to bring the village’s problem to Beijing.

Chinese use the word
shangfang
to describe the act of petitioning a higher authority for justice. The phrase literally means “upward visit,” and the practice has been a part of the nation’s political culture for centuries if not millennia. For much of Chinese history, it referred to an appeal to the emperor or one of his ministers to right the wrongs committed by a lower official. Today,
shangfang
continues in slightly modified form. Many Chinese believe they have a better chance of winning redress of grievances by directly petitioning a higher level of the party than by filing a lawsuit because they know the party controls the courts and is above the law. The modern-day version of the imperial appeals bureaucracy is a system of what the party calls “Letters and Visits” offices. Almost every state and party organ in China has one, and the busiest ones are in Beijing. Huge numbers of petitioners from across the country converge on the capital every year clutching sheaves of papers outlining the injustices they have suffered. Many of these people end up living in slums and camping outside the Letters and Visits offices, which are usually located on backstreets away from the gaze of tourists. Their grievances are varied but they share a common hope—that an upright party official will somehow see their complaint and intervene on their behalf. It almost never happens, but that doesn’t stop the masses from coming. They stay in Beijing for months, years, even decades, because they refuse to give up or because they feel they have nowhere else to go.

The three Wangs joined the throngs of petitioners in Beijing in the winter of 1993 after the villagers took up a collection to pay for the six-hundred-mile train journey. In the capital, they lodged complaints at the Letters and Visits offices of the Central Committee, the State Council, and the Ministry of Agriculture. At each office, they presented bureaucrats with evidence of the taxes paid in Wangying Village, and the bureaucrats promised they would investigate. The official at the Agriculture Ministry went a step further, giving the men a letter endorsing their complaint to deliver to provincial authorities in Anhui. When the men went to Anhui, officials there read the letter and gave them another one addressed to officials in Linquan County. Armed with the two letters supporting their position, the three Wangs led a group of three hundred villagers back to the government offices in Linquan County, optimistic that their tax problems would soon be resolved. What they didn’t realize was that the Letters and Visits offices had little real power and often gave out such letters just to get petitioners to go home. The Linquan County officials who met with them, on the other hand, understood this, and they were noncommittal about the peasants’ complaints. One expressed skepticism and said the county wouldn’t be able to function if it cut taxes to the levels indicated in the letters. Frustrated, the villagers demanded to see the county party chief and refused to leave until they did.

Hours later, just before dusk, the residents of Wangying Village caught their first glimpse of the most powerful man in the county. They were camped outside the government building when Zhang Xide arrived by car and walked over to them. The peasants quickly surrounded him, and many got down on their knees in supplication. They told him about the illegal taxes in their village exceeding the 5 percent limit, and showed him the letters they had obtained in Beijing and the provincial capital, Hefei. At first, Zhang defended his record, saying he had not raised taxes. But the peasants wouldn’t let him leave and pressed him to read the letters, which he did, slowly. He did not look surprised by what he read, nor did he appear nervous about the emotional crowd around him. Finally, Zhang looked up and spoke again. “If the township increased the peasants’ tax burden, I’ll ask them to return the money to you,” he said. The three Wangs asked him to put it in writing, and Zhang scribbled a note for them.

“The masses from Wangying Village have petitioned seeking the return of funds for village administration collected in excess,” it said. “Please work diligently, and return all of the funds collected in excess according to the agreed amount in a timely fashion.”