Will the Boat Sink the Water?: The Life of China's Peasants (11 page)

ment of threshing ground.* The woman started arguing with him, while standing on a bridge. To him it was absolutely outrageous that anyone could talk back to him like that, much less a woman. In a fit of anger, Deputy Village Chief Zhang pushed her off the bridge. She lay there unconscious for hours and appeared to be dead. Later she regained consciousness, but she remained paralyzed for life. Her husband dragged Deputy Village Chief Zhang before the Guzhen County Court and the court ruled that Zhang must pay 8,000 yuan to the family for damages. Of course, Deputy Village Chief Zhang refused to pay anything at all. Finally, when the issue came to a head and could not be evaded, Zhang embezzled the sum out of the village public funds.

How could such a villain get to be a leader in the village? Granted, he was only a deputy village chief, but where were the village chief and the Party head? Were they working hand in glove with him, or did they look the other way? It was one of the mysteries that we hoped to solve through our investigation. The more we learned about Deputy Village Chief Zhang’s background, the more preposterous the whole situation appeared. It turned out that the problems in Zhang Village were not limited to shady finances. Organizational irregularities at the grassroots level were extremely alarming. On May 20, 1992, this same Zhang had been convicted of embezzlement and rape and sentenced to one year in prison by the Guzhen County Court, with two years’ probation. During the two years’ probation period, Zhang Village’s administrative area was redistributed and Zhang Guiquan got himself into the position of deputy chief of the newly formed Zhang Village. The vil-

*“Threshing ground allotment” refers to the fact that after the agricultural communes were gradually broken up, the land was divided and contracted to individual households. The threshing ground was also divided into sections for individual household use, and there could be disagreements as to how these divisions were undertaken.

will the boat sink the water
?

lagers complained that no one had elected him to the position, that there never had been any consultation, and that Zhang Guiquan’s appointment had been forced on the people by the township Party boss and a few individuals within the village Party organization.

The fact that a criminal and sociopath could actually be appointed by two levels of the Party organization, township and village, to a position of power while still on probation for a court sentence, in effect set him up to commit more atrocities. The behavior pattern of Zhang Guiquan presents the charac-teristics of the village bully of traditional Chinese society. But Zhang differed from this traditional figure in many ways. The village bully of old times was a pariah in the community and did not own a great deal of land or property. He certainly did not enjoy any legal authority. Now, however, the likes of Zhang Guiquan could appropriate public land and property with no restrictions because they were legally invested with power over the village. In other words, a village cadre such as Zhang Guiquan was a worse public affliction on the people than the

village bullies of the old days.

The case of Zhang Guiquan and his sons killing people in broad daylight, though exceptionally horrific, was not so unique. In our investigation, we discovered that local bullies who lorded it over the peasants was a common phenomenon of village life. Zhang Guiquan being just one of the products of China’s peculiar mechanism of power at the rural grassroots level. It is easy to define the problem, but the real question is how to make sure that such a tragedy as that in Zhang Village cannot recur.

the village tyrant

A Long-Drawn-Out Suffering

Twenty minutes after getting a call for help, the antiriot police of Guzhen County surrounded Zhang Village. The murder suspects, Zhang Guiquan and his sons, were immediately arrested, except for son number seven, Zhang Leyi, who had fled. According to the testimony of the victims’ families and witnesses, Zhang Leyi had put all the murder weapons in a bag and walked away, right in front of the village Party head, Zhang Dianfeng, who did not identify him to the fully armed antiriot police, so he was able to sneak out via a small path behind the house of a villager, Huang, and escape.

News of the murders in Zhang Village spread like wildfire. But both the county and the township authorities totally ignored the fact that the whole affair had been sparked by the peasants’ demand for their democratic rights and for a lighten-ing of their burden of taxes. The authorities avoided the subject like poison. The day after the tragic incident, while the whole village was still in shock and mourning, the county cable TV station suddenly announced a news item. According to the TV announcement, an extremely grave case of “manslaughter” arising from “a civic dispute” had occurred in Zhang Village in Tangnan Township. The screen showed pictures of a scythe and kitchen knife as the murder weapons. Of course, the scythe and kitchen knife on display had been taken from the victim Zhang Guiyu’s home, since the police could not find any murder weapons, which had been removed from the scene of the crime. The whole report was a farcical fabrication.

As soon as the story aired on TV, Zhang Village exploded in indignation. Members of the victims’ families—Zhang Liang, the only son of the murdered Zhang Guimao, and Zhang Guiju, who had lost two brothers, Zhang Guiyu and Zhang Guiyue— and many others were all enraged by the TV broadcast. The very next morning, February 20, they gathered, three hun—

will the boat sink the water
?

dred–strong, and went to the broadcasting station to demand an explanation. Why was the incident called “manslaughter?” What was the so-called “civic dispute” that the victims, representatives elected by the villagers, were supposed to be engaged in with Deputy Village Chief Zhang Guiquan? The real problem, the villagers said, was that a criminal still serving his sentence had became the deputy village chief and was lording it over the other villagers. The villagers, groaning under excessive tax burdens, had demanded an audit of the books, which was their democratic right. The audit had been ordered by the county authorities, and was to have been supervised by the township authorities, but down in the village, people engaged in the auditing were victims of a barbarous intentional slaughter, not “manslaughter.”

The local TV producer was struck dumb by the questions. He had never imagined that there were so many sides to the issue, and that it was a case of premeditated murder. He had no choice but to confess that he put out the broadcast by order of the county authorities. The dead cannot be resurrected, true, but at least there must be a just verdict. The victims had been killed because they were champions of the peasants and had been entrusted by the peasants to look after their interests. This ghastly chain of events was totally unacceptable, and the fabricated TV news item was even more aggravating, adding insult to extreme injury. The enraged villagers decided to confront the county Party boss.

The county Party and government headquarters was right next to the county TV station, separated by a wall. When the villagers made their way out of the station building, they discovered that the street was filled with people. The news had spread, and many people had been outraged by the flagrant atrocity of the killings. When people learned that Zhang Village had turned out en masse to have it out with the TV station, they sensed that something was afoot. Nowadays, news reports were

the village tyrant

rarely reliable, especially reports of major incidents. And so people poured out into the streets to find out the truth of the matter for themselves. In no time at all, three thousand people were milling around the town of Guzhen.

The county authorities, being right next to the TV station, had a clear picture of the situation. By the time the villagers made their way to their office, the county’s Party and government officials had disappeared.

On February 21, the day following their fruitless trip to the county seat, the villagers were notified by the village Party boss, Zhang Dianfeng, to meet in Huang’s house at the western end of the village. Huang had built the house for his son’s coming marriage. The young man was still working in the city, and the house, standing empty, was often used for meetings and other events.

When the villagers gathered for the meeting, they discovered that leaders from the township had descended upon them. Present were the deputy head of the township, He Jingkuei, and the Party head for legal affairs, Qiu Ya, as well as members from the township security force. It turned out that the reason for their presence was to seal up people’s mouths.

The atmosphere at the meeting was extremely tense. He Jingkuei opened the meeting by reading sections of the criminal code, and then announced that it was forbidden to appeal to the higher authorities, or to start a disturbance, or to gossip about the incident. Everyone present was nervous, especially the fam-ily members whose loved ones had been killed. They were made to feel as if they had transgressed the law and were now being treated as if they fit into two of the “four pariah” categories of the old days: forbidden to “talk out of turn,” and forbidden to “act irresponsibly.”* It seemed as if the victims were under suspicion and were being controlled from all sides.

*The four pariahs (
di fu fan huai
) are the landlord, the rich peasant, the counterrevolutionary, and the bad element.

will the boat sink the water
?