Will the Boat Sink the Water?: The Life of China's Peasants (14 page)

According to the article, Zhang Village and its affiliated areas comprised 142 households, with a total population of 750. It was an exclusively agricultural area situated in the lowlands neighboring the Huai River. It was prone to floods and the peo-ple were poor. The reporter went through many households without seeing a decent piece of furniture or furnishing; many households couldn’t even afford a black and white television set. But most cadres owned refrigerators and color televisions, and some of them even lived in multistory mansions. The villagers all complained that the cadres cheated their superiors and oppressed the people, gave themselves perks and privileges and did not keep proper records of the village finances. The “one payment, two records” scam was just one item in their bag of dirty tricks.

Following the publication of the Li Renhu–Ge Renjiang report, a journalist from the influential
Trade and Industry Daily Guide
published an article titled “Zhang Guiquan Must Answer to the Law for the Deaths of Four People” that did not mince words about the murder. This article went to the heart of the problem by stating in its headlines: “Still serving a sentence,

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this man became a village cadre; he has something to hide and opposes auditing; four members of auditing group killed in broad daylight.”

Following the article in
Trade and Industry Daily Guide
, the paper
Wenhui Trade and Industry
published on its front page a piece titled “A Truthful Report on a Case of Aggravated Murder in Guzhen County.” These articles finally set the true facts of the killings in Zhang Village before the public, defeat-ing all the cover-up attempts of the Guzhen County and Bengbu municipal Party authorities.

About four months after the tragedy, on a hot early-summer afternoon, four reporters from China Central Television trudged their dusty way to Zhang Village carrying their heavy equipment on their shoulders. They had seen the Xinhua News Agency story on “one payment, two records,” which had been wired nationwide, and on June 15, 1998, they decided to come and see for themselves. Once in the village they started talking to people casually and taking pictures at random.

They walked into the house of Huang Zhiwei and asked him, “How much is your annual burden of taxes?” Huang was obviously ill at ease, but after a long hesitation, he showed them his official report card of payments and the real payments scrawled on pieces of plain paper. “Yes, it is a heavy burden,” he said.

The reporters interviewed the upstanding village representative, Zhang Jiayu, whom they found working in the fields. Zhang Jiayu gave the reporters more information about the cadres’ practice of issuing two records for the same payments. He went on to tell them the whole story of how the representatives decided to check the village books for evidence of Zhang Guiquan’s embezzlement of public funds, and how Zhang came out in full force with his sons and killed four people. The reporters asked Zhang Jiayu to lead the way, and they went to

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see the orphans of the murdered Zhang Guimao and Zhang Hongchuan and offered their condolences.

Finally the reporters asked Zhang Jiayu to take them to the house of the village Party boss, Zhang Dianfeng, hoping to interview him. It turned out that the Party head was not at home, so the reporters decided to interview his wife, Chen Yunxia. To their surprise, Chen was very hostile. First she shut the door in the reporters’ faces. Then she came out of the house, locked the door behind her, shouldered a hoe, and went her way to the fields. The reporters did not take it personally. Cameras in hand, they seized this rare chance to follow her, shooting all the way, until she was out of sight.

The reporters were just about to leave when they saw someone walking toward the house, steering a bike with one hand. It was obviously Zhang Dianfeng. From a distance the reporters followed the man’s movements. A bunch of villagers were shouting something at him, and finally the man caught sight of the camera aimed at him. Probably sensing that something was wrong, he turned to flee; then changing his mind, he turned around and walked back toward the reporters.

The reporters went up to him and asked, “Are you the Party head for the village?”

“Yes.”

“May we talk to you?”

Zhang Dianfeng had by now recovered his composure. “Of course, let’s talk in my house,” he answered readily. But on arrival he was met by the big lock hanging on the door, the key taken away by his wife. Zhang was visibly embarrassed.

The reporters decided to talk to him then and there. “Are the financial records of your village open to the public?”

Zhang Dianfeng replied readily, “Of course the records are open. Daily recordings, monthly summing ups. The records are posted for public review every fifth of the month.”

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“Posted? Where?” the reporters asked. “Posted in each of the three village localities.”

“Where exactly are they posted in the three localities? Have you seen them?’

Zhang Dianfeng hesitated a second before saying, “I don’t see them myself, but I give out assignments to have them posted.”

Amused, the reporters bombarded him with more questions as the villagers, who had by now crowded around them, laughed out loud at Zhang Dianfeng’s lies. Someone shouted, “The Party boss is talking through his hat!” amid more laughter.

Zhang Dianfeng wiped the smile from his face, and glowered at the group in front of him.

Just then, the village representative, Zhang Jiayu, emerged from the crowd, walked right up to the camera, and said in a loud voice, “The village records have never ever been made public in Zhang Village!”

Zhang Dianfeng turned to the speaker and growled, “Zhang Jiayu! Do you count yourself a Communist Party member? The records are posted and you never saw them? Are you doing your duty as a Party member?”

Obviously, according to Zhang Dianfeng, every Party mem-ber who was worth his salt must be in lockstep with him or be disqualified as a Party member.

The whole scene was caught on camera.

That same night, or, more precisely, at 2 A.M. the next morning, the Party leader of Tangnan Township phoned Zhang Dianfeng, asking about the details of the reporters’ visit. Whom had they talked to? What about? Had anybody said anything about the auditing and the village representatives who had been killed? And so on and so forth. These local leaders acted as if they were under siege by a deadly enemy.

Two days after the reporters’ visit, the village chief, Zhang

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Fengchi, went on the attack. This illiterate boor raved and ranted in the village broadcast,* “Some individual Communist Party members snuck a few rotten reporters into our village, telling them that everything here is a patchwork of lies. They also dragged over some reporters from the
Core Issues
TV program with their blather. Who cares for their core issues? As I see it, some people are out to make trouble. Okay, go on with your underhanded dealings. Wait till I catch you!”

The village chief was shouting at the top of his voice and had cranked the amplifier’s volume up to the highest level so that the villagers felt as if their ears were being blasted by an explosion. Rudely awakened in the early hours of the morning, they couldn’t help wondering, what kind of creatures, after all, were running Zhang Village?

On the evening of June 20, the TV series
The Fabric of Our Society
beamed a report on how the cadres of Zhang Village fleeced the peasants, putting the story in the national headlines. Soon, the
Southern Weekender
used the whole of its front page to expose the bloody murders in Zhang Village, publishing a long report by Zhu Qing titled “Father and Four Sons Tyrannizing a Village Will Stop at Nothing; Villagers Intent on Auditing the Books Are Stopped by Murder.” The front page also featured a series of cartoons by the cartoonist Fang Tang. He portrayed village leaders feasting and drinking at public expense, one picture showing their desks laden with wine bottles, and another showing them with cigarettes stuck between their lips as they stepped over the bodies of peasants bent prostrate before them. The article matching the cartoon was written by Dang Guoyin, a fellow of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, in Beijing. Guoyin’s indignation fairly burst off the

*In some areas it was standard practice for each village household to be fit-ted with a speaker that could not be turned off.

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page: “We have a government that has signed the international convention regarding human rights, and after all we are in a civilized age, how could we tolerate such rampant evil among us.” He pointed out, “It is of course necessary to discipline the cadres who violate the policies and laws of the country, and such discipline will probably bear results to a certain extent, but that is only scratching the surface of the problem. A thorough solution is to allow the peasants to be well-to-do, to allow them to organize themselves, and to confer legal status on their organization so that the peasants will be empowered to resist the political machine in the countryside.”