Will the Boat Sink the Water?: The Life of China's Peasants (27 page)

5

a vicious circle

A Vicious Circle

Among the incidents of abuse in rural Anhui, one of the most shocking was the tragedy in Shensai Village, a typical case of tax extortion leading to a peasant’s losing his life.

The village of Shensai, part of Zhonggang Township, Funan County, on the banks of the Huai River, is known far and wide as a “reservoir,” in effect a spillway for the river. Whenever the Huai overflows its banks, the villagers have to see their fields become vast reservoirs to accommodate the rising waters and see their own homes float away with the flood. Year after year, they make this extreme sacrifice so that downstream, the city of Bengbu, the coal mines on the lower reaches of the river, the great city of Shanghai, and the bordering rich provinces of Jiangsu and Zhejiang can be spared. Year after year, the villagers must resign themselves to seeing everything that they have worked for inundated. People we talked to said that Heaven would punish anyone who dares take advantage of these long-suffering peasants. But the Party boss of Shensai Village, Shen Keli, was just such a man.

At one time Shen Keli had been a hearty young fellow. He signed up for the army and joined the Party soon after. When

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he was demobilized, the villagers felt that he had the right stuff and elected him chief of the villagers’ committee. At the beginning he did indeed exert himself on behalf of his fellow villagers and he won their esteem. Soon he became Party boss as well as village chief and was even elected a delegate to the Township People’s Congress.* As he rose in status, Shen began to see more of the world. He realized that public institutions big and small, which were supposed to be “serving the people,” actually were being exploited and their powers used to extract what could be wrung from the people in the form of taxes, fines, fees, charges, and obligatory “fund-raising” for this or that cause. In a word, “serving the people” had become “serving the money god.” Shen Keli got the picture and began to act on it. Through embezzlement, bribes, and extortion, Shen clawed his way to money and power. Next he turned his attention to the military. He appointed two of his three younger brothers to the militia: Shen Kexin, the eldest, became captain and Shen Kehui became a full-time member, and he equipped them with firearms and electric prods. He then appointed his youngest brother, Shen Chaoqun, as head of one of the production brigades in the village.** With this, Shen Keli had control of the Party, the civil administration, and the military, and became the absolute ruler of Shensai Village.

It was against this background that the infamous incident of armed extortion of the “village cash reserve” in Shensai Village took place on November 4, 1995, which led to two deaths, and a third man wounded. The incident caught the attention of the

* China’s top legislative body is the National People’s Congress. It makes the laws, and local people’s congresses and governments produce local legislation.

**Administrative and production units in China have varied over time and also by locality. In the post-Liberation era the countryside was divided into communes, production brigades, and production teams. Nowadays village committees are more common.

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Central Committee and the State Council.
Focus
, a popular program on China Central Television, broadcast an account of the incident, and this elicited calls for harsh punishments for the perpetrators and inquiries into the responsibility of leaders at higher levels involved in the case. Both Shen Keli and his brother, Shen Kexin, were stripped of their political rights for life. Moreover, Militia Captain Shen Kexin, the principal perpetrator in the incident, was sentenced to death for premeditated murder, and Village Chief Shen Keli received the death sentence, with probation. Just as the provincial high court confirmed the sentences and ordered the immediate execution of Shen Kexin, a new order came from Beijing to delay the execution until CCTV readied itself for live broadcast, obviously to send a message to the nation at large. This was totally unprecedented in the history of the nation.

The sentencing and subsequent decision to televise the execution had some interesting fallout, for it created a predicament for the local government. It had been decided that the formal announcement of the death sentence and the execution to fol-low would take place in the county seat instead of the more usual location, the provincial capital. The county leadership became uneasy at the possible movements of Beijing TV reporters in their locality: housed in the county area, they might quite possibly nose around in Shen Village and see the abject poverty everywhere. So the reporters were put up in the coun-ty’s best hotel with young female attendants to keep them happy. Even so, the reporters still managed to steal into Shensai Village and make video recordings of what they saw.

On the eventful day when thousands if not millions witnessed Shen Kexin being led off to the execution ground, live on TV, announcements were made on
Focus
of disciplinary measures and administrative demotions to be meted out to leaders at prefecture, county, and township levels. The broadcast ended with

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words quoted from Zhu Rongji, then premier of the State Council: “From this day on, anybody who ignores rules and squeezes the peasants will have to answer for himself!”

The Party Central Committee and the State Council also jointly issued a document regarding the Shensai incident that called national attention to the problem of excessive taxation of the peasants. “Briefing on Serious Incidents in 1995 Relating to Overtaxation of the Peasants” revealed that in 1995 alone there had been thirteen cases in eight provinces of excessive taxation leading to loss of life among the peasantry. The case of Shensai Village in Anhui Province was only one of many, and it was used to make an example and send a strong signal.

The joint document traveled down through the tiers of government to the village level, so that all and sundry were put on notice that excessive burdens would not be tolerated, but it was not enough to prevent the tragedy of Zhang Village (see chapter 2, “The Village Tyrant”), in which four peasants were killed and one wounded. After the Zhang Village incident, eight similar cases were reported in 1999—three in Hunan, two in Sichuan, and one case each in the provinces of Hubei, Gansu, and Henan. Who knows the number of cases that went unre-ported? Many of our countrymen in rural areas have lost their lives trying to resist excessive taxes. Meanwhile the Party and the government have issued one directive after another, laying down rules and prohibitions, but taxes keep being piled on the peasant population.

When we examine the wording of those authoritative documents, we notice that many of them were limited to laying down principles, or “spirit.” Practice could not be checked against these principles, nor did the prohibitions carry legal weight. Consequently, what was to be abolished continued to flourish; what was to be changed remained business as usual; what was to be halted continued unchecked. The excessive taxation targeted by the Party’s and State Council’s rules and

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restrictions became like the chives in the popular proverb: “The more you lop them off the faster they grow.” It seems that the problem of the peasants’ excessive taxes has evolved into a vicious circle: the more directives prohibiting taxation, the more taxation there is.

In our own investigations in fifty of so counties in the province of Anhui, we did not find one single county that did not cut corners in implementing those directives—that is, if they did so at all. This situation is hardly likely to be limited to Anhui.

Li Changping, the Party boss of Jianli County, Hubei Province, who had made a name for himself a few years earlier by writing bluntly of the peasants’ plight to the Central Committee, summed up the current situation: “The Party Central Committee knows perfectly well that although problems appear at the bottom, the root lies with the top leadership. Why not pursue it at the top? If the leadership refuses to dig up the root of the problems, local officials will only be more emboldened, the bureaucratic machine will continue to grow, while the peasants’ burden will be heavier and heavier. In which case the policies of the Party would be like ‘ears for the deaf’ in the popular saying: just put up for show.”

In 1994, when the peasants were already feeling the pinch, the government decided to introduce a tax reform whereby state and local taxes would be separated into two parallel systems and taxation would thus be decentralized. When the central government had supreme control of tax monies, local governments faced a budgetary crisis. Income tends to flow up, to the central government, while expenses get passed down, to the local government. Spending on basic public services such as education, family planning, veteran’s pensions and so on were all relegated to the local level. The state’s new policy with regard to local income was: “no tax on surplus; no subsidy for

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