Will the Boat Sink the Water?: The Life of China's Peasants (7 page)

A Case That Caught the Eye of the Party Central Committee

When some villagers, including members of the auditing group, found Ding Zuoming, the latter was nearly dead. They sobbed as they bent over his prostrate body, knowing that Ding had been brought to this terrible state because he had championed their cause. Some ran to tell his family. Old Ding, his father, rushed in and stumbled to his knees at the sight of his son. By now Ding Zuoming’s face was clammy and deathly pale, and his trembling lips could hardly utter a word.

Meanwhile, the deputy head of the township security, Peng Zhizhong, sauntered in to check if Ding Zuoming had been “softened up.” When the old father realized that the new arrival was a leader around the place and that his son had been beaten for refusing to pay up, he turned to beg Peng, “I will apologize to Ding Yanle, I promise to pay his medical bills! Please let my son go!”

Actually, Peng Zhizhong himself was somewhat shocked that his men had gone so far. Seeing Ding Zuoming’s condition, he was more than happy to accommodate the old father’s plea and let them go. He waved them away, but flung a warning at their retreating backs: “Let’s get this clear, the payment must be on my table by tomorrow.”

Old Ding, helped by the villagers, rushed his son to the township hospital. Ding Zuoming was suffering severe pain in the abdomen and the township hospital sent him on to the county hospital. There he was diagnosed with a ruptured spleen and given blood transfusions, but it was too late. The next morning, the day after the village audit that he had agitated for was supposed to start, Ding Zuoming died on the operating table.

Ding’s father was prostrate with grief. “My son, you poor simpleton! You are in the right, but they have might. Don’t you know that the leg is always stronger than the arm?”

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Ding’s wife could not accept the reality of what had happened, wailing, “How could you let them kill you over two hundred yuan! Isn’t your life more precious! How are we to live, with two sick old parents and three small children!”

The villagers tried to console them, but they were also sad-dened. How could Ding Zuoming, so smart and resourceful, let himself be beaten to death without calling for help.

The news that Ding Zuoming had been killed for speaking up for everybody hit the area like a thunder bolt.

The peasants of Luying Village had had enough. Rage swept away their timidity. They left their houses and marched up to the home of Ding Yanle, whose provocation had started the trouble. By then, Ding Yanle, having gotten word that trouble was brewing, had snuck out of the hospital and made off with his family. He has never been heard of since. Eight years have passed. It was rumored that the family had been spotted in Shanghai, then in Nanjing, and even as far off as Hainan.

Drawing a blank at Ding Yanle’s, the crowd headed for the township security office, but by then the high and mighty Peng Zhizhong and his thugs had also made themselves scarce.

Thwarted now for a second time, the enraged villagers decided to go straight to the Lixin County seat. They raised clouds of dust as they moved forward to the accompaniment of the hoots and toots of tractors and flat-bed tricycles and trucks and carts trundling along the road. As they passed through the neighboring villages, more people joined them, and together the angry crowd made its way to the county seat. Obviously, Luying Village was not the only village where the peasants found it hard to make a living. The problems that Ding had presented to the county leaders, the demand to audit the books, actually reflected the common aspirations of them all. And so they could not stand by and see Ding Zuoming beaten to death for his efforts and do nothing about it. Their unspoken understanding was: if we don’t band together and do something now, we could

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suffer the same fate as Ding Zuoming. Eventually, the group that set out from Luying Village snowballed into a crowd of three thousand before they arrived at the county seat.

The “Ding Zuoming affair” that took place in the security office of Jiwangchang Township of Lixin County of Anhui Province on February 21, 1993, and ended in Ding’s death the next day will never be forgotten. A man gave up his young life to protest the peasants’ excessive burden; his death called national attention to the condition of the Chinese peasants.

Officials of the Lixin County Party Committee and the county government rushed out to meet the crowd halfway down the road, fearful that the situation would spiral out of control. They acknowledged the facts, and tried to handle the problem fairly. What the authorities wanted to avoid above all was that news of the events would get out to the general public, so they banned any reporting on the affair.

The news did leak out after all, not to the provincial authorities, as the county officials had feared, but, worse, straight to the Party Central Committee and the State Council.

The person behind this leak was Kong Xiangying, a reporter for the Anhui branch of the Xinhua News Agency. Kong was in charge of reporting on agricultural affairs in the province. When he heard of the story of Ding Zuoming he saw it as a mir-ror that reflected a multitude of issues in rural China. And the timing was good. The fact that the tragedy had occurred when the problem of the peasants’ excessive tax burden was a top concern at the Party Central Committee made the story stand out even more starkly. Here was an educated young peasant who had reported on precisely this issue, had even gotten the support of the county, and he had been killed in broad daylight—beaten to death while in the custody of the township security force. Kong’s sense of civic duty and mission led him to

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drop everything and go to Jiwangchang Township to do his own investigation. Less constrained by the gag order than local people, he quickly wrote up a report covering the facts, which he sent straight to the Xinhua main office in Beijing. The main office immediately published Kong’s story, unabridged, in
Domestic Trends
, an internal publication meant exclusively for the eyes of the top leadership.

One day, a staff member at the General Office of the Anhui provincial government got the shock of his life when he picked up the phone. On the line was Chen Junsheng, secretary-general of the General Office of the State Council in Beijing. Chen Junsheng got straight to the point: “We have learned that Ding Zuoming, a young peasant of Luying Village, Lixin County, in your province, has been persecuted to death for reporting on the excessive burden of the peasants. How did the provincial leadership deal with this case?” No answer. The provincial government had heard nothing from the county or the prefecture about Ding Zuoming, and naturally had no answer.*

Secretary-General Chen continued, “Let me know how the case is being handled. Leaders at the Party Central Committee have taken notice and jotted down directives. Call me as soon as you have information.” The secretary-general left numbers not only for his office phone and home phone, but also for the emergency “red phone” within Zhongnanhai, the Party Central Committee headquarters, in Beijing, which faces Tiananmen Square. Nothing like that had ever happened in the history of the Anhui provincial government. The officer immediately reported to his bosses, the provincial leaders, and then set about wiring directives down to the prefecture and county levels.

The Party secretary of Lixin County, Dai Wenhu, who had earlier on listened to the complaints of the peasants with Ding Zuoming at their head and had ordered the audit, now realized

*China’s system of administrative units, as described throughout the story: Central, province, municipal (prefectural), county, township, and village.

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the gravity of the situation. If it was established that Ding’s death was linked to the problem of “excessive burden of the peasants,” everyone would be in the hot seat, from the village to the township all the way to the county, and Dai Wenhu himself, though newly appointed to the position of county Party secretary, could not avoid being tainted. After thinking over all sides of the case, Dai chose the path of least resistance—to gloss over the whole affair. And so within twenty-four hours of getting the call, the county Party and government leadership sent off a report to their superiors at the provincial government in which they stated that Ding Zuoming’s death was the result of a personal dispute pure and simple that was totally unrelated to the problem of the “peasants’ excessive burden.”

When Dai Wenhu decided to slant the report as he did, he was ignorant of the fact that recently a thousand peasants had mounted a protest against excessive burdens in Renshou County, Sichuan Province, and that the protesters had clashed with the police and burned one police car. This explained the central government’s current anxiety over events in Anhui. Dai, unaware of this background, never imagined that in trying to be clever and glossing over the problem, he was actually killing his own political future.

Lixin County’s report was exactly the kind that the provincial Party and government leaders wanted to see, and they promptly wired the gist of the report to Chen Junsheng in Beijing.

Secretary-General Chen of the General Office of the State Council was a careful man. Seeing the discrepancy between this report and the earlier Xinhua News Agency’s internal report, he realized that what was at stake was not so much the
handling
of the case as the
nature
of the case: Was it really a civil dispute, or was it revenge taken on the peasants for reporting on their excessive burden? Chen followed up with the Xinhua News Agency, which stood by its own story. But in the interests of

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