Will the Boat Sink the Water?: The Life of China's Peasants (13 page)

dared to raise questions without mincing words. Deputy Village Chief Zhang Guiquan hated Zhang Jiayu to the very marrow. On the day of the killings, Zhang Guiquan and his sons, after killing four people, thirsted for more blood, and the first person they had in mind was Zhang Jiayu. Son number six had shouted, “C’mon, let’s deal with Zhang Jiayu! Don’t leave anyone in his family alive!” Luckily for Zhang Jiayu, he was not home; he had gone off to report the atrocities being committed, and thus escaped being killed. To this day, Zhang Jiayu has no peace and feels himself to be in danger on a daily basis, possibly being followed. Sometimes he sees suspicious-looking characters lurking outside his house.

As to the murderous village tyrant Zhang Guiquan, his fam-ily was still a power to be reckoned with in the village. Besides, Zhang Leyi, number seven son, was still on the loose, and who knew when he might show up again. The villagers, especially the victims’ families, had no sense of security. The old mother of the murdered brothers was inconsolable. In one afternoon she had lost two sons, and her grandson Pine had been wounded. A happy family was destroyed. And the nightmare was not over. The old mother said, showing fear and trepidation, “No one dares go out at night. Even in daytime, no one dares go far. Too scared to tend the peanuts, even in broad daylight.”

The Press Arrive at Last

What next transpired was beyond imagination.

As mentioned, the township had dispatched cadres to call a general meeting at Zhang Village to warn the victims’ family members not to “blab.” The county TV station and the provincial newspapers referred to the killings as “manslaughter,” the result of “fighting among ignorant peasants.” Of course these pronouncements did not carry legal weight. Even the inhabi—

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tants of Zhang Village, who were not well versed in legal issues, knew that the last word on the matter would be had by the People’s Procurator and the People’s Court. Yet, strangely, when the case started to unravel, the legal machinery failed. The local court degenerated into a representative of local special interests. It was at this point that the inhabitants of Zhang Village were truly overcome with fear and despair.

When the Bengbu Intermediate Court began to try the case, they had no intention of informing the victims’ families. When the families did finally hear about it, their legal representatives did not even have time to hire a lawyer.

Zhang Jiayu, the Party member who was village representative, swore by his twenty-five years’ Party membership that the court investigators had never even set foot in the village, let alone interviewed witnesses regarding the facts of the case. No one had a clue as to what charges the prosecution had filed. The victims’ families and witnesses only knew through hearsay that the trial was about to take place and rushed to the court, but were allowed in only as spectators. Worse, the accused, Zhang Guiquan and his sons, sat in the courtroom visibly at ease, whispering to each other. The victims’ families were distraught. Again, during the sentencing phase, the victims’ families were not formally notified. When they rushed over after hearing of the news, they learned that the main culprits and directors of the killing, Zhang Guiquan and son number one, Zhang Jiazhi, who had killed Zhang Guiyue, had been given the death sentence. Son number six, Zhang Chaowei, and son number five, Zhang Yuliang, who had killed the village representatives Zhang Guiyu and Zhang Hongchuan, were both given life sentences. Justice had not been done; obviously, the sentences were meant to make

one of the sons pay for the crimes of all the others.

The victims’ families demanded to see a copy of the sentencing document, but the courts would not release it to them. The victims’ families delegated their lawyers to ask for a copy of the

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sentence, but the court stood by its decision and stoutly refused, spouting a lot of legalese.

Zhang Jiayu, a graduate of the county high school, had the most schooling among the peasants of Zhang Village. He looked in the official copy of the civil code and discovered that paragraph 128 stipulated in black and white that “in the event that the victim or the legal representative of the victim is not satisfied with the sentence of the local court, they have the right, within five days of being informed of the sentence, to appeal to the People’s Procurator to dispute the sentence.” Thus, it was clear that according to state law, the Bengbu Intermediate Court had no right to refuse to show a copy of the sentence to the victims and their legal representatives. They had denied the victims and their representatives their legal right, and this could not be explained away as an oversight.

The victims’ families now went to the High Court of Anhui Province.

The Anhui court finally directed that they be given a copy— not of the sentence handed down by the Bengbu Intermediate Court but of the prosecution charges, filed as Bengbu civil case

1. When the victims’ families laid eyes on the charges, they had the shock of their lives. There was no mention at all that Zhang Guiyu and his fellow victims had been village representatives charged with auditing the village books, no mention that they were trying to discharge their civic duties as entrusted to them by the eighty-seven households of Zhang Village, and no mention that Zhang Guiquan, the accused, had deliberately taken deadly revenge on the victims for checking on the village finances, including his own financial irregularities. The case summary was silent on the true background of the tragedy, which was the fact that the villagers were overburdened beyond endurance and demanded to check the village finances, where-upon the cadres had murdered in order to avoid the audit and cover their tracks. There was no mention that the instigator of
   

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   the so-called fight was Zhang Jie, son of the village accountant, and that Zhang Guiquan’s son number seven had exacerbated the situation by swearing at Zhang Guiyu for taking part in the auditing. In other words, the core events of the tragedy were covered up. At the same time, the charges did make mention of the words of protest made by Wei Surong, the wife of the first victim, Zhang Guiyu, when the Zhang father and sons rudely invaded her home. But Wei’s remark was framed as the source of the violence and the tragedy, as the spark that set off a bout of mutual recriminations. Furthermore, the formal charges did not explain the presence of the two sons of Zhang Guiquan in Wei Surong’s house. Since they had nothing to do with the auditing, what were they doing in the company of their father, and what account, if any, did they have to settle with the victim Zhang Guiyu? The charges were silent on the actual subject matter of the so-called mutual “recriminations”—namely, the need to audit the village finances.
   

   According to the prosecution’s document, Zhang Guiyu and his wife Wei Surong were the first to take up weapons in the confrontation, and Zhang Guiyu and the other victim, Zhang Hongchuan, were the first to attack. As for Zhang Guiquan’s son number one, who had killed without batting an eyelash, he was described as having picked up his knife only when he saw Zhang Guiyu and Zhang Hongchuan “on the point of” attacking his own father; such imprecise language was used throughout the case report to muddy the waters and create confusion as to what really had happened. The case file notes that later on, when this same son number one saw Zhang Guiyu straddling the back of his brother son number six, only then did he deal that last blow and finish him off. And this son number six, supposedly held down by Zhang Guiyu, was reported as only being able to join the fight after he was able to get to his feet, stress being laid on the expression “get to his feet.”
   

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   In a word, according to the charges in the Bengbu Intermediate Court case file number 21, it was the village representatives or their families who started the hostilities, who first picked up weapons, and who first attacked. The report implied that these village representatives who had been killed had been asking for it.
   

   The explanation of how Zhang Guiyu’s son, Pine, had been wounded was even more ludicrous. According to the information quoted in the file, Zhang Guiquan’s son number five had snatched a club from the hands of Zhang Guiyu (who by then had fallen heavily to the ground) and dealt a blow to the latter’s son, Pine. The fact was, this one strike had left a wound two and a half inches long and almost three inches deep in Pine’s shoulder, and put Pine in the hospital for a whole month. The magazine
   Democracy and Law
   later printed a photograph of Pine’s wound, belying the wording of the case file. The Bengbu Intermediate Court prosecuted the murder as a case of “inflicting bodily harm, which resulted in death.” This totally changed the nature of this case, which is in essence a case of violent attempted murder. To inflict bodily harm refers to harming someone’s health and well-being, whereas trying to deprive someone of life, as in this case, is plain attempted murder. In fact, the forensic evidence is sufficient to show that the perpetrators aimed for the heart and other vital organs and were out to kill. Zhang Hongchuan died from “a single knife wound in the chest which ruptured the main artery of the heart, leading to massive hemorrhage. Zhang Guimao died of a single knife wound in the left side of the back, which punctured his left lung, leading to massive hemorrhage. Zhang Guiyu died of a single knife wound in the chest, which punctured his heart and lung, leading to massive hemorrhage; his brother Zhang Guiyue died of a single knife wound in the left side of his chest, which punctured the left lung, leading to massive hemorrhage. Zhang
   

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   Guiyu’s son, Pine, was spared his life because he turned his head, and the meat cleaver aimed at his head landed on his shoulder.
   

   If killing four people within a matter of minutes is considered “inflicting bodily harm,” what does it take to constitute “mur-der”?
   

   Everyone who heard Zhang Guiquan bellow, “Kill! Kill! Twelve bastards trying to check my books, kill them all!” had been shocked at his animal-like rage, yet the case file would not, or dared not, include these words in the record.
   

   Although the Bengbu Intermediate Court did not prosecute Zhang Guiquan for murder, ironically, he did not appreciate the favor. When the sentence was read out in court, he actually exploded in anger, and vowed that his sons would stick a knife into the judge when they were released! An instigator and organizer of multiple killings actually dared to bare his teeth in a court of law; one wonders what the prosecutor and his deputy, who had signed their names to the sentence, thought of this performance.
   

   Two thousand years ago, in the era of the Han Dynasty (206
   B
   .
   C
   .–
   A
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   D
   . 220), Huan Kuan wrote in his treatise
   On Salt and Iron
   that a society does not suffer for want of laws, but from want of orders to implement laws. It is fatal, he wrote, to pass laws and not implement them.
   

   We usually refer to the supervisory power of the law as the “fourth power,” after the Party, the government, and the army; the law is an important force to ensure social justice and right-eousness. But even to this day, in many places, what determines the victory or failure of a lawsuit is not the rights and wrongs of the case itself, but rather, the petitioners’ ability to get access to the justice system. The inviolable law and its rightful authority cannot be upheld, and the independence of the legal process
   

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   becomes only words written on paper, if the law cannot be appealed to. In fact there is another, more powerful force operating, creating a distance between our life as it is lived and the letter of the law. To prevent the peasants of Zhang Village from going to Beijing to appeal cases and present petitions to the courts, the Guzhen County railway station employees actually interrogated the peasants closely before they were allowed to buy a ticket. Two peasants from the Guzhen area who wanted to visit with relatives in Beijing and seek medical advice there had to do a lot of explaining; only after proving without a doubt that they were not from Tangnan Township and were not going to make complaints at the capital were they finally allowed to get on the train.
   

   This kind of control was futile, of course. How could all activities in the vastness of China be controlled by a few prohibitions? Eventually, news of the tragedy at Zhang Village did get out, and eventually it attracted the attention of the media.
   

   The first media people who came to do on-the-spot investigations were reporters from the Anhui branch of the Xinhua News Agency. After their investigation, Li Renhu and Ge Renjiang wrote “Get-Rich-Quick Tricks by Cadres of Zhang Village: One Payment, Two Records,” an article on the fraud perpetrated by the village cadres to cover the excessive tax burdens imposed on the peasants. Although the article did not mention the murders committed in the village, the facts presented provided the background for understanding what happened, and was reprinted in the national papers. It began with the reporters’ arrival in Zhang Village for interviews and described how the villagers showed them the trick practiced by the local cadres of recording payments in two different versions, one fig-ure that was minimized for the benefit of inspectors from their
   

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   superiors, and another, higher figure, the true figure, which was what the peasants were forced to pay.
   

   For example, Zhang Jiayu took out the records of his payments for the years 1996 and 1997 in dual versions—on official cards and on plain paper. For the year 1996, the official card recorded that the previous year, Zhang Jiayu’s family of five with two working adults under contract for 12.65
   mu
   (about 19 acres) of arable land had paid 6.1 percent of their income in taxes, but they had actually paid 19.8 percent of their income in taxes and other payments, 13.7 percentage points more than the official record. For the year 1997, the official percentage of his income paid in taxes was 7 percent, but the real percentage was 22.7, making a gap of 15.7 percentage points between the true and the false record of payments.