Will the Boat Sink the Water?: The Life of China's Peasants (18 page)

One of the cadres demanded angrily, “What do you mean?” One villager replied, “If you leave without a trace, where are we going to look for you to get justice in this case?” To everybody’s surprise, one of the township leaders lost his temper. Raising his right hand as if signaling a final charge in a life-and- death struggle, he said in the tone of a tragic hero, “No one leave!” The villagers were not at all impressed. They thought to

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themselves: How easily provoked these people are. They travel to and fro in cars, spend their days sitting at headquarters looking at reports, and cannot cope with a whiff of real life.

None of the other cadres raised any objection to the command to stay, though no one had a clue as to why they were staying, and how and where they were going to spend the night. They walked in the direction of the house of Mrs. Gao Xuehua, the head of the village women’s committee; her house was just a few steps away from where their vans were parked.

As if it were the most natural thing in the world, Mrs. Gao, seeing the group approach, put out tables and chairs, made tea, and laid cards on the table. While some of the men sat down and played cards, Mrs. Gao busied herself in the kitchen. Very soon it was like a party, with the men sipping tea, cracking melon seeds, and slapping cards on the table. Others dozed, or were just bored. Mrs. Gao soon produced a batch of crispy pancakes to go with fresh bean sprout soup. Someone managed to produce a carton of instant noodles, and the makeshift supper was complete.

It was common knowledge that eating and drinking were part of the daily official business of these public servants. Eating and drinking had become a branch of profound study at which these people excelled. So it was understandable that they found Mrs. Gao’s pancakes and bean sprout soup to be not quite up to their standard, and very soon the floor was littered with half-eaten pancakes and leftover soup and noodles. During the greater part of the evening, many villagers lingered outside Mrs. Gao’s house, watching the show and remarking on the shameful waste of food. Although they were at the bottom of the social heap, they were free to wag their tongues, and that night the villagers had a good time lashing out at these bloodsuckers. But no one could figure out why these public servants had decided to spend the night there, instead of in the comfort of their own homes.

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Only white-bearded old Gao Zongpeng was uneasy. Tossing and turning in his bed, he could not make sense of the situation, but he knew that something fishy was going on. True, the villagers had urged these cadres to stay, but it was still very strange that the officials had stayed overnight in the village. It occurred to Gao Zongpeng that it was quite possible that these cadres might now claim that they had been kidnapped by the villagers.

The next day, October 5, 1997, dawned with the sun blazing in all its glory, sending its golden rays over the rooftops of the houses in Gao Village. No one except for Gao Zongpeng imagined what a day of disaster it would be for the villagers, a disaster that would cast a long shadow.

No one knew what the cadres were doing that night at Mrs. Gao’s. The next morning, Zhu Xianmin, the political director of Fengmiao Township security, left the house early. The vans were parked nearby, but Zhu chose to return to the township by tractor; he was driven by the son of Village Chief Gao.

None of the villagers was aware that Zhu Xianmin had secretly left the village, and none could have conceived of the extent of the conspiracy. Who would have imagined that Zhu would rush back to Fengmiao to make a false report to the township Party boss, Hou Chaojie, and that Hou would go a step higher, to the Lingbi County Party Committee, and that the Lingbi Party bosses in turn would go the next step higher and make their report to officials of Suxian Prefecture. After the events of the next day, no one was able to unravel this proliferation of reports; their existence and contents remained closely guarded secrets that would ultimately affect the rise and fall of these cadres.

But the string of reports was in fact the last link in the chain

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of events that culminated in the coordinated armed invasion of Gao Village at noon of October 5, 1997.

The White-Bearded Old Man and the Ruddy-Faced Young Man

After the crackdown on the nonexistent “antitax armed uprising” referred to officially by the authorities as the “Gao Village incident,” the old man Gao Zongpeng disappeared. It turned out that he had been taken away by the security forces. After his release, he became a different man, keeping to himself, never uttering a word. Some said he was ill, others said he was nurs-ing his anger and had vowed to bring to justice all the cadres involved in the incident. He disappeared from the village to live the life of a tramp, foraging among dumps; it was rumored that he was scraping together every cent he could muster for a trip to Beijing.

When Gao Zongpeng reappeared in Gao Village, he had already made a trip to Beijing. He said that he had made his way to the Petitions and Appeals Office of the State Council, where he accused the county and township cadres of distorting the facts regarding the Gao Village incident. The trip to Beijing was an eye-opener for Gao Zongpeng. It turned out that he was not the only one who was making complaints about cadres’ corruption and the excessive burden on the peasants. From Lingbi County alone many had tried to make the trip to Beijing, but such a journey was a hazardous undertaking indeed. A villager from nearby Huigou County had only gone as far as the next township before word of his plans got out, and he was stopped and taken off the train. The county court could hardly convict him of any crime, so he was sent off to three years’ reform through labor. But then there was the woman Yin

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Guimei, also of Lingbi County, who had single-handedly made her way to Beijing to seek justice.

Gao Zongpeng was heartened by such comrades. Gao and the woman Yin were taken in hand by the representatives from Lingbi County, who had been summoned to Beijing to deal with their complaints. While in Beijing, those county representatives were all smiles and promises, but once outside the precincts of Beijing and within the jurisdiction of Lingbi County, these creatures changed their tune. Gao and the woman Yin were immediately incarcerated for fifteen days.

Gao Zongpeng would not give up, and vowed to go to Beijing again. And again, pretty much the same thing happened. When he returned from the capital after this second setback, he was the ghost of his old self, his health completely wrecked by the two arduous trips. He feared that he would never be able to make it back to Beijing to let the leaders know the facts of the Gao Village incident. He spent his days in bed, gazing blankly at the ceiling, shaking his head despondently and silently brooding.

One day, unexpectedly, the door to the old man’s house was pushed open and in walked a tall young fellow with a ruddy face. It was Zhang Jidong, widely known in the area as a fearless man who always spoke up for the underdog. He was also one of the best-educated among the peasants. Zhang had been accepted into the veterinary department of the Fengyang County campus of Anhui Medical School, but soon his studies were interrupted by the Cultural Revolution and the school itself melted away during the chaos. Zhang received a certificate as a graduate of a “junior professional school” and was sent back to the commune where he came from. First he worked as a veterinarian in Fengmiao Township, but later he started working for a food chain. The business was badly managed and

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the workers were not paid. Finally, in 1988, Zhang gave up try-ing to find work and went back to being a peasant. He settled in Dongliu Village, in Lingbi County.

Zhang Jidong soon became known as an expert in making appeals and petitions to the top leadership. He had a way with words. As a student Zhang had written short stories and essays and had even put together a play. Now back in his home county, he was again one of the activists among the peasant writers. A couple of years before, he had written a hundred-thousand- word report based on his investigation of the conditions in his own Dongliu Village regarding the excessive burdens on the peasants and the hostility between peasants and cadres. He mailed the report to the Standing Committee of the People’s Consultative Conference in Beijing, and was most pleasantly surprised when his report was published in one of the committee’s bulletins. But he was chagrined that his report accomplished nothing and things were going from bad to worse.

For instance, just recently Zhang Jidong with his own eyes had seen Wang Heping, an officer of the township public affairs office, running down the street on market day with a gun in hand, in hot pursuit of a peasant who had refused to pay the excessive per capita tax. When Zhang later took the officer to task for his outrageous behavior, Wang retorted, “I can arrest anybody; I don’t need a warrant. I am a graduate of law school.”

Zhang said, “No one is above the law.”

Wang sneered at this: “Do you really believe that crap you see on TV and read in the newspapers about the rule of law? Don’t be daft. Maybe in America a local official can indict the president—but that is America, not China. Let me tell you, this is China, under the rule of man, and I rule over you.” Zhang Jidong was shocked that men with such convictions were appointed officials.