Will the Boat Sink the Water?: The Life of China's Peasants (36 page)

“This is one of the effects of falsifying figures,” Wu told us, “report false profits from enterprises, report nonexistent township income, and you end up having to pay taxes. In the past there was the saying ‘There is no tax on bragging.’ Wrong, there is a tax on bragging. You brag about your gains and inflate the

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figures, you pay taxes on them. After paying taxes, you are broke, you can’t even pay staff salaries. Then you take out a loan.”

“Another reason for the deficit” Wu continued, “is illegiti-mate spending, the unspecified ‘other expenses’ on the books. One of the abuses hidden under the item ‘other’ is eating and drinking at public expense. It just cannot be stopped, no matter how many rules and interdictions are handed down. Mao Zedong said, ‘The revolution is not a dinner party.’ Now this has been transformed into ‘The revolution
is
a dinner party.’ Even the often-quoted lines from one of Mao’s poems—‘The Red Army fears not the long march, mountains and rivers they will take in stride . . . ’—has been changed to a popular saying: ‘The official fears not a drinking match, ten thousand cups he will down with pride.’”

It occurred to us that the Chinese, proverbially known as a brave people who fear nothing, have now validated this claim: they have the courage to eat anything that creeps, flies, swims— anything, that is, except human flesh. Officials eating at public expense have tired of the usual delicacies of chicken, duck, fish and pork; they are familiar with turtles and have tasted wildlife in all its forms. They have passed the “test of alcohol” as their predecessors passed through and survived the “crucible of revolution.” It is impossible to tell how much public money they have spent on dining, money wrung from the blood and sweat of hard-working peasants. According to figures released by the National Statistics Bureau, the yearly spending on dining at public expense in urban and rural areas is somewhere between eight hundred million and one billion yuan, enough to host four Olympic Games, to build two dams like the Three Gorges, or wipe out the disgrace of the widespread phenomenon of children being kept out of school because there are insufficient funds in the education budget.

On June 28, 1998, Su Duoxin, the owner of the Huai River

a vicious circle

Restaurant in Pingyu Township, a suburb of Huainan, fed up with repeated failures to collect a debt owed by local officials, went to court and sued the township for unpaid bills, totaling 414,851.77 yuan. Su had gone repeatedly to the township administration to remind them that payment was long overdue on their stack of bills, but he was always sent away. Desperate, Su filed suit with the Huainan Intermediate Court. The evidence was there, the case was clear-cut, and in January 1999 the Huainan Intermediate Court ruled in favor of the prosecution. As the township was running in the red and could not pay the restaurant bills, which had accumulated, unpaid, over a period of ten years, the court ordered that the township administration give up part of its administration building to its creditor. The township was ordered to cede ten rooms on the ground floor of its administrative building, a total of about 3,600 square feet, to Su Duoxin, the restaurant owner.

The news exploded in the area. It was a huge scandal, and the Huainan Municipal Party Disciplinary Committee issued “internal warnings” to the three main officials responsible: Township Party Secretary Yang Pengshen, Township Chief Dai Jianshan, and Deputy Township Chief Chen Heping. The disciplinary measures were publicly announced. After the scandalous settlement of this latest lawsuit, people expected the leaders to control their appetites and pay their bills.

Barely one year later, however, Wang Guisong, the owner of another restaurant in town, the Royal Song Restaurant, sued the township for a quarter million in unpaid bills. To everyone’s shock, the township chief named in this suit was none other than Chen Heping, the former deputy chief, one of the recipi-ents of an “internal warning” for his previous offense. In July 2000, the Huaiman Intermediate Court again ruled in favor of the restaurant owner and ordered the township to pay up. This time the Pingyu Township appealed the decision to the provincial Anhui High Court, and introduced a curious logic to

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defend themselves: The restaurant was aware that eating and drinking at public expense was very demoralizing for the society as a whole, and was aware that the township government was unable to pay. Yet, with full knowledge of these circumstances, the restaurant still encouraged the township officials to eat and drink, thus demoralizing the social fabric as a whole and ultimately causing loss of public property. According to the township’s logic, it was the restaurant and not they who should be punished. It was rare for a private person to sue the government, but in this case, the Anhui High Court upheld the verdict of the lower court, the Huainan Intermediate Court, and rejected the township’s counteroffensive.

We visited the restaurant owner, Wang Guisong, who had won the suit. He was outside his house, happily setting off fire-crackers to celebrate his victory. But we did not feel happy. We learned that it was not the first time Pingyu Township had had to exchange public property in payment for its eating and drinking debts. Previously, the Pingyu Township officials had negotiated with another restaurant owner and had traded a public building, a two-story house located on a market street, to pay for a debt of more than 100,000 yuan in restaurant bills. And we learned that the township was secretly negotiat-ing with yet another restaurant to exchange property for for-giveness of 100,000 yuan in unpaid bills. We could foresee the only asset of the township—its administrative building—being carved up again and again to pay for cadres’ eating and drinking.

The township leadership had made repeated efforts to establish rules and guidelines to rein in this eating and drinking at public expense. In 1990 they had announced that henceforth, visitors would be entertained at the office cafeteria only and that neither wine nor cigarettes would be provided. In 1994 the township limited the number of people who could be invited to

a vicious circle

join officials over dinner—three official to every guest, the price of the meal to be limited to 10 yuan per head, and each unit must pay for its own dining entertainment. In 1995 they came up with a new plan: they issued meal vouchers, which hosts and guests could use at restaurants. But the dining bills piled up as fast as the rules were made. It was a complete enigma to us. But as we made our way through more townships and counties and saw how prevalent the problem was—a problem that, apparently, no number of rules could halt—we became aware of the deeper causes of the phenomenon.

The fact of the matter is the vast countryside of China has become a gourmand’s paradise. Like a cloud of locusts, officials with their appetites in tow descend on the countryside and are infinitely inventive in coming up with excuses to eat and drink: dinners for inspectors, dinners for conferences, dinners for rural poverty relief, dinners for disaster relief; dine if you can afford it, and dine if you can’t; dine on credit, dine on loan; keep the dinners going from one year’s end to another, from one month’s end to another, from morning till night; enjoy dinners when you take office and dinners when you leave office.

A popular saying about eating and drinking at public expense runs “There’s nothing to be gained by not eating since it’s free; so why not eat?” To eat free has become a sign of status, an index of position. The quality of a dinner may determine whether or not a project is approved or a deal clinched, or whether a promotion is in the works. It has become a part of the political culture.

Wu Zhaoren, the deputy director of the Anhui Agricultural Economic Committee, told us a tragicomical story. A peasant from a village in Changfeng County came to their office to report the local officials’ excessive eating and drinking at pub-lic expense. Wu’s office passed on the message down to the next level and someone from the county administration was sent to

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investigate. To their surprise, the peasant returned not long after and begged them to halt the investigation. Asked why, the peasant said the investigator was now eating and drinking at public expense!

The revolution
is
a dinner party.

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