Will the Boat Sink the Water?: The Life of China's Peasants (15 page)

Around this time, three reporters from the magazine
Democracy and Law
also went down to Zhang Village, and published their on-the-site report in the seventeenth issue of their journal. The title was blunt—“Villagers’ Representatives Trying to Audit the Village Books Were Brutally Murdered”— and the report was riveting in its graphic description and thunderous in its denunciation. One very curious fact first revealed in this report was that one of the murder weapons, the bloody knife that had been wielded by Zhang Guiquan’s son number six, was still lying in a drawer in the village clin-ic and had been totally overlooked all this while. The reporters took a photo of this piece of evidence and published it along with their report.

With the media’s attention now focused on the crime and numerous articles appearing in the national press, the case of peasants being killed because they wanted to audit the village books could not be covered up any longer. Only then did things take a turn for the better.

Tangnan Township officials took steps to provide for the two orphans of the dead Zhang Hongchuan.

At the Dragon Boat Festival, which fell on the fifth day of the

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fifth month by the lunar calendar, the county government gave one hundred yuan in consolation money to each of the afflicted families.

Moreover, during the harvest following the Dragon Boat Festival, several officials from the Guzhen County administration came down to the village and helped the afflicted families take in the harvest, working through a long morning without complaining of tiredness, nor touching a drop of water nor a grain of the families’ rice. This went some way toward convey-ing to the families the warmth of the Party’s and government’s concern for them.

On August 8, 1998, the High Court of Anhui Province issued the final sentence on the case of Zhang Guiquan and his sons. The sentence and the list of charges differed little from that of the Bengbu Intermediate Court, and the peasants of Zhang Village could not help being disappointed at the legal system.

But from one important point the villagers drew some comfort: in the final paragraph of the indictment it was pointed out that Zhang Guiquan and his sons had no grounds for claiming self-defense, that the offense of Zhang Guiquan and his eldest son, Zhang Jiazhi, sixth son, Zhang Chaowei, and fifth son, Zhang Yuliang, was not merely intent to “inflict bodily harm” but that they had committed acts of violence with intent to kill, and that their claim of lack of intent to kill was without merit and could not be considered. That was some consolation to the villagers of Zhang Village, which had been devastated by the crime.

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the long and the short of the

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Where the Emperor Bade Farewell to his Concubine

Gaixia, the scene of a famous battle more than two thousand years ago, in 202 B.C., lies within today’s Lingbi County, Anhui Province. This is where the Han king Liu Bei and the Shu king Xiang Yu fought to the death for supremacy over control of what would later be known as the Middle Kingdom.* Xiang Yu’s army of a hundred thousand men was surrounded in the town of Gaixia. King Liu, in coordination with his aide Han Xin, amassed an army four hundred thousand strong and encir-cled Xiang Yu’s army so tightly that not a drop of water could seep in, let alone reinforcements. Under siege and starving, Xiang Yu’s hundred thousand troops lost the will to fight when echoes of their native Shu songs wafted over the town walls, deluding them into thinking that these were the sounds of their fellow Shu men who had been taken into captivity. In fact, it was a trick played by the Han king. This was the setting for the tragedy of Xiang Yu’s concubine Yu, who snatched her lord’s sword and killed herself so as not to encumber her lord in his last desperate battle to break the siege and save his men. Her

*The Middle Kingdom (Zhongguo) is an ancient name for China that is still used in modern China.

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act of supreme loyalty is remembered down the ages in history, art, and legend, the best-known example being the classic Beijing opera
The King Bids Farewell to His Concubine.

Since that momentous historical event, whose outcome was

the founding of the Han Dynasty, the years have rolled by, and this patch of poor barren land has lain dormant and forgotten, as if time had stopped. But at noon on a sunny day, October 5, 1997, the silence was broken by the rumbling wheels of modern transportation. A convoy of police cars, sedans, trucks, and even fire engines started out from Lingbi County, enhanced by the forbidding presence of a selection of local Party and government officials—in an outrageous display of sartorial preferences. Police sirens cleared the way as the convoy rumbled onward, raising clouds of dust, while an array of weapons gleamed in the sunlight. Such a show of power, pomp, and circumstance was totally unprecedented in the history of Lingbi County.

People living nearby hastily made way for this armed caval-cade, while frightened eyes peering from behind cottage windows counted the number of vehicles—thirty-two altogether, carrying over two hundred personnel.

From Fengmiao Township the armed convoy made a turn for the southeast and, about ten kilometers later, arrived at Gao Village. The armed police immediately hopped down and sealed all the exits from the village. The Fengmiao Township Party boss, Hou Chaojie, sent for the Gao Village Party boss, Chen Yiwen, and the village chief, Gao Xuewen. With the two Party bosses leading the way, a group of fully armed public security officers descended on the western section of the village like a wolf on the fold. The battle ended as swiftly as it began, and a resounding victory was declared less than fifteen minutes later.

It was the noon break, and the inhabitants of Gao Village were totally unprepared for any kind of conflict. The women were bustling over the cooking while the men had just returned

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from the fields. Many of them had tossed off their jackets and shoes. They were stunned when armed security men material-ized in front of them, and no one thought of reaching for an object to use in self-defense.

The fully armed detachment of officers and their men, suddenly faced with a motley crowd of totally defenseless, barefoot peasants, were themselves taken by surprise—they were unprepared for this somewhat anticlimactic victory. Nevertheless, the spoils of victory were impressive: except for the handful of peo-ple who were still planting seedlings in the rice paddies, or were at the market, or were migrant workers employed in the city, this military action made a clean sweep of all the suspects; not a single one eluded the lawmen’s net.

The population of the western side of Gao village numbered barely a hundred heads; now, fifty-one had been arrested in one fell swoop—or fifty-two if you counted a three-year old toddler who was arrested along with his mother. This so-called “Gao Village incident” sent shock waves through millions of inhabitants of the provinces of Anhui and neighboring Jiangsu.

When the “Gao Village incident” occurred, two magazines in Hong Kong were already publishing reports of widespread rural unrest, disturbances, riots, and even armed uprising on the mainland under such titles as “Peasants’ Uprising Spreads Through Several Provinces” and “Half a Million Peasants in Four Provinces Stand Up for Their Rights.” These particular reports were unfounded, but the problems they touched on were undeniable. Our own investigation showed that the General Office of the Party Central Committee and of the State Council had issued joint directives, warning: “Many of our local Party and government leaders do not know how to han-dle the new situation and new problems cropping up in the rural areas today. On the contrary, they resort to security forces, armed police and militia, thus aggravating the situation.” Although the “Gao Village incident” was labeled a vio—

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lent “antitax uprising” by the local authorities, in truth there was no resistance at all. When villagers heard the screaming sirens and saw the police convoy arrive, they thought that the security forces were doing their job and were coming to arrest Village Chief Gao Xuewen!

The so-called “Gao village incident” was merely the last episode in a story fabricated by Gao Xuewen, the village chief. It is a long story.

To begin at the beginning, Gao Xuewen was universally hated in Gao Village. Ever since worming his way to the position of village chief, the man had been walking on clouds with his nose in the air, seeming to have even forgotten the surname of his own ancestors. No matter how many documents and directives were passed down from the Party Central Committee on relieving the peasants’ burden, the amount of taxes and dues in Gao Village still depended on Gao Xuewen’s word. You had to pay exactly what he ordered, and not a cent less. Opposing Gao was tantamount to opposing the people’s government, even the Party. If you were so unfortunate as to get into his bad books, he had no compunction against cursing and striking you. Not enough to be beaten and abused, the injured party was obliged to apologize before the matter was allowed to end.