Will the Boat Sink the Water?: The Life of China's Peasants (2 page)

As our work on the book was drawing to a close, we conducted some studies on readers’ responses and were confident that if the manuscript could just get published and hit bookstores’ shelves, it would not go unnoticed. And this was because of the nature of our book. As the critic He Xilai said in his introduction to the original book, “This is not a book of good news, even less is it a book glossing over bad news. This book places stark reality in front of the reader without mincing words. This book brings out the Triple-Agri problem in all its complexity, its urgency, its gravity, and its latent danger.”

The facts narrated herein are almost without exception gar-nered from the fearsome “forbidden areas” of writing and journalism, including major criminal cases in rural areas, cases that have alarmed the Communist Party Central Committee but about which the public has been kept in the dark. We disclosed for the first time the obstacles and inside stories relating to the government’s push for a new tax and agricultural policy, called “fees for taxes.” And we didn’t mince words about who is involved: all the players—from the secretary-general of the Communist Party Central Committee to the premier of the State Council (the central government) to the various heads of ministries to officials at the provincial, municipal, county, and township levels all the way down to ordinary peasants in the villages—all are named.

This was unprecedented for writers and readers alike, living as we all do on the Chinese mainland, which has yet to get used to freedom of speech.

Despite the obvious interest in our book, being plunged into a media frenzy did not make us happy. Knowing China only too

author s’ preface

well and being familiar with the way things are, we actually felt uneasy. Our apprehensions were justified: barely two months after its publication and in the midst of the publicity blitz,
The Life of China’s Peasants
was banned by order of the Propaganda Department of the Central Committee and disappeared from bookstores. All references to the book disappeared overnight. It was as if it had never been written, as if the publicity surrounding it had been a dream. For us the shock of the overnight coup was overwhelming; it seemed unreal, like living a nightmare.

To this day we cannot understand where the book went wrong; no one has ever explained to us the reason for the ban. Under pressure from all sides, we had no choice but to remain silent. To our surprise, millions of pirated copies made their way into the hands of readers across the length and breadth of the country, and that was a consolation of sorts. What’s more, a number of substantive articles about the book were published. That was another source of encouragement. Dang Guoyin, a noted scholar from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, wrote:

A hundred years hence, our descendants will not understand the age we live in. But we have indeed lived through such times, times when you need courage to tell the truth, times when you run a risk to tell the truth, times when peo-ple yearned to hear the truth and yet it was hard to get to hear the truth because truth was drowned out by the bab-ble of complacent platitudes. It is precisely for this reason that we are grateful to the couple Chen Guidi and Wu Chuntao for writing this book.

In fact, the truth was being stifled while lies flourished. Following the ban, Zhang Xide, an official named in our investigation, showed up and sued us, saying that our account of the Baimiao Township incident described in “The Long Road”

author s’ preface

(chapter 4) was libelous. Following the accusation, a local court took up Zhang Xide’s case and turned it into a political indictment of the book and its authors.

Corruption within the legal system is a long-standing problem; once caught in the system’s coils you are done for. But our readers supported us and that encouraged us. Besides, it was questionable whether the description of the Baimiao Township incident could be construed as libel. Obviously, this supposed libel had nothing to do with the banning of the book. Openness is the best antidote to corruption, we decided, and we assumed that the journalists who had supported us so far would not remain silent and would report on the progress of the suit, which we were sure we would win. At the request of leading members of the Communist Party Committee of Hefei, where we live, who appealed to our sense of patriotism, we promised not to grant any interviews to the foreign press.

But one day we suddenly realized that the media had been muzzled concerning our case. More in sorrow than in anger we asked ourselves, what has happened to the much-vaunted “rule of law”? The media blackout meant that the progress of the lawsuit would not be exposed to the scrutiny of public opinion. Our readers were also denied the right to information about the case. The mainland media were silent. No one stood up for us. With our backs against the wall, we had no choice but to break our promise and began to grant interviews to foreign journalists, so that the world would know the facts. Actually, we were merely exercising our rights within the framework of the Constitution. Besides, we truly felt that an open China should not be a silent China. Lu Xun, the doyen of modern Chinese letters, has said that only the voice of truth could move the people of China and of the world, that only through the genuine voice of the truth could the Chinese people live side by

side with the rest of the world’s people.

author s’ preface

As of October 2005 the uproar over the libel suit has quieted down, and all that is needed is to wait patiently for the verdict of the court. We fought the suit long and hard, and the facts were made public, that is in itself a victory. The court proceedings ended more than a year ago, but we are still waiting for a verdict. We can only speculate as to what is going on beyond the public gaze. During the waiting period, a new Party secretary of Anhui province, Guo Jinlong, denounced us during an interview with a Hong Kong TV station. He publicly criticized the book as a very bad one that twisted facts and brought bad reputation to the people of Anhui. Not long after that, people started throwing rocks at our home. The attack continued for more than twenty days. No one came to investigate, even though we repeatedly asked the local public security for help. Then, Chen Guidi was asked to resign from his job.

Yet at the same time, other things were encouraging. We received the Lettre Ulysses Award for the Art of Reportage; we were named as Leaders at the Forefront of Change in Asia by
BusinessWeek
; and we were given the title of Asia Hero by
Time
magazine in October 2005.

After the book was banned in China, we were embraced wherever we went by all walks of people, especially peasants. The Chinese central government is working on the “Triple-Agri” problems more than ever. That's partly due to our efforts. But whatever awaits us in the days ahead, we will never regret having spoken up for the peasants of China. We have given voice to the voiceless.

Chen Guidi Wu Chuntao
March 2006 Anhui Province

introduction

by john pomfret

current West Coast Correspondent and former Beijing Bureau Chief for the
Washington Post

When I was going to university at the end of the 1970s, we were taught that China’s Communist Revolution was on the whole a good thing for China’s peasants, who comprise the bulk of that country’s population. In classes on Chinese history, anthropol-ogy and economics, we were told that the Communists came to power and redistributed land to many millions of landless farmers, breaking the backs of the parasitic landlord class. The Communists got rid of opium smoking and illiteracy, my professors enthused, and despite millions of executions and the deaths of 30 million to starvation during the Great Leap Forward, the party truly represented the wishes of China’s dispossessed. A revolution is not a dinner party, one of my professors remarked, quoting China’s leader, Mao Zedong. Many of us, newly-minted college kids from elite schools and good families, nodded in agreement.

Will the Boat Sink the Water?
challenges every assumption of the generally accepted Chinese narrative in the United States— a received wisdom that continues for the most part unchanged and unchallenged since the 1970s. Readers of this work, arguably the most important book to have come out of China

in years, cannot help but conclude that China’s revolution from the outset was a disaster for the vast majority of China’s peo-ple. For that reason alone, it should be essential reading for anyone interested in what life was—and is—really like in the People’s Republic of China.

Chen and Wu’s book on China’s peasants was published in China in January 2004 at the end of a short period of relative press and publishing freedom in China. During those years, a series of Chinese historians and social scientists published works that amounted to one of the most significant challenges to the accepted historical narrative in China. Social critics lam-basted China’s moral vacuum—heresy in a country that prides itself on its ancient culture and supposed traditional values. Economists bemoaned a widening gap between rich and poor that easily surpasses that of the United States—again sacrilege in a place still nominally communist. Historians laid siege to the great symbol of China’s revolution—Chairman Mao—showing how his particular brand of cruelty helped fashion China’s peculiarly successful brand of totalitarianism, dissecting his debauchery and detailing his sadism, the famines he caused and the lives he destroyed. Chen and Wu’s book fell neatly into this tradition. And like many of its counterparts, within two months of publication, it was banned. But not before hundreds of thousands of official copies and millions more pirated editions had been sold.

Chen and Wu’s life after the appearance of their bestseller is sadly typical of the fate of many other gutsy Chinese writers. First, one of the characters in their book, an allegedly corrupt apparatchik named Zhang Xide, sued them for defamation. Zhang brought the case in the same county where he had been the county boss. Naturally, given his ties into the party structure there, he won the case; it is currently on appeal. In December 2004, the head of Anhui Province’s Communist Party committee blasted Chen and Wu’s book for “smearing Anhui