Will the Boat Sink the Water?: The Life of China's Peasants (31 page)

• The best example of finding excuses to impose new taxes would be the tax on cooking. Since the government’s promul-gation of the national “Environmental Protection Law,” officials in some areas have invented the “hazardous waste disposal tax,” slapped on peasant households on account of the family cooking.
  

  And finally, there is a tax to ensure that all taxes are promptly paid, and that is the “attitude tax.” If you dare to challenge or resist the tax collector who comes knocking at your door, you are capped with a “bad attitude” label, and that entails an extra tax.
  

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  The central government and its various institutions profit by prying taxes out of the peasants. The directives, orders, and regulations from the State Council are but pieces of paper handed down the various levels of government and read out—but that is all that happens: they are papers to be read. No matter how these orders are devised, there are always ways to work around them. Take, for instance, the government’s policy on birth control. Once left in the hands of village cadres, the same sound policy could be downright barbarous in practice. One of the “precepts” that local cadres are guided by is: “Do not pluck from the water; do not snatch the bottle; do not cut down the rope.” This murky rule means that it was more important for these village cadres to enforce the one-child policy than to save the lives of people who resisted the policy by threatening suicide by drowning, taking poison, or hanging themselves. In reality, these cadres discovered that the authority invested in them to implement the one-child policy turned into a veritable gold mine. It was discovered that in a single village in Suixi County, a birth-control inspection team had imposed more than three million yuan in fines during one month of “inspections.” The team had replaced the enforcement of the one-child policy and the various “precepts” related to it with fines, thus opening the door to unlimited births so long as the families could pay the fines. As a result, unplanned births came to one hundred thousand for that county alone. (The vice chairman of the Anhui Provincial People’s Congress gave us this information from the 1990s.)
  

  We also came across a bizarre court case in Lixin County. Three cadres from Sunmiao Township—Yuan Zhidong, Li Peng, and Lin Ming—had run a clandestine “population education center” from December 1998 until their scam was
  

  a vicious circle
  

  

  uncovered in the summer of 1999. During this six-month peri-od, equipped with vans and with hired thugs to do the dirty work, these three cadres had arrested and detained over two hundred people from twenty-two villages in the township, charged them with violating the one-child policy or obstruc-tion of official business, or with no excuse at all, and put their victims under illegal detention. The unfortunate villagers were held in three rooms at a secret location; the windows were sealed and there was no lighting. People were forced to stay in the dark—eating, sleeping, relieving themselves within that same unbearably filthy, stinky area—not knowing whether it was day or night. Three older women, Mrs. Diao, Mrs. Wang, and Mrs. Xiao, were taken on the pretext that their daughters-in-law had missed the mandatory periodic check for pregnancy. A younger woman, Li Ying, had had complications during labor. She was rushed from the township to the county hospital for an operation, and was arrested for not giving birth at the “designated facility.” Mrs. Qiu was arrested for getting pregnant right after the wedding instead of waiting for her turn according to the quota system,* while another young woman, Mrs. Luo, was taking care of her aunt’s children and was arrested by mistake. The young Mrs. Zhou had gone to the township clinic for an abortion and was taken away by the three thugs for three days without an explanation. Most outrageous was the case of a young woman, Ma Yin, who had conceived without prior permission; while in detention she went into labor and had to give birth under appalling circumstances. When her father and younger sister rushed to the place of detention to help her, they were held hostage before she could be released with her newborn baby.
  

• Quotas for births were distributed according to a central plan, and couples had to wait for permission before starting to try for a baby. These quo-tas are no longer enforced.
  

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All these illegal proceedings were undertaken with one end in mind: to extort money.

Ru Zipei of Shuangmiao Village had been working in the city for many years and was suspected of having made a small fortune. He became a main target and was one of the first to be detained; after eighteen grueling days in the dark room, he coughed up 8,000 yuan and was promptly released. A trio of young men all surnamed Zhou, who had also worked as migrants in the city, were taken together on the same day in early January. After five days in detention, the three jointly paid 10,000 yuan in cash and were set free. But an older man, Ma Yuerong, of Ruzhai Village had just had his home destroyed by fire and was unable to produce any cash. He was detained for one hundred and seventy days, and when he was finally released, he had started going deaf. Lixin County was designated a poor county by the state, and many villagers’ lives were destroyed by the crushing fines. Some had to take loans, some had to sell their houses or whatever they owned and were left with nothing to live on.

The villagers were very disappointed at how lightly the three villains got off. Apart from running the illegal “population education center,” these three rascals had given false witness, embezzled public funds, helped their superiors embezzle public funds, and committed many other offenses against the law. But the three got only light sentences of one year to three years, with probation. Their vile offenses had been committed right under the noses of the township leadership over a long period of time and had provoked a major public outcry when exposed, yet not a single local official took any responsibility for the dis-graceful affair. People were very disillusioned.

a vicious circle

The Village Anticorruption Bureau

Since they had no channel to air their grievances and often suffered retaliation if they did speak out, the long-suffering peasants sometimes resorted to other means of protest, occasionally showing great ingenuity.

This happened one day in Dongliu Village, Fengmiao Township, Lingbi County. The village Party boss, Shi Hua, took it into his head to collect some taxes. To ensure compliance, Shi got an official from the township administration to lend a hand, and also brought a bunch of thugs to do the dirty work.

Traveling by tractor, the group first went to Gao Village.

When Gao Chuanming couldn’t come up with the cash, the gang just followed their usual procedure: ransack the family grain stores.

After dealing with Gao Chuanming’s grain stores, the gang headed for the next target, but by then the whole village was alerted and came to the rescue of the intended victim. The two sides clashed and the villagers pushed the offending tractor into a pond nearby. The tractor’s owner begged the villagers to spare his tractor—it had only been lent for the occasion, he explained, trying to distance himself from the tax-collecting gang. So the tractor was spared.

Seeing that the villagers were up in arms, the tax collectors decided to retreat. In their haste they stumbled into the home of Zhang Jidong. The pursuing group of villagers pursued them into Zhang’s house, demanding an explanation. “Do you call yourself Communists?” “Do you have a conscience?” “How are we to live if this goes on?” Faced with the crowd, the tax collectors apologized right and left, saying that they were act-ing on orders. However, a few words of apology were not enough for the villagers, and the situation became tense. Then, one of the bullies backed down, promising that they would let

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their superiors at the township know the feelings of the people, and gradually the turmoil subsided.

Zhang Jidong, at one time an activist for villagers’ rights, did not trust any promise made by this crowd. He knew them all too well. Having been humiliated, they were certain to seek retaliation later on. If not for the strong stand taken by the villagers, his own grain stores would have been ransacked that day. He felt sure that the villagers would have to pay dearly for their clash with the tax-collecting group. He gritted his teeth and took out a hundred-yuan note from his pocket, and stuffed it into the hand of the leader saying, “This is pitiful, I am so embarrassed. Just a trifle to get a few packs of cigarettes to calm down your men. Right now life is getting harder and harder and the villagers feel a lot of pent-up resentment. Hope you don’t take it personally . . . ”

Things turned out exactly as Zhang Jidong had feared. Not long afterward, the township military turned out in full force, led by the captain, Liu Huanchang. He put together a three-hundred-strong tax-enforcement team made up of stalwarts picked from ten villages within the township. At the head of the group were the uniformed township security personnel sporting police batons, with handcuffs jangling at their sides. They were followed by security guards from the various villages, decked out in camouflage. They proceeded to the villages as if they were penetrating enemy territory, faces set in stony determination, like some bad imitation of a squadron of commandos. Following on the heels of this formidable armed advance was an array of village chiefs riding on two tractors and seventeen motorized tricycles.