Will the Boat Sink the Water?: The Life of China's Peasants (32 page)

Where should they begin? The people of Wangyang Village were adamantly opposed to paying excess taxes and firmly united in their resistance, therefore it was decided that Wangyang Village was exactly where they should start. The villagers were scattered in the fields or working on the threshing

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ground, but they immediately fled back to the village when they got word of the coming invasion. The first thing the tax-enforcement team did was to seal off all the exits of the village. Then they occupied the village proper and the action started in earnest. They pounced on the grain stores of Lu Shuji, carting off 1,600
jin
of grain. Next were the grain stores of two other villagers, Wang Ruxiu and Wang Shuwei; each was robbed of over 400
jin
of grain. Then the tax collectors confiscated 200 yuan of Wang Shiming’s, which the man had saved to buy fertilizer for his corn and cotton. During the process of confiscat-ing grain and snatching cash, the tax collectors also hit and injured two villagers, Song and Cao.

By lucky, or unlucky, coincidence, a Taiwan businessman, Wang Yingqiu, who had been born in Wangyang Village, had sent his representative to make a study of the environment for possible investment in a manufacturing enterprise in his home village. The representative was caught in the middle of the tax-enforcement violence. He tried to take shots of the scene with his camera and got a few knocks himself. When the incident was reported to the Taiwan businessman, one can imagine the result. Thus ended the native son’s hope of making some contribution toward the development of his home village.

Having suffered much at the hands of the invading tax-collecting squadron, Wangyang Village erupted like a volcano. The villagers took up hoes and scythes and spades and rakes. Someone shouted, “Even dogs jump over the wall when provoked. We are men after all!” The crowd roared, “Let’s get them! It’s do or die!” When the village security guards among the invaders saw their fellow villagers running full tilt at them, they turned and made off. Soon it was only a handful of township and village cadres who were holding their ground, the main body of the team having scattered to the winds.

It happened that the Huai River was at high water, and was at least a hundred yards wide. Some of the township cadres,

will the boat sink the water
?

seeing the villagers at their heels in hot pursuit, turned and dived into the river, swimming desperately toward the other shore. Others, being land ducks so to speak, had no recourse but to hide in the soybean fields nearby, or even to duck behind villagers’ outhouses.

The scandalous events at Gao and Wangyang villages, where the villagers’ grain stores had been ransacked and people beaten up, became known far and wide and the neighboring villagers devised ingenious ways of self-defense. Take, for instance, the people of Huangyu Township in neighboring Si County. In one of the bigger villages of the county, the people revived the old tradition of the war years when they would send signals by lighting bonfires on turrets or by trimming a tree in such a way that it serves as a signal post. In one particular village of several hundred households, the villagers devised a secret signaling system of their own: when the tax-enforcement team was seen coming from the west side of the village, the west-end villagers would beat gongs as a warning sign; if the invading team came from the east side, the east-enders would blow on the whistle. The villagers could figure out by the different signals from which end of the village the enemy was approaching. By collective agreement, at the signal each and everyone must stop whatever he is doing, arm himself, and go to the east or west end of the village as it may be and join in the defense. No one was exempt: even women in the middle of cooking must put down the rolling pin, put out the fire, pick up something to use in self-defense, and head out.

The village vet, Gao Chuanmin, was used to being asked to look at poisoned animals. Nine times out of ten, he knew at a glance that it was a case of a cadre’s animal being punished for its master’s transgressions. He called it “cadre disease.”

A common saying among the village folks was: “Line up the cadres and shoot them all; there may be a few innocent among

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the dead. Line up the cadres and shoot every other one; there may be a few guilty among the living.”

When we first heard of a village “anticorruption bureau” and a self-styled “bureau chief,” we were intrigued. There is a state Anticorruption and Antibribery Bureau, but how could there be such a “bureau” in the village? We decided to go and take a look.

This curious anticorruption bureau was in Zhang Dayu Village, within the precincts of Wugou Township, Suixi County. This was a distant county on the northern bank of the Huai River. We took the train and then a car to the county seat of Suixi. It was close to the Chinese New Year and traffic was heavy. From Suixi County there was a bus into the villages. The bus route covered a hundred and twenty
li
, about thirty-eight miles, to reach the township of Wugou. From Wugou Township to the villages we had to walk through a flatland that stretched as far as the eye could see. Rooftops and trees with leafless branches were completely bared before us, dotting the barren landscape.

It was a godforsaken place, where the villagers barely survived with “the heavens above and the Emperor beyond.” With no transportation, and no communication, the area was very backward and economically underdeveloped. But the peasants’ taxes were even higher than in many other places—250 yuan per person. Take Zhangying Village, for example. This village was in fact jointly controlled by a man and his nephew, one being the Party boss and the other the village chief. These two rascals not only imposed fines at will; they monopolized the sale of seeds, fertilizers, pesticides, and other agricultural necessities, selling at higher price and lower quality. People went to the township to complain, but the township just shrugged off

will the boat sink the water
?

the problem. When the village leadership decided that every family must take part in planting 180
mu
of mulberry, the uncle-nephew pair monopolized the supply of mulberry saplings. At over 10 fen each, how many saplings must the villagers purchase to cover one
mu
of land, and how many saplings would they need to complete the required quota of 180
mu
of mulberry trees? None of the villagers wanted to get involved, but the Party boss laid down the rules: you can plant them or you can refuse to plant them, but you must pay your share nevertheless! Later on, the mulberry saplings all died and were only good for firewood, but even so the payment for the saplings was foisted on the villagers. In Shaoying Village, when the harvest was taken in, the villagers wanted to sell their own grain, but the uncle-nephew pair would not allow it: all the grain must be bought and sold through the village—meaning through them. The result was a loss of thousands of yuan for the peasants. The peasants of Zhangying Village had had enough. They went to the township but all they got for their trouble was hems and haws from the leadership. Wugou Township gradually sank into complete chaos. Of the twenty-nine villages within the township, twenty-two flatly refused to pay taxes or make grain contributions. Half of the cadres with-in the precinct had been verbally cursed or even beaten by irate villagers. So pervasive was the animosity that many cadres did not dare to show their faces in public.

It was under these circumstances that Yan Xueli emerged from Zhang Dayu Village of the same township and made a name for himself by setting up an “anticorruption bureau.” Zhang Dayu Village, consisting of around three hundred people, was divided into the rear village and the front village. During the starvation of the sixties, the population of 300 had dwindled to 130 peo-ple with 970
mu
of arable land among them. Now, after forty

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years, the population has grown back to 330 people, with the same amount of land. But with the encroachment of unplanned building, the land has lately shrunk to a mere 870
mu
. There was no enterprise of any sort in the village. Except for a couple of migrant workers in the city, the villagers spent their days scratching a living from the soil. Life was hard, and it was hardest for the peasants of the rear village, where Yan Xueli came from.

Yan Xueli had been a village production-team leader from the land-reform years of the early fifties, and had kept this position for thirty-five years, only stepping down because of his age. People in the village persisted in calling him Team Leader Yan, as they had done for thirty-five years. No one remembered his full name. When we asked around in the village for Yan Xueli, no one knew whom we were talking about, until a little girl suddenly blurted out, “You are asking for Bureau Chief Yan?” During his years as a production-team leader in the village, Yan had never taken advantage of his position to bully the peo-ple or profit personally in any way. On the contrary, he was always ready to lend a helping hand to his fellow villagers and was not afraid to speak his mind to his superiors, so people looked up to him even after he had retired from his post. Yan was disgusted with the current prevalence of corruption in official circles; much less could he tolerate the fleecing of peasants in the form of fines, taxes, and the like. As things were going from bad to worse, he decided to do something about it. “Damn it,” he announced one day, “let’s set up an anticorruption bureau and take a look into the finances of those sons-of—