Will the Boat Sink the Water?: The Life of China's Peasants (33 page)

bitches.”

It turned out that the secretary of the Party Committee of Wugou Township was none other than the maternal uncle of his eldest daughter-in-law. Yan Xueli figured that considering their close relationship, the Party secretary would surely support him in checking the finances of the village cadres, especially as

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relieving the peasants of their tax burdens was the Central Committee’s top concern. Yan decided to go to the township to look up the township Party secretary, taking along with him a group of fellow villagers.

The Wugou Township Party secretary had just dealt with one group of peasants and was not exactly in the mood to entertain a visiting relative with a pack of villagers at his heels.

“Is there something I can do for you?” he asked. The group of peasants behind Yan made him uneasy.

“Of course.” Yan replied, “Why else should I intrude on your highness?”

The Party secretary shot back, “So, you’re here to stir up trouble, like the others?”

Yan didn’t like his tone and retorted, “Do you call this stirring up trouble?”

The Party secretary asked, “So you think Wugou Township is too quiet for your taste? Needs shaking up, is that what you think?”

Yan tried to control his rising anger as he answered, “I am not here to stir up trouble. I am not trying to shake up anything. All we are hoping for is to talk to you about the peasants’ burden.”

The Party secretary felt as though his head would explode if he heard one more word about the peasants’ burden. He demanded, “Out with it, what is it you want?”

All the peasants in Yan’s group started talking about this and that, complaining of the cadres in their own village and excessive taxes.

The Party secretary controlled himself, feeling that he had to maintain the proprieties of official behavior in front of the peasants, though he was quite mad at his relative Yan for bringing in this crowd.

After hearing them out, he waved to the group, “All right, you can go back.”

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Yan was disappointed. “So you don’t support us?” he asked. The Party secretary had to give Yan “face” in front of so many people, so he held his tongue.* But Yan, not knowing when enough is enough, pursued the question. “The village cadres are bullying the people, and bleeding them dry. Don’t

you people at the township bear some responsibility?”

This was more than the Party Secretary could bear. He stood up behind his desk and ordered in a loud voice “Leave this minute!”

Yan Xueli was shocked that his relative would humiliate him in front of so many people. In his anger, he retorted, “You need not put on airs with me, you piddling township secretary. If this is your attitude, it seems that I have no choice but to set up an anticorruption bureau, and make myself bureau chief!”

“Wh-wh-what? Anticorruption bureau?” It was the Party secretary’s turn to be shocked.

“Anticorruption! Antibribery! Anti–excessive taxes!” Yan Xueli stated, then turned on his heels and marched out of the room.

Word got out quickly that Yan Xueli of Zhang Dayu Village was planning to set up an anticorruption bureau, and appoint himself bureau chief. The news reached the ears of the county and city leadership. Suixi County and Huaibei soon learned about the acute situation in Wugou Township—how resistance to taxes was spreading among the villages.

The county and city leadership reviewed the situation and made a decision. It emerged that the current township administration’s term of office was coming to an end and an election for a new administration would be held soon. The municipal leadership designated four capable men from their pool of talent and, hoping to rejuvenate the township leadership, recommended

* Here, in front of a crowd, Yan Xuieli put the Party secretary on the spot and the latter rebuffed his demands. Each caused the other to lose “face.”

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them as candidates for the positions of head and deputy head of the Wugou Township administration.

To the surprise of the municipal leadership, all four of their candidates failed to win. They were foiled by a carefully planned bribery scam.

The township People’s Congress comprised sixty-three delegates, who were to vote in a new township administration. Fifty-eight of these delegates had sold their votes for gifts or cash—in fact, on 145 separate occasions. Among them were the deputy Party secretary of the township Party Committee, the deputy township leader, the secretary of the township Party Disciplinary Committee, the secretary and propaganda head of the township Communist Youth League, and the heads of the township armed forces, the Party and administration General Office, the Education Committee, the township Women’s Federation, the township cooperative, the Birth-Planning Committee, the township bank, the township judiciary, the township finance office, the state tax office, the trade and commerce office, the township granary, the township agricultural economic station, the township clinic, as well as other officials on the township government payroll. Among those who had used cash or gifts of wine and cigarettes to sway the delegates’ votes were the chairman of the township People’s Congress, the deputy township head, a delegate from the municipal People’s Congress, as well as Party bosses and administrative chiefs of the villages under the township jurisdiction.

This was unheard of in the history of the People’s Republic. That so many “people’s” delegates could be bought with cartons of cigarettes or bottles of wine not only was disgusting but also raised questions about the system through which they had become delegates. These delegates didn’t give a hoot as to who was elected to the township leadership, it didn’t make any difference in their lives.

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Among the people who had bought votes to be elected into township positions, the case of a driver at the township security office was the most amazing. He was actually only a temporary worker, but by means of forty-one cartons of cigarettes and 1,600 yuan in cash, he had managed to buy enough votes to get himself elected deputy chief of the township administration!

The election scandal was the last straw, exposing the fester-ing chaos in Wugou Township. The well-meant scheme of Huaibei leaders to replace the township’s leading group with their own trusted candidates in order to deal with the problem was frustrated. When the Party secretary of Huaibei heard of the scandal, he sighed as he said, “It is high time to face the problems in Wugou squarely.” Suixi County was instructed to send out a joint investigation team, and Huaibei city assembled a hundred-member support group, to help the peasants get back on their feet. The Party secretary of Huaibei joined the support group and stayed in the poorest homes, studying the situation and listening to what the peasants had to say.

How Many Official Hats Crushing Down on One Poor Battered Straw Hat?

We talked to a retired cadre of the Shucheng County Irrigation Bureau, Li Shaobai. As a young fellow in Shucheng County, Li had distinguished himself by supporting the Communist side during the civil war and had been honored with the title of “Rear Support Model.”* When the People’s Republic was founded, he was the first democratically chosen leader of his township within the precincts of the county. He still gets excited when harking back to those heady days of the early fifties.

• People who risked their lives to support the Communist Party during the civil war often were rewarded with such honorary titles.
  

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  At the time, there were a hundred things waiting to be taken care of, but just a handful of cadres to share the burden. Shucheng County set up offices for civil affairs, finances, education, and development, with about five people running each office. All the cadres for the county administration and the county Party Committee ate at the workplace; a few tables were enough to accommodate them all. In those times, a township administration would consist of just the head of township, a political director, a secretary, and someone to take care of finances.
  

  With a small staff and a heavy workload, the township affairs ran very smoothly, thanks to a cheerful spirit of cooper-ation. When the size of the townships was enlarged in 1956, the number of officials working at the township level for the Party organization didn’t change; the staff still consisted of the Party secretary and his deputy and the heads of the organization and propaganda departments. As for the other organizations, there were the heads of the Youth League, the Women’s Federation, the military, and the Peasants’ Association, about six or seven people altogether. On the administrative side, there was the township chief and his deputy, with a couple of committees, each with its own secretary and officers for civil affairs, finances, production, defense, security, agriculture, industry, commerce and so on, never more that six or seven people.
  

  In a 1952 order that we came across during our investigations, the Central Committee laid down clear rules limiting the number of nonproduction officials at township level to just three. Later, when the scale of the township was enlarged, the members of newly added committees were mostly volunteers. From the 1950s to the early 1980s, staff salaries and the expense of running the township administration all came out of the county budget. The township was not empowered to create new bureaucracies or hire staff. Later on, starting in 1958,
  

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  townships were by and large replaced with a new entity, the people’s commune, which merged the political and administrative functions into one. The leading personnel consisted of the Party secretary, the head of the commune, some deputy functionaries, and the heads of the military, the Youth League, and the Women’s Federation. Other functions were carried out by individual functionaries such as the agricultural machinery caretaker, the veterinarian, the irrigation caretaker, the promoter of agricultural techniques, the forest caretaker and oth-ers. Agricultural organization was still fairly simple under the people’s communes.
  

  When the reform of the eighties was carried into agricultural areas and people’s communes were disbanded and converted into township administrations, 56,000 people’s communes were transformed into 92,000 townships. Following this organizational change, the collective nature of the people’s communes was rolled back. The expansion of the newly created townships added greatly to the peasants’ burden. This was because by now the township had its own budget. The state allowed the townships to run their own finances. Taxes and management fees paid by enterprises, donations and funds for township projects, as well as other income from various fines and payments were now controlled by the township. This opened the door to unlimited growth of the bureaucracy and proliferation of fines, payments, and extortion under various pretexts. The trend of letting lower levels of government run their own budget grew, the guiding principle being “share power and concede interests.” Gradually administrative barri-ers were developing between various levels of government and between different departments as government became more bureaucratized and spheres of interest developed. Those working in the proliferating government departments lost sight of the common good. Increasingly, they pursued their own inter—
  

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  ests by means of the power they held within their domain. Soon those cadres’ interests were in competition with those of the people they were supposed to serve. By 1990, various ministries of the State Council alone had issued documents authorizing taxation on 149 items of agricultural products. Following in their footsteps, the lower levels of government, similarly pro-pelled by greed, jumped on the bandwagon by increasing the number of items on which taxes and charges could be levied, expanding the scope of operations, and raising the charges for services. In addition to collecting their own taxes, the county and township would also piggy-back on the ministries’ taxes and extract something for themselves on the side—called “hitching a free ride.” What should have been services by the state were gradually turned over to newly created units in order to collect fees and charges.
  

  What was the prime cause of the erosion in the gains of the peasants through the agricultural reform? None other than the monstrous growth of the bureaucracy and the metastasizing number of officials. The eighties were the period when the bureaucracy experienced the fastest growth, especially at the county and township levels, the locus of the greatest ballooning in the numbers of offices and staff.
  

  In 1979 there were 2,279,000 people on the government payroll; by 1989 that figure had grown to 5,430,000. During this period, the number of government employees at the county and township levels increased by a factor of ten. By 1997, the figure stood at over 8 million. The increase in the number of people on the government payroll was almost the same as the number of layoffs from state enterprises: 1,250,000. The word from the top was “Streamline—growth—more streamlining—more growth,” but the creation of new offices in the lower levels of the bureaucracy more than kept pace with any “streamlining” that took place at the top.
  

  We conducted an overview of the administrative profiles of
  

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  over two hundred countries around the world, and from our study we learned that there were eight small countries that only have one administrative level, or layer. There were twenty-five countries with two levels of government: central and local. There were sixty-seven countries, including the United States of America, Japan, Canada, and Australia, with three layers of government. But our country has set up five layers of government: central (national), provincial, municipal, county, township. (In addition, a prefecture has the same status as a municipality, but manages a number of counties instead of a city. Below the township level are the villages, which are semi-offi- cial administrative units.) This plethora of administrative levels is really unique to China.
  

  Why should something that can be done by one person or one office be spread among so many? There are many departments that do nothing for the peasants, yet they all live off the peasants. The county and townships have set up increasingly complex bureaucracies to match their counterparts at the upper levels—staffing offices dealing with industry, agriculture, commerce, education, military, financial, and youth and women’s affairs. Some people say the only institution missing at county and township levels is a ministry of foreign affairs!* It goes without saying that the more temples, the more Buddhas. At township level, there were usually two to three hundred cadres, and in some bigger townships there may be a thousand. These people do not produce one cent of value or profit, but they must be paid their salaries and their bonuses, they must eat well and live well. In addition, office buildings must be put up, dorms must be provided, as well as sedans and telephones and cell phones. This would be unimaginable in the past, when a county would be equipped with a jeep or two. The famous
  

• A list of the offices and bureaus that function under the auspices of the central government can be found at
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ State_Council_of_the_People’s_Republic_of_China.