Will the Boat Sink the Water?: The Life of China's Peasants (37 page)

the search for a way out

The Numbers Game

Most Chinese assume that all officials manipulate figures, to the detriment of ordinary people and the advancement of their own careers. But there are some honest officials, who stick to facts and figures. We met Huang Tongwen, who was one such man.

Huang was born and bred in Huangyu, a poverty-stricken village in Huanggong Township, Changfeng County, where his ancestors had lived and died, generation after generation. Changfeng County is situated on the border where four different cities and prefectures converge, and is a godforsaken corner neglected by them all. It is situated on a stretch of highland referred to as “the tip of the Yangtze and Huai rivers.” The soil is poor, and water is scarce, though Mother Nature visits yearly with floods and natural disasters. The area was designated a county in 1965, but the administrative apparatus for running a county had not yet been properly set up before the Cultural Revolution swept everything before it. Changfeng, one might say, was defective at birth and malnourished from then on. Despite its auspicious name—Changfeng means “long-lasting bounty”—that bounty had always eluded it.

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Huang Tongwen’s hometown was a new village that had been moved to its current site following the flood of 1954. In the deprived county of Changfeng, Huangyu was one of the poorest villages. The abject poverty of Huang Tongwen’s home village had been branded on his earliest memories. He graduated from high school in 1972 and enrolled in Anhui Teacher’s College. When he departed from his village to attend college, he vowed to himself that he would come back after graduation and try to do something for his native village.

In 1988, Changfeng was afflicted by an unprecedented drought, and the peasants were stricken with despair as they watched their crops wither and die. By then, Huang Tongwen was Party secretary for the county. He issued orders that all cadres must go into the countryside to assess damages, and he added the injunction not to delay, not to deny, and not to minimize damages caused by the drought. He himself also visited numerous villages and gave directions on-site, trying to control the damage as much as possible.

A senior official from the provincial leadership, flanked by Party and government heads from the provincial capital, was visiting various areas of Anhui Province. When he arrived in Changfeng, one of the counties hardest hit by the drought, he looked around and then had Huang deliver his report. Huang stated without preliminaries: “We cannot fulfill the grain sale quota for this year.”

Huang’s words were said coolly and calmly, but also very decisively. People in the room could not believe their ears. The concept embedded in the slogan “Man will conquer Nature” has become one of the nation’s fundamental precepts. It has become customary for people to hear the resounding declara-tion “A bountiful harvest will follow a natural disaster.” Besides, the central government had already sent down directives stipulating that the county must meet the government’s

the search for a way out

grain-sale quota (the amount of grain the peasants must sell to the state at a low price fixed by the government). Exemptions would only be allowed under extreme circumstances. A drought like the one currently ravaging Changfeng was not considered “extreme” and would not qualify the county for an exemption.

Huang’s reply seemed to take the inspector by surprise. He looked the young man up and down, not hiding his displeasure. Huang was always disciplined in carrying out the orders of his superiors. He was a bright young man who knew exactly what went on in official circles: a year of natural disasters was usually transformed into a chance for “achievement” and promotion. His previous position had been a desk job with the municipal government; when he was appointed to the position of county Party secretary, he had been promoted to department level on the government official scale—the youngest official in the whole province at that level. If he was to continue to further his career, he needed to come up with achievements that would be seen as such by his superiors. But he was also a man with a conscience, an independent mind, and a sense of responsibility. He saw that Changfeng was afflicted with a disastrous drought unprecedented in the region, and that hundreds of thousands of peasants were suffering terrible losses. He felt he had no reason and no right to minimize the extent of the damage. He felt he

must tell the truth.

He reiterated to the visiting official: “I must make it clear that we can’t fulfill the quota. Of course I could do it. All I need to do is hold a meeting and enforce the quota of grain sales. But that would be too hard on the peasants. Come next spring they would not be able to start the planting.”*

Huang said it matter-of-factly. He had grown up in the coun-

*Implied here is that he could force the peasants to sell their seed grain.

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tryside, he knew exactly how the peasants suffered when officials fixed the numbers for their own ends and made up false reports.

After the provincial leader left in a huff, people said Huang had been a fool. The fact was, vast swaths of Anhui Province had been struck with natural disasters, but Huang was the only cadre to say that his county of Changfeng could not fulfill the grain-sale quota. It was standard procedure for officials to come up with attractive figures; good figures promoted officials and boosted their prospects. Many cadres looking for promotion couldn’t wait for such a disaster to come their way so that they could be seen to overcome it, but Huang had thrown away the opportunity that had landed on his doorstep. Reports from other affected areas had all more or less minimized the damage, while here was Huang exhorting the men working under him to report its full extent. Not only that, but he dispatched his men to pester the top officials for relief, asking them to provide grain and cash, and then made sure that these reached the hands of the suffering peasants. In a word, he did everything he could to help the peasants survive the drought.

His explanation for his actions was that he was “just a country boy.” He said, “Now that I am Party secretary for my own county, all I want for myself is to do something to help the peasants in my area.” He studied the situation and divided the drought area into three categories: the unaffected area, where he rallied the peasants to sell their grain to the state; the lightly affected areas, where he rallied the peasants to do their best toward fulfilling the state’s quota of grain sales; and, finally, the worst-affected areas, where he absolutely forbade the local cadres from squeezing the peasants and making them sell more than they could spare.

Wang Jiapei, head of the Relief Office of the provincial Civil Affairs Bureau, was a specialist in the relief of agricultural

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areas, and he understood all the tricks of the trade. In most cases, official reports about natural disasters would either hide or minimize the extent of the damage, with a lot of baloney thrown in about how the disaster had been fought and averted, supported with a lot of made-up figures. Later, however—once the positive publicity blitz was over—these same officials would come flocking back with inflated figures of damage to get what they could in grain and money. This had evolved into a routine: first grab the honor of overcoming the disaster, then grab relief “goods” in grain and money. The combination was a sure bet for promotion. There was even a saying, “No lies, nothing accomplished.”

But now Wang Jiapei of the Relief Office discovered that the reports coming from Changfeng County were different. They reported the true state of the drought from the very beginning, and to judge by figures coming up, the disaster was unprecedented. He had never seen such a thing—an unvarnished report of a natural disaster submitted by local cadres—and it puzzled him.

In order to satisfy his curiosity, Wang Jiapei went down to the villages to see things for himself. He visited the worst-afflicted villages and saw that the reports were indeed well founded. But he also saw that because of the division into categories, the worst-afflicted villages were exempt from the mandatory sale of grain. Thus, people could see the light at the end of the tunnel, and were heartened to fight the consequences of the drought. Wang Jiapei was impressed and decided to look up the Party secretary who had had the integrity to face the truth and deal with it in an honest down-to-earth way.

“You’re great!” Wang exclaimed the minute he met Huang. Indeed, just as everybody else was boasting of “a bountiful harvest after a natural disaster,” it took courage to go in the opposite direction and conduct a self-invented program of “one county, three systems.”

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“Aren’t you afraid of getting yourself into trouble?” Wang asked.

Huang Tongwen replied calmly, “I never concern myself with the irrelevant. My ancestors were peasants over untold generations. Our relatives from both sides of the family are peasants and they all come from dirt-poor regions. I know how hard it is to scratch a living from the soil. If we force the peasants to sell grain that they need, how are they going to live? How are they going to keep working the soil?” Obviously, Huang took his job very seriously; his main concern was the livelihood of the peasants.