Will the Boat Sink the Water?: The Life of China's Peasants (8 page)

thoroughness, they relayed Secretary-General Chen’s query to their branch office in Anhui. When the writer of the original report, Kong, saw the query regarding the discrepancy between the two stories, he of course stood by his own version. To clarify the problem once and for all, the Anhui branch office of Xinhua requested that the Party and government dispatch an investigation team down to the village to clear up the problem on-site.

A joint investigation team was quickly formed, with members from the Disciplinary Committee of the Party Central Committee, the Legal Bureau of the State Council, the State Planning Commission, the Ministry of Agriculture, and the Supreme People’s Procuratorate.* They did not involve the provincial or local authorities, but left Beijing and headed straight for Luying Village. The local governments at various levels were in total shock when they realized what was happening right under their noses.

The investigation team first offered condolences to Ding Zuoming’s family and then started meeting with the villagers. The investigation did not limit itself to Luying, but took in two neighboring villages as well. Local cadres were not invited to participate in the interviews, and the peasants the team interviewed were put under protection. News of the investigation spread, and peasants from more distant villages came over to talk to the investigation team. In no time at all, the news spread that a living “Judge Bao”** in plain clothes has arrived from the capital and was in their midst.

*The people’s procuratorates are state organs for legal supervision. The Supreme People’s Procuratorate is the highest procuratorial organ. It reports to and is supervised by the National People’s Congress and its Standing Committee. For further information, see
http://english.people.com.cn/data/ organs/procuratorate.html, accessed November 26, 2005.

**Judge Bao was a judge of the Song Dynasty (960–1279) whose name became a byword for legal integrity.

the martyr

The Tears of the Joint Investigation Team Members

Seven years later, on the afternoon of October 30, 2000, in an office in the Anhui provincial government building in Hefei, we met with Wu Zhaoren, who had been deputy head of the provincial Agricultural Economic Committee for seventeen years. Now retired, he was a consultant to the provincial government of Anhui and chairman of the Agricultural Economics Association. He started talking about the events surrounding the activities of the joint investigation team. It was as if everything had happened the day before. He had accompanied the joint investigation team back to Beijing by accident, he explained, because he himself was on a business trip to Beijing. But he did not hide the fact that his bosses at the Anhui provincial government were very curious to know what the investigation team had found out in Luying Village and what views they had formed. Wu said that even today he could remember the names of two members of the team who were from the Ministry of Agriculture: Li Xiangang, head of the Department for Supervising the Peasants’ Burdens, which was an administrative unit of the Bureau for the Supervision and Direction of the Agricultural Economy, and his deputy, Huang Wei. Huang Wei, Wu remarked, was a very capable female comrade, and Li Xiangang had once been secretary to the deputy minister, Jiang Chunyun. The fact that Li and his deputy, Huang, were both included in the investigation team shows how seriously the Central Committee took the case. The head of the team was Zeng Xiaodong, head of the Central Committee’s Supervisory Committee for Law Enforcement.

Wu told us that Zeng Xiaodong, in describing to him the condition of the peasants of Lixin County, had said tearfully, shaking his head, “I never dreamed that so many years after Liberation, the peasants are still so poor, their lives so hard, their tax burden so heavy, and they are so badly treated by cadres.”

will the boat sink the water
?

What impressed Wu most from the team members’ account was that the reality was much worse than the situation described in Ding Zuoming’s original report. Apart from the bosses, who had tile-roof houses, all of the peasants lived in hovels. The village was so desperately poor that in some production teams, people survived by selling their blood at regular intervals. Even so, the taxes and fines kept piling on. The investigation team established beyond a doubt that Ding Zuoming was a thorn in the side of the leadership, not because of his violation of the one-child policy, but because he had reported on the excessive burdens imposed on the peasants. And for that, Ding was beaten to death. As he said this, Zeng’s lips trembled and tears rolled down his cheeks.

Other members of the investigation told Wu that the moment they arrived in the village, some of the older peasants fell down on their knees, supplicating for justice. It was heart-wrenching. Just think, if they had not been weighed down by grief unprecedented in their long lives, if not for their extreme feelings of oppression, how could these venerable elders have overcome their sense of humiliation and gone down on both knees in supplication to people who were their grandsons’ age? Weren’t these peasants the kind of people that we usually refer to as having reversed their fate under Communism—
fanshen
—and become the masters of the country?

The case of Ding Zuoming’s beating and death for reporting on the peasants’ excessive burdens had been taken most seriously by the Central Committee. Twenty-six days after his death, on March 19, 1993, the General Office of the Communist Party Central Committee and the General Office of the State Council issued, jointly, “Emergency Directives Regarding Relieving the Peasants’ Burden.” On June 20, the State Council convened a meeting in Beijing on the issue of relieving the peasants’ burden. One month later, on July 22, the two general offices again issued an emergency directive, con—

the martyr

firming regulations regarding agricultural products to be taxed. Altogether, 122 agricultural products were declared exempt, making illegal any forced taxation under one pretext or another. The directive also listed items that should be exempt or should be subject to deferred payment of taxes, or where the regulations should be revised. It was unprecedented in the forty-four- year history of the People’s Republic of China for so many emergency directives regarding the peasants’ burden to be issued in such a short time—not to mention the national conference that was convened on the subject.

Charges were brought, and the Intermediate Court of Fuyang Prefecture, one level above county level, tried the case in open court in Lixin County. On trial were seven men who were directly involved in the death of Ding Zuoming. The club-wielding Wang Jinjun was given the death sentence and was stripped of all political rights. As to the other thugs, Zhao Jinxi was sentenced to life imprisonment, and Ji Hongli got fifteen years. The deputy head of the security office, Peng Zhizhong, who had ordered the “softening up,” was sentenced to twelve years in prison, and Zhu Chuanji, Ding’s former classmate who had suggested the “horse’s walk” torture and then had snuck away, was sentenced to seven years in prison.

The Party Committee and government body of Fuyang Prefecture took disciplinary action against Party and administrative cadres on the county and township levels who had been involved in the case: Dai Wenhu, the head of the Party in Lixin County, was given a warning; Xu Huaitang, the deputy head of the county government, was demoted. Li Kunfu, the Party head of Jiwangchang township, received a severe warning; Kang Zichang, the head of the Jiwangchang township government, was put on probation as a Party member and was stripped of all Party and administrative positions; Ren Kaicai, the township deputy Party boss, was removed from his position.

A happy ending indeed! Or was it?

will the boat sink the water
?

*

On an early spring day in February of 2000 we walked into Ding Zuoming’s former home. It was obvious that the family, having lost its mainstay, was finding it hard to get by, even though they had been exempt from taxes since Ding’s death. The old father’s tears still flowed at the mention of past events. He showed us the formal verdict of the prefectural court, which stipulated that the family was entitled to payment of damages. Over the years they had made endless inquiries at the prefecture office and had paid the exorbitant fee for “implementation of the court order,” but by the time of our visit, no money had been paid to them. Ding’s mother was a bedridden invalid. Ding’s widow had broken her right arm hauling fertilizer; she was incapacitated, and could do only light work. The three children were exempt from tuition, but the two eldest, fourteen and twelve, had left school to help around the house.

Leaving Luying Village, we went to visit Ding Zuoming’s grave. Silently we stood before the grave marker, hoping that such a tragedy would not be repeated.

We had hoped that Ding Zuoming, the first martyr to the cause of protecting the peasants’ rights, would be the last. But we found that in another village of another township of another county, a similar tragedy had occurred—this time bloodier, more shocking, and on a larger scale.

2