Out of Mao's Shadow: The Struggle for the Soul of a New China (28 page)

The wording was vague, but the villagers were elated. “We believed we had obtained an imperial order from the county party secretary,” one of the petition leaders, Wang Xiangdong, recalled. “We thought the money would be returned to us for sure.”

Over the following weeks, local officials went through the motions of conducting an audit in Wangying Village. A few tax payments were refunded, and a few village officials were fired. But they refused to return the rest of the money. Then the three Wangs ran into problems. One lost his job in the township land bureau. The other two were jumped by thugs and roughed up after they were summoned to a meeting with township officials. The villagers concluded that township officials were exacting revenge on their representatives and resisting Zhang’s order, and about a hundred of them went to see him again, intercepting him on the steps of the county’s party headquarters as he was going in for a meeting.

At first, they recalled, Zhang tried to brush aside their complaints, saying he had already directed the township officials to return their money. “If they won’t do it, what can I do?” he said. “I can’t control them.”

But the peasants kept pressing him. Wasn’t he the county’s party chief? Didn’t the township officials report to him? Couldn’t he fire them if they refused to return the taxes? The peasants wouldn’t let him leave, and suddenly, Zhang lost his temper. “What do you think you’re doing?” he said to the group, raising his voice. Then Zhang told them flat out that he wouldn’t return the taxes. “I’d rather lose an arm than return the money!” he said.

The peasants were surprised, and some threatened to return to Beijing and file a complaint against him. “If you can make it to Beijing, then go!” Zhang shot back. “If you have the guts to go to Beijing, then go!” The party boss was furious and challenged the peasants to make trouble, saying that would only make it easier for him to punish them. “Come over here!” he shouted. “If you have the guts, come over here!” Zhang took out his cell phone and called his police chief. Within minutes, a large group of officers arrived and forced the peasants out of the party compound.

The violent police raid on Wangying Village that became known as the April 2 Incident occurred just a few weeks later. Over the next year, conditions in the village grew more desperate. Zhang issued arrest warrants for the three Wangs, and two of them were caught after traveling to Beijing again and petitioning for help at one of the Letters and Visits offices. The third continued to lead groups of villagers to Beijing to complain about Zhang’s abuses but their appeals were ignored. After all, Zhang was the party’s man in Linquan County.

In October 1995, seventy-four residents of Wangying Village and forty-six peasants from elsewhere in Linquan County traveled to Beijing again and staged a public protest by kneeling in Tiananmen Square. That same month, another peasant from Linquan upset about the confiscation of his land to build a police station committed suicide by jumping from the roof of a shelter run by one of the Letters and Visits offices in Beijing. The two incidents finally led national party leaders to order a more impartial investigation into the events in Linquan. This time, the party agreed that the villagers had been forced to pay too much in taxes, and acknowledged that “extreme behavior by a small number” of police officers during the April 2 Incident “hurt the feelings of the masses.” The three Wangs were cleared, and some of the tax money was returned. But the party again stood by Zhang Xide, and promoted him to a higher-paying position in the nearby city of Fuyang.

The residents of Wangying Village saw Zhang one last time before he left the county. The news of his imminent departure had spread quickly, and a crowd of as many as five thousand peasants came to settle old scores on one of his last days of work in March 1996. Some were seeking refunds of taxes they had paid, worried that the new party chief would refuse responsibility for Zhang’s excesses. Others just wanted to vent their anger, about the torture they had suffered at the hands of the police, or the abuses committed in the name of the one-child policy. When the peasants didn’t find Zhang at party headquarters, they forced their way past a security gate into the leafy residential section of the party compound and gathered in front of his five-story building. He lived in a three-bedroom apartment on the top floor, and he must have heard the people assembling below. The crowd shouted for him to come out, and finally, Zhang showed himself.

“I’ve already resigned,” he told the peasants. “Go deal with the other officials.”

But the crowd pressed in on him, shouting and cursing. The bravado that the villagers had seen before was gone now. Zhang was alone and surrounded, and he looked smaller than they remembered, almost pitiful. None of his colleagues at party headquarters came to his aid. As Zhang tried to walk away, there was a scuffle. A few of the peasants slapped him, and he fell to the ground. Finally, a team of police officers rushed over and dragged him into another courtyard, locking the gate behind them. The peasants followed, knocking down the wall and rushing in. But Zhang was gone. He had slipped away, out the back.

T
HE STORY OF
Wangying Village was one of several told in
An Investigation of China’s Peasantry,
and hardly the most damning. There was also the profile of Ding Zuoming, a peasant who was tortured and beaten to death by police after leading a decade-long campaign against illegal taxes and fees in his village. There was the case of Shen Keli, an idealistic party official devoted to fighting poverty who became a village tyrant. There was the tale of Zhang Guiquan, a corrupt official who murdered four peasants who had tried to audit his accounts. And then there were all the party officials who tried to cover up these crimes. Amid this cast of characters, Zhang Xide came across as only a minor villain. But a few weeks after the book was released, he filed a defamation suit against the authors and their publisher, accusing them of libel and demanding a public apology and about twenty-five thousand dollars in damages.

Published in December 2003,
An Investigation of China’s Peasantry
was an immediate hit. Interviews with Chen and Wu appeared in newspapers and magazines across the country, and the authors were booked on the major television talk shows. Their gritty portrayal of rural conditions found an eager audience among city readers, many of whom knew little about the countryside and saw peasants only as an uneducated mass of cheap labor. The book became a bestseller, beating out the sex novels, get-rich-quick guides, and other fluff that dominates Chinese bookstores. The first print run of one hundred thousand copies sold out within a month. The book was a success because Chen and Wu gave readers something they rarely saw—and the censors rarely allowed: an honest look at some of the darkest aspects of party rule, complete with the names of officials and the details of their crimes. The authors were careful to praise the efforts of the party leadership to reduce the rural tax burden and improve the lives of peasants, but they also declared their policies a failure and placed the blame not on economic conditions or natural disasters, as the party often did, but on the political system and its inability to curb the abuse of power by rural officials.

As the book became a media sensation, the propaganda czars decided it was too much. Less than two months after it was released, as another session of the National People’s Congress was opening in Beijing, the authorities prohibited any further coverage of the book in the media and ordered the publisher to stop printing new copies. The publisher complied, but the ban came as the book’s sales were gaining momentum, and pirates quickly stepped in to satisfy demand, printing and selling as many as seven million more copies across the country. Even party officials wanted to read it; sales were brisk at the hotels in Beijing where delegates to the National People’s Congress were staying.

Zhang Xide welcomed the party’s decision to ban
An Investigation of China’s Peasantry
. He considered it an official endorsement of his view that the book was not only flawed but also subversive. Now that the book was gone, he could claim victory and quietly drop the case. But he didn’t. He wanted his day in court.

It was a surprising decision, because party officials almost always dealt with books and articles they objected to behind the scenes, using the hatchet men of the propaganda department to silence their critics. Once they had succeeded in banning a book or recalling a magazine, it was considered bad form to draw further attention to the matter. Doing so would only remind people of whatever it was that the authorities didn’t want them to read, as well as the fact that the party still practiced censorship. From this perspective, a lawsuit against two bestselling, blacklisted authors seemed like a bad idea. Media and publishing circles were rife with speculation about Zhang’s motives. The book was set almost entirely in Anhui, and some believed Zhang’s superiors in the province were using the lawsuit to take revenge on the authors. Others were convinced the propaganda authorities were testing the use of the courts as a new channel for intimidating writers and journalists. But when I asked Zhang if anyone had asked him to file the lawsuit, he said no. Propaganda officials had promised to punish the authors if he prevailed in court, he told me, but the decision to sue was his alone.

When I first met Zhang, he was waiting in a private dining room of the best hotel in Fuyang, a drab three-star establishment with dirty carpets that overenthusiastic proprietors had named Buckingham Palace. He was wearing a white short-sleeved dress shirt and dark pants, and he greeted me as “an old friend” before we even sat down. A younger man, one of his aides, was in the room, too, but Zhang never bothered to introduce him. Instead, he handed me a forty-six-page rebuttal of the Wangying Village story and immediately began bad-mouthing the authors. There was an oily quality about him; he spoke too quickly, and he often got worked up and raised his voice. At one point, he grabbed my copy of
An Investigation of China’s Peasantry
and began flipping through the pages, reading sentences aloud and then refuting them in the same breath. He even found it necessary to point out that the peasants of Wangying Village grew only scallions, not cabbage, as the book claimed.

In fact, he denied almost every aspect of the Wangying Village story. “It’s all fabricated,” he said. “Everything they wrote about me, except my name, was a lie.” Zhang said that he kept taxes low, and that when the villagers complained, he immediately conducted an investigation, found some discrepancies, and refunded everything the peasants were owed. He said he paid special attention to the case because of the letters the peasants had obtained in Beijing and the provincial capital, and he denied ever losing his temper or challenging the peasants to go back to Beijing. As for the April 2 Incident, Zhang stuck to the party line and said he ordered the raid to rescue a police officer who had been disarmed and detained by the peasants, not to punish the villagers. He denied any police brutality or torture. An elderly villager died after the raid, he acknowledged, but from a heart attack, not from anything the police did. “I have no regrets about that incident, none at all,” he said. “The police had no contact with the masses. There was no clash.”

When I asked Zhang why the peasants all told a different story, he asserted that they had been paid off by Chen and he launched into a diatribe against the writer, accusing him of harboring a personal grudge against him, of exaggerating and distorting the truth, of seeking fame, fortune, and “political capital” with the book, and finally, of pandering to and inciting antiparty sentiment. “Chen has fired the first shot in an attempt to overthrow the Communist Party!” he said.

But if conditions were so good in Wangying, why were the villagers petitioning for tax relief? Zhang shifted to another explanation, saying a party official in a rival faction had egged on the peasants to embarrass him. “The tax burden on the peasants isn’t heavy here, but there are just some people who are unwilling to pay,” he added. Later, when I noted that the party’s own investigation concluded the peasants were forced to pay excessive amounts, Zhang offered a third defense, saying that lower-level officials may have demanded too much money and insisting that he was not to blame. If he had been responsible, he argued, the party would have disciplined him instead of giving him a promotion.

Zhang seemed most upset by the book’s portrayal of him as a short, inarticulate bully who relied on his aides to write speeches, especially the description of his “five-short figure,” or short neck, arms, and legs. “It’s insulting. Only soft-shelled turtles have five-short figures,” he said. “I’m 165 centimeters tall. No matter what, that’s medium height.

“And they said I didn’t write my own reports, but that’s exactly what I do. That’s one of my specialties. Did you know that?” He didn’t wait for me to answer. “When I was party secretary of Linquan County, other than the reports used for party conferences and the congress, I never used any prepared texts. I would just write an outline in my notebook and speak. After I went to the People’s Political Consultative Conference, I personally wrote several good investigative reports.”

He went on for long stretches about himself. He said he had never told a lie in his life. He shared a story about turning down a bribe. He said he always worked late and never turned off his cell phone. While he was the party chief in Linquan County, he said, hundreds of township enterprises were established and tens of thousands of wells were dug. “Wherever I have worked, people always said that I have a good heart, that I’m amiable, and that I have an approachable, democratic working style,” he said. “I’ve worked in ten different places, and they all evaluated me this way.”