Red China Blues (reissue): My Long March from Mao to Now (40 page)

Wei laughed. “The collective road leads to fascism. China has proved that.”

For the next hour, the two of them hotly debated Maoism and Chinese history, shouting over the head of one guest until she gave up and pushed her chair back from the table. Bill said Mao’s 1950s collectivization movement was the first time many peasants had owned land. Wei retorted that they never really owned it; the Party grabbed back the land a few years later when it organized the People’s Communes. To Bill, Wei was a young whippersnapper who
hadn’t a clue what a lousy system Western democracy was. To Wei, Bill was an old fogy who hadn’t a clue what a lousy system socialism was. Only two things united the American Marxist and the Chinese democrat: their love for China and their contempt for Deng. At the end of the evening, Bill graciously stood up, shook Wei’s hand and said, “I really respect you.”

I had one last question. Had Western pressure helped Wei at all? In 1993, the Gleitsman Foundation in Malibu, California, had named Wei a co-recipient, with Nelson Mandela, of its International Activist Award, an honor that came with a $50,000 grant for each. I wanted to know if naming names made a difference. Wei looked at me as if I were an idiot. “If it wasn’t for pressure from the West,” he said, “I wouldn’t be sitting here now. I’d be dead.”

His release, he said, had nothing to do with China’s 1993 bid to host the 2000 Olympics, as was widely believed. “That was a face-saving pretext,” he said, and recounted another tantalizing story from his elite contacts. Some Chinese leaders feared time was running out if they were going to gain any political points for letting Wei out early. But because Deng had ordered his arrest, no one dared take responsibility for his release. So the Politburo deputized Deng’s youngest daughter, Deng Maomao, to broach the subject with her father. “He refused at first. Finally, after two hours, he nodded. Deng Maomao rushed back to the Politburo. ‘Father has nodded,’ she said. And that’s how I got out.”

But why would Deng’s daughter care? I asked. Wei lit another Marlboro. “After he dies, his kids still have to survive in China,” he said, blowing the smoke in my face. “The friend who told me also said, ‘If something happens, you must remember what she did for you.’ ”

A month after my dinner party, I went to see Wei, who had moved back into his old room in his father’s apartment. It was sparsely furnished with a white telephone, two bamboo armchairs and a narrow single bed. On the wall was a glossy poster of a Dalmatian sitting among ten black-and-white spotted cats. In English, it said, “In a world full of copycats … Be an original!” I asked how he was spending the $50,000 from the Gleitsman Foundation. Wei laughed, and lit a Japanese cigarette.

“The first time I tried to get the money, the Bank of China confiscated it,” he said. When the money finally came through, he hired a secretary, purchased a photocopier for a fellow activist and bought a computer, which he hadn’t yet learned to use. Wei had quickly become a magnet for the dissident community, which lionized him for emerging unbowed from the gulag. I asked if he knew anyone who was organizing workers and peasants who also dared to meet with foreign journalists. I wanted to write a story about dissent in the countryside, where the majority of Chinese lived. He told me he’d think about it.

“Let’s meet for lunch today,” the caller said, without giving his name.

“Fine,” I agreed, and hung up. By prior agreement, Wei Jingsheng was telling me that he had found a pro-democracy organizer willing to talk, and that I and several colleagues should meet him the
next
day at the Holiday Inn near his home.

I discreetly notified three other reporters, Cathy Sampson of The
Times
, the BBC’s James Miles and the
Washington Post’s
Lena Sun. We rented a room at the hotel, and at the appointed time, there was a light tap on the door. Wei Jingsheng walked in, trailed by a slight man with hooded eyelids, a wispy mustache and a goatee.

“This is Zhang Lin,” Wei said.

Zhang (pronounced
Jaang
) was from Bengbu, a transportation hub on the banks of the Huai, China’s third-largest river. At thirty-one, he was already hardened by five stints in jail. We listened in amazement to his claim that he was agitating among workers and peasants in Anhui province right under the nose of the Communist Party.

“Can we visit you?” Lena asked eagerly.

“Of course,” Zhang said. “I’ll arrange everything.”

Such a trip would be illegal. Anhui authorities had rejected my applications several times before. Even though we risked being expelled from the country if caught, Lena and I thought the story on rural unrest was too important. James and Cathy agreed that we could go first because, as ethnic Chinese, we had a better chance of avoiding detection. We booked our flights without using the telephones and instead sent Lena’s Canadian assistant to buy them in person. A
couple of weeks later, we took a bumpy propeller plane to Bengbu.

I had known Lena since the late 1970s. The American-born daughter of the prominent Overseas Chinese novelist Yu Lihua, Lena had spent her junior year abroad, studying at Beijing University. I liked traveling with her because she had a great sense of humor, an eye for a good story and was a thoughtful, seasoned journalist who could browbeat the most recalcitrant hotel staff into changing the dirty sheets when we checked in.

In Bengbu, on his own turf, Zhang Lin exuded the charisma of a Latin American guerrilla leader. Indeed, he had once tried organizing a band of armed rebels in the Yunnan mountains of southwest China. He referred to other activists as “my
bu xia”
or underlings, and they ran his errands and carried out his orders. Zhang said we could use his real name because the police already knew him well, but everyone else in his circle had to remain anonymous. “Ordinary people don’t think it’s worth the sacrifice to go to jail for democracy,” he said. “I do.”

He and his pregnant young wife, Ji Xiao, lived in a single whitewashed room, without heat or plumbing, down a dirt alley too narrow for cars. On his wall, he had pasted a small photo of Wei Jingsheng, with a handwritten caption: “Democracy Fighter.” As Zhang held forth on politics, Ji Xiao made lunch on a small coal stove in the yard. “My democratic work is the most important thing in my life,” he said. “My wife and unborn child come second.”

To reduce our chances of being discovered, Zhang had arranged for his aides to take us to Yuan Village, a godforsaken hamlet of several hundred mud huts where he was organizing the peasants. The next morning we set out in a battered minibus. At Yuan Village, eleven nervous peasants, some of them Party members, were waiting for us inside an adobe cottage. Lena and I were jittery, too. As ethnic Chinese, we risked being beaten first and asked questions later. We could also be charged with spying since we weren’t authorized to be there. The consequences for Zhang’s aides were even worse.

The peasants gave us a copy of their denunciation. I knew that Party members were no longer models of moral rectitude, but I was not ready for Shen Shaoxi. The Communist Party secretary of Yuan
Village was a rapist, an embezzler, a tyrant and a thief. The denunciation accused Shen, among other things, of lechery, fornication, assault and using China’s one-child policy to reward his friends and punish his enemies. Each charge was meticulously documented with the date of the alleged incident, the place, and the accuser’s name and thumbprint in bright red ink. I felt sick as I scanned the petition. As the village’s main broker in an illegal wife trade, Shen helped kidnap women for sale as brides to the local peasants. He also took the feudal overlord’s ancient right of first night. At night, when a light burned late in his office, the peasants knew their Party secretary was raping the abducted women. “All the kidnapped women must spend the first night with him in his office. The next morning, after the deal has been reached with the buyer, firecrackers are lit at the office doorway, and the new bride is conveyed home,” the petition said. The wife trade was so brisk that local villagers dubbed his office the Commodity Exchange.

It was odd how spectacularly wrong Mao had been when it came to running China and how right he had been on so much else. He once warned that if the Chinese Communist Party did not police itself, it would turn into a fascist dictatorship. He had been prescient. The Party, once cherished as the liberator of the Chinese people in the 1940s, had become their oppressor in the 1990s. Where wealthy landlords once tyrannized the peasants, the local despot was now the Communist Party secretary. Was Party Secretary Shen typical? In 1994, Xinhua, the official news agency, reported that corruption was endemic in Anhui province, with one in five cadres on the take.

Shen Shaoxi typified the thousands of petty tyrants who made life miserable for millions of peasants in the Chinese countryside. As Party secretary for the past fifteen years, he wielded absolute power over Yuan Village’s three hundred families. Although he had only a third-grade education, he was village mayor, police chief, prosecutor, judge, jury, welfare dispenser and father confessor rolled into one. He could, and did, label his critics counter-revolutionaries, and used the local militia to suppress them. When our minibus stopped to pick up three peasants to interview, a rumor flashed through the village that Shen had abducted them.

Most galling of all to the peasants, he selectively enforced China’s tough one-child policy “If you’re close to him, you can have six children with no problem,” said one. Shen’s closest ally, the village accountant, had five, and never paid a fine. And three-fourths of the families in Yuan Village had three or more children, including Party Secretary Shen himself. But after one peasant accused Shen of corruption, he ordered the village militia to drag the man’s daughter-in-law, then pregnant with her third child, to the county hospital for a forced abortion. And for good measure, he bulldozed her home while she was gone.

Yuan Village was so poor it lacked running water. It had no commerce, if you didn’t count the wife trade. But in 1991 when the mighty Huai River overflowed its banks, causing the worst flooding in China in decades, Shen, who was in his forties, saw a get-rich-quick opportunity. He fenced relief grain from Beijing, embezzled emergency construction funds and divided up special shipments of cooking oil, sweet dates and fertilizer among eight of his cronies. He also gave eight sacks of flour, intended for the neediest families, to the village accountant. “It rotted before he could eat it, so he fed it to his pigs,” one peasant said bitterly. Another said angrily, “Even the Party secretary’s pigsty is better than our homes.”

Three times that year, the villagers rode into the county town in a convoy of bicycles and belching tractors, demanding justice. They kowtowed before the county officials, trying to present their petition. Nobody cared. Two-thirds of the families in Yuan Village were forced to leave home to go begging. A handicapped bachelor in his fifties nicknamed Lu the Deaf starved to death. Three years later, many villagers were still living in temporary shelters.

Lena and I went on a quick walking tour of the desolate village. In front of one lean-to, a tearful old woman told us that she had nothing to feed her grandchildren that day. Others were living in the ruins of their destroyed homes. We decided we had to see where Party Secretary Shen lived. It was the grandest house in the village, with a high courtyard wall, a snug tile roof and a cement foundation. And the peasant had been right; Shen’s pigsty was made of brick while the villagers’ homes were made of mud. A bent old woman, perhaps his mother, suddenly emerged from the house. We
froze. One of Zhang’s quick-thinking associates thrust his hands behind his back, assumed an official air, and strode up, scowling and gesturing at the home’s blank walls.

“We’re inspecting slogans,” he said importantly. “Your home doesn’t have any slogans about family planning.”

“So sorry,” the old woman said hastily. “We’ll fix it right away.”

Emboldened, we strolled over to the village accountant’s home and walked in without knocking. Only an old man was in. Our “city official” dismissed him with a perfunctory wave. I couldn’t believe my eyes. Inside one large room were four giant straw bins, each the size of a chest-high hot tub. They were overflowing with grain. I felt a wave of anger as I thought of the old woman whose grandchildren had gone hungry that day. I thought of Lu the Deaf, who had starved to death a few years earlier. And I remembered the class-struggle exhibits I had seen as a revolutionary tourist so long ago — the evil landlord hoarding food while the masses starved.

Party Secretary Shen learned of our visit a few hours after we left. The village militia, led by his brother, beat up three of the peasants who had talked to us and seized and interrogated two others. A sixth peasant, who evaded capture by hiding in the fields, managed to smuggle out a statement, thumbprinted by eleven villagers, testifying to the reprisals. Party Secretary Shen had no idea who we were, but the village accountant swore that if we ever returned he would break our legs.

We caught up with Zhang Lin in nearby Big Temple Village, where his grandfather now lived alone. It was in this simple thatched-roof cottage that Grandfather Zhang had taught his precocious grandson the Confucian classics, rewarding every correct recitation with a piece of candy. In 1979, the old man had been so proud when his grandson became the first person from the Bengbu region ever admitted to Qinghua University. In 1989, when Zhang was arrested for his pro-democracy activities, his grandfather went into shock. For six months, he wore a rope around his waist, planning to commit suicide the moment he confirmed his grandson’s execution.

At Qinghua, Zhang Lin wanted to study literature, but central planners assigned him to nuclear physics. Bored and alienated, he
began cutting classes to listen to dissidents like Wei Jingsheng at Democracy Wall. After graduation, Zhang went back to Bengbu, where he organized a democracy discussion group and supported himself by washing dishes and selling sweaters. He would have rejected the comparison, but Zhang reminded me of a young Mao Zedong. Seventy years earlier, Mao, too, had traveled the backroads of his native province, leading peasant uprisings against cruel despots.