Will the Boat Sink the Water?: The Life of China's Peasants (10 page)

on the stove top, ready to defend herself.

The two sides faced each other; the situation was explosive. The commotion alarmed the neighbors. The two sons of

Deputy Village Chief Zhang, seeing that they were outnum-bered, snuck out of the house.

But Deputy Village Chief Zhang was not about to give up. He walked toward the back of the house, throwing a challenge to Zhang Guiyu: “Come on, meet me over there, if you have the balls!”

Zhang Guiyu, an upstanding man who had never taken a challenge lying down, was certainly not going to cave in to a village cadre’s bullying. He followed Zhang to the back of the house, saying, “You know it is the township’s order for a general audit. The people chose me. Am I to blame? You’d better put a lock on that mouth of yours. I am going to check your books and dig out the problems! And what can you do about it?”

Deputy Village Chief Zhang had secretly signaled son num-ber seven to go home for reinforcements. Now he came back with his two brothers, son number one, Zhang Jiachi, and son

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number six, Zhang Chaowei, both of them carrying hidden weapons. Son number six started hitting Zhang Giuyu the moment he arrived, while son number five struck the brick out of Zhang Guiyu’s hand. Seeing that the disarmed Zhang Guiyu was not giving up and still fighting, son number six took out a dagger he had stuck in his rubber boots and a meat cleaver that was hidden under his jacket. Brandishing these weapons, he struck Zhang Guiyu on the head and stabbed him in the chest. Taken by surprise, Zhang Guiyu fell heavily to the ground, without uttering a sound.

By then other members of the work group, Zhang Hongchuan and Zhang Guimao, both rushed over, honoring their previous agreement to stick together in an emergency. They were shocked when they saw Zhang Guiyu lying on the ground covered in his own blood, and cursed Deputy Village Chief Zhang and screamed for a doctor.

By now, Deputy Village Chief Zhang had completely lost his senses. Seeing Zhang Hongchuan and Zhang Guimao at the scene, he said with a sinister smile, “Damn it, you are just on time. I’ve been waiting for you!” Turning to son number one, he shouted, “Kill! Kill! Twelve bastards trying to check my books, kill them all!”

Son number five, who happened to be standing closest to Zhang Hongchuan, sprang on him immediately, stabbing him in the chest, the abdomen, and the hips. Zhang Hongchuan stopped breathing before he could put up any resistance.

Just as son number five was attacking Zhang Hongchuan, Deputy Village Chief Zhang himself pinned the other village representative, Zhang Guimao, tightly from the back and cursed him: “Fuck your mother! Going around raising complaints against me? Trying to audit my books? Come on and get your fill of auditing!” Though restrained from behind, Zhang Guimao was tall and muscular and still managed to grapple with the deputy village chief. The latter, finding himself no

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match for his victim, called to son number seven, “Leyi, come and put him down!” Son number seven raised the meat cleaver in his hand and crashed it down on Zhang Guimao’s skull. Meanwhile, son number one, who had become delirious at the scene of the carnage, now joined his brother; he straddled Zhang Guimao and stabbed him three times in the back with the butcher’s knife. According to forensic evidence gathered later, Zhang Guimao’s skull was cracked by five blows to the head, and his left lung was pierced.

Meanwhile Zhang Guiyu, in whose home the attack had first started, was groaning in pain and about to breathe his last. Son number one, seeing that he was still breathing, sprang at him and stabbed him five times in the chest and abdomen.

Thus, in the twinkling of an eye, three members of the auditing group—Zhang Guiyu, Zhang Hongchuan, and Zhang Guimao—were lying dead or dying at the back of Zhang Guiyu’s house. The rain pattered on, now mixed with blood on the ground; the sickening smell of blood hung heavy in the air. Just then, Zhang Guiyu’s elder brother, Zhang Guiyue, heard of what had befallen his brother. He hastily snatched up a stick used for stirring cattle feed and rushed over. Yue’s eyesight was bad and he did not recognize his brother lying on the ground. Suddenly he found himself face to face with Zhang Guiquan’s son number one. “Isn’t that my little brother?!” he exclaimed.

Before he could finish the sentence, the butcher knife was already lodged in his breast.

In the melee, Zhang Guiyu’s sixteen-year-old son, Pine, tried to move his father to take him to hospital. However, son num-ber six aimed his bloody meat cleaver straight at the back of the young fellow’s head. Someone let out a gasp, and Pine turned around just in the nick of time to avoid the blow, which landed on his shoulder instead. Pine turned and ran for his life.

Thus, within a matter of minutes, four people were killed and one wounded as the rain fell on Zhang Village.

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Deputy Village Chief Zhang Guiquan’s son number four, Zhang Simao, rushed over, knife in hand, anxious not to miss his share of the kill. Just then the voice of the village Party boss, Zhang Dianfeng, boomed out over the village P.A. system, calling on the audit group to start their morning’s work.

Appointed to Leading Position While Serving a Sentence

The power of organization is considerable, and can be formidable when combined with political power. The sheer number of Chinese peasants could make them overwhelming, but they are scattered, and have no organizational resources to counter oppression. The rural cadres, on the other hand, are highly organized; they are the legal representatives of state power in the countryside. If this body of representatives puts aside the will of the central government,* the highest authority, which has delegated power to them, and appropriates the organizational resources of the state for their own interests, the consequences will be disastrous.

Deputy Village Chief Zhang Guiquan’s education was barely equivalent to primary-school level, but relying on his power as village chief and the power of his clan—he had seven sons—he was able to control Zhang Village and act as the absolute tyrant of the area.

In 1997, he knew perfectly well that the county’s figure for the levy of grain tax** was unchanged from the previous year, but he went ahead anyway and imposed an extra fifty jin (1.1

U.S. pound) per head. He had myriad ways to fleece the peas-

*“Central government” refers to the State Council of the People’s Republic of China.

**The grain tax—a mandatory amount of grain that the peasant has to sell to the government at a fixed priced—is said to have been established as early as

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ants. One of his inventions was the “five taxes and one fee:” by his order, any family that raised a pig must pay an extra 45 yuan; any family who built a new house had to pay a tax rang-ing from 150 to 500 yuan (the precise figure to be determined by Zhang’s whim of the moment); owners of old houses in the village had to pay 50 yuan; any family that planted peanuts had to pay 10 yuan per
mu
(about 1,660 square meters, or one sixth of a hectare); any family that acquired a tractor must pay a tax of 50 yuan. (Zhang Guiyue, who was killed while trying to save his brother, Zhang Guiyu, had scraped together his savings to acquire a tractor, but had to come up with 45 yuan tax before he ever started up the machine. Now the owner was dead while the brand new tractor stood unused under a shelter.) As for two other inventions of Deputy Village Chief Zhang—the “birth-control” and “child-care” fees—no one could decipher their meaning. The amount of the fines for violations of the one-child policy depended on his whim. Moreover, he would casually issue a piece of paper instead of a regular receipt for payments and he never made a record in the books. On the other hand, he himself never contributed to the village cash-reserve fund, and even less would he pay the “five taxes and one fee” personally invented by himself. In a word, he invented ingenious ways to fleece the peasants.

Relying on his enforcement power, this deputy village chief encroached on public lands; appropriated fish ponds, public property, and public funds to himself. He stopped at nothing. He would not tolerate the slightest sign of discontent on the part of the villagers, not to mention any attempt to defy him. For instance, one day Zhang Chaohua, the wife of a demobilized army veteran, got into a quarrel with him over the allot-

the Xia Dynasty, around 2200
B
.
C
. More can be learned about the grain tax in Peter Morris, “China to Abolish Age-Old Grain Tax,”
Asia Times
, March 12 , 2004
(http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/FC12Ad03.html, accessed

November 27, 2005).

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