Will the Boat Sink the Water?: The Life of China's Peasants (25 page)

Linquan County Party Boss Zhang Xide was extremely alarmed when heard about the trip and immediately took action to counter its effects. He sent a hundred-man “work team” of local cadres into Wang Village who made a great show of going to solve problems. Members of the work team ate and drank at the expense of the peasants and went around the village with loudspeakers issuing propaganda reminiscent of the days of the Cultural Revolution. It was an unbearable affliction to the already hard-up villagers, not to mention the “work team’s” true purpose, which was to appear to make moot the objective of the planned third trip. To add to their misery, there was a drought that summer.

As the fifty-six peasants led by Wang Junbin and Wang Hongling filtered back from this third, and unsuccessful, trip to Beijing, they could not tend their parched fields because of the interference of the work teams. After the hundred-man work team, Zhang Xide sent in a two-hundred-strong shock team in thirty cars and trucks. They surrounded the village and announced that the county would soon hold a mass meeting of

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ten thousand people, to educate the peasants on the issue of making appeals to Beijing. An atmosphere of fear was pervasive. Some people left the land altogether, and more than a thousand
mu
of corn was lost. So oppressive was the witch-hunt atmosphere that a peasant called Wang Yang, who had joined the group of fifty-six on the villagers’ third trip to Beijing, overcome with fear, took poison one night and died.

In October of the same year, the security station of Linquan County issued a public notice calling on Wang Junbin and his companions to give themselves up as “criminals” wanted by the police for “illegally detaining police,” “robbery,” and disseminating “reactionary propaganda.” A public warning was issued to their families as well. This was followed by a public notice from the county Party organization announcing the expulsion of Wang Junbin from the Party—the event with which our story began.

When Men Fear Not Death, What Hold Do You Have over Them?

Running parallel to the action taken against Wang Junbin, who had led the third fruitless trip to Beijing, the next step taken by Linquan County in retaliation for the peasants’ repeated appeals to Beijing was a public trial of Wang Xiangdong and Wang Hongchao, two of the three men who had been dragged back from Beijing and thrown into the Taihe County jail. On the day of the trial the authorities posted police and plain-clothesmen all over the place, but that did not prevent nearly seven hundred peasants from far and near from attending the trial to see what evidence the court could produce against their trusted representatives.

The public prosecutor proceeded to read out the “vicious crimes” of Wang Xiangdong and Wang Hongchao, as well as

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evidence they had collected in the village. The villagers—who didn’t give a hoot about maintaining order in the kangaroo court—started shouting.

“Lies! False evidence!”

“These good men have been wronged!” “Release them immediately!”

“You are the ones to be tried.”

The public trial descended into complete chaos.

It was unheard of in the area that a crowd could hijack a court of law. The judge and the court police were completely at a loss as to how to react. When men fear not death, what hold do you have over them? The fully armed court police were afraid of things getting out of control, and snuck away. The judge had no choice but to announce that the trial would be deferred to another day. But to open the trial again would be asking for another such demonstration from the massed peasants. To save face, the county court surreptitiously found both men guilty of “obstructing official business” and sentenced Wang Xiangdong to two years in prison and Wang Hongchao to one year in prison with two years probation.

Wang Hongchao was forced to serve seven months of his sentence before being released on probation. Since the Baimiao Township incident of April 2, 1994, the previous year, he had been either hiding in Henan, or on the road to Beijing, or in jail. He was in the dark as to what had happened to the village and his own home in the intervening time. Now he finally returned to see his ransacked home, and his rat poison mixed with his wheat stores. His wife was losing her mind from the family disasters and his only daughter suffered from hallucinations and had had to quit school. Stunned by the situation facing him, Wang remembered the saying, “From time immemorial, the peasants turned to authority for justice; if that fails, what can

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hold them back?” Indeed, Wang Hongchao thought back to their second trip to Beijing, when he and his two friends had been seized so lawlessly by the Linquan County thugs right outside the Petitions and Appeals Office. The county cadres must have slandered them for the Beijing comrades to stand by and see them taken away—the Beijing comrades must have been lied to. Thinking thus, Wang Hongchao decided that he must go again to Beijing to clarify the slanders heaped on him and the other village representatives. Wang Hongchao decided to act.

He remembered the “evidence” against him that had been read at the kangaroo trial. He started by looking up three peo-ple in the village who had supplied the court with evidence against him. What he heard gave Wang the shock of his life.

The first witness he looked up, a woman named Shao, had never showed up in court. When told that her evidence had been read out in court, she in turn got the shock of her life. She said that on the fateful night of April 2, she had gone to bed early and did not hear anything that happened in the village. Besides, she said, she was illiterate and had never given any evidence, much less made a mark with her thumb on any written document. “Either someone is out to hurt me,” she said, “or someone is using me to hurt somebody else.”

The second witness, also surnamed Wang, said that officers from the county security office had come visiting. They took out a photocopy and asked him to read it. He was illiterate, so the officers read out a list of names from the page and asked him, “Are these people from your village?” He said yes. Then the security officer took out another sheet of paper and started writing; when finished, he asked Wang to put his mark on the page. Wang of course didn’t want to do anything of the sort. Then Baimiao Township Party Boss Han Chunsheng walked over and said, “Just make a mark with your thumb and get it over with.” So Wang did as he was told and made a mark with

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his thumb first on the photocopied page and then on the written page. Only when the pages were read out in court did he realize that he had been made to give “evidence” to the “crimes” of Wang Hongchao and Wang Xiangdong.

The third witness stated that he never said anything about the accused “attacking the public security men.” He told Wang Hongchao, “They made me talk, and they took notes, then they asked me to put down my mark, but they never read back to me what they had written. When they read out my ‘evidence’ in court, it was nothing like what I had said.”

Two other men who were accused of attacking the police the night of April 2 also claimed that they had been framed, as they were not even at home at the time. One had been in Henan and the other in Shanxi Province.

Wang Hongchao was stunned by the revelations. Once again, near the end of 1994, Wang Hongchao gathered together a group of seventy-three villagers and they undertook a fourth march to Beijing to seek justice. This time the emphasis of the accusation was less on the unfair financial burdens as on the oppression that people suffered under County Party boss Zhang Xide.

When Zhang Xide heard that the Wang villagers were once again on the road to Beijing, he hit the roof. “I am going to get them,” he said gnashing his teeth, “even if it costs me an arm and a leg.”

The peasants’ repeated trips to Beijing in the face of unremit-ting official harassment sent danger signals to officials all the way up to the provincial level. The Anhui authorities commis-sioned a joint investigation group made up of officials on the provincial, the prefectural, and the county levels. They set up shop in both Baimiao Township and Wang Village. But the joint investigation was a great disappointment—how could it be otherwise, seeing as how the county people were in effect investigating themselves!

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We later had a chance to examine the formal report of the investigation. It totally avoided the subject of whether the peasants of Wang village had been overburdened, and its pages were littered with figures showing that the books were in good order and that there were no financial irregularities among the cadres of the village. Worse, the joint investigation’s report concerning the “Baimiao Township incident” repeated the county authorities’ allegations that Wang Junbin, Wang Xiangdong, Wang Hongchao, Wang Hongzhang and others were “criminals.” As to the illegal secret detainment of Wang Hongchao, Wang Xiangdong, and Wang Hongqin in the Taihe County jail, the report falsely stated that the accused had all signed statements confessing to their crimes. Shielded by his superiors, Zhang Xide continued to lord it over the village unrestrained, becom-ing richer and richer in the process, even driving around in a Mercedes Benz, paid for by public money, of course.