Patriot Number One

by Lauren Hilgers

  He had been moving too fast in the pitch black and hadn’t spotted it in the road. The bike spun out from under him, clattering onto the pavement. He lay low for a moment, waiting to see if the noise had woken anyone up, then limped back to the scooter. He was unharmed, but the scooter would need some repairs. He wheeled it home quietly, chastened, and parked it outside his father’s house. At the bottom of his letter, he had included an anonymous number for an online chat group. He sat down on his bed as the sky was lightening, wondering what would happen when the village woke up.

  * * *

  • • •

  Long before Zhuang set off on his three a.m. ride, land had become the preoccupation of every villager and local official in Wukan. It was valuable now, situated close to both Shenzhen and the coastline. According to China’s constitution, however, village land was collective. Farmers could sell land use rights to other farmers, but only for agricultural purposes and only with the approval of a village council. If, on the other hand, a developer was looking to buy land—to build a factory, hotel, or apartment tower—the only way to do it was to have the government requisition and sell the land itself. According to China’s constitution, the government can requisition rural land as long as it does so in the public interest. What constitutes the public interest is left up to interpretation.

  People in Wukan had noticed for years that village land was disappearing. Their farmland was situated on the edge of a city called Lufeng, a dusty metropolis of 1.7 million people, filled with the rubble of discarded construction materials. Lufeng was expanding quickly, its streets growing in the direction of the coastline, threatening to swallow the little fishing hamlet whole. By the time I made my first visit to Wukan, in 2012, the city had constructed an avenue of new government buildings not far from the village. The new street was adorned with white streetlights, and one of the new buildings had a dome-shaped roof, painted gold and glowing in the sun, visible even from a distance.

  Lufeng City is the county seat of an area that includes more than 280 villages. Its mayor, Qiu Jinxiong, is responsible for a district that is famously unruly. (In 2015, during a raid on a village not far from Wukan, three tons of methamphetamines were confiscated, the wares of a village-level party leader.) In addition to keeping his 280 villages in line, Qiu was tasked with funding and overseeing a sprawling county bureaucracy. There were planning commissions, tax commissions, bureaus for fish, grain, weather, and salt; there were county-run schools, hospitals, and factories. Counties, in China, are expected to oversee 20 to 25 different government departments. In reality, most have between 40 and 50.

  Above Qiu, at the prefecture level, was a man named Zhen Yanxiong, who held responsibility for the economic development of all the villages, towns, and cities under his purview. In China, leaders like Qiu and Zhen were responsible for fulfilling mandates passed down by the central government in Beijing—to build cultural centers, improve hospitals, develop infrastructure, and expand GDP—that are frequently underfunded. Local governments receive, according to World Bank estimates, about 40 percent of the nation’s tax revenue but are responsible for twice that amount of government spending. The gap has to be made up somehow.

  In the 1990s local governments in China often tried to balance their budgets by levying illegal taxes on villages and towns. When authorities cracked down on this practice, local officials turned to land sales. Corrupt local officials could requisition collective land, collude with developers, help balance the budget, and line their own pockets all at the same time.

  The village chief of Wukan, Xue Chang, had been selling off blocks of Wukan’s land since the 1990s. He had registered the Wukan Port Industrial Development Company, listing himself and his deputy village council chief as the corporate representatives. Xue went about selling land to developers and pocketing the money: his buyers put up a garment-dyeing factory. Some land was parceled off for a pig farm. The village chief went so far as to lease out some of the bay for a seahorse-breeding operation. Soon a pink hotel complex sprang up along the more picturesque part of Wukan’s bay. Most villagers accepted the new developments with a fatalistic shrug. They were focused on the money they might make outside the village. No one farmed anymore.

  The Wukan villagers were not the only ones in China to watch their land disappear at the hands of the local government. In a survey of seventeen hundred village households conducted three years after Zhuang first papered Wukan with pamphlets, 43 percent of the people interviewed had seen their agricultural land taken by the government and sold to developers.

  Like the other villagers, Zhuang himself had shrugged until sometime in 2008, when he logged on to the work computer of his first steady girlfriend. He was waiting for her shift to end, and without thinking much about it, he typed in the two characters for his village: 乌, meaning “dark,” and 坎, a character that, in Daoist philosophy, represents water. He was shocked at first that anything came up at all. And then he got angry.

  The first entry that caught his eye was a website advertising Wukan real estate. It called the village beautiful and industry-friendly. In 2007, the website stated, every one of Wukan’s ten thousand villagers had received 6,688 yuan, nearly a thousand U.S. dollars, from collective industry and agriculture. It was a perfect place to do business. A model village. Except that the advertisement was false. No one Zhuang knew had ever received a penny from the land that had been developed. It was illegal, he realized, what the village chief was doing. And if it was illegal, Zhuang thought, there might be something he could do about it.

  Zhuang opened an anonymous instant messaging account on QQ, a popular service that offered a platform for chatting online, joining discussion groups, and playing games. It allowed Zhuang to use his cell phone to send messages and access his account. He was taking it one step at a time, he told himself. First he would find out if anyone would support him. Then he would think about step two.

  * * *

  • • •

  Zhuang picked the name Patriot Number One after he decided to pen the open letter to the people of Wukan. He praised the ancestors who had cleared the land for Wukan Village during the Song Dynasty, then pointed out how corruption during the Qing Dynasty in the 1800s had made the country weak. Chinese soldiers had fought against Japanese invaders during World War II. “So many heroes were sacrificed in waging guerilla warfare,” he wrote. “It was only because of these patriots that we were able to achieve victory.” Why had they done it? “To defend thousands of years of culture and history, a thousand years of toil by their ancestors.” The message was clear: protecting Wukan from corruption was a patriotic endeavor. Those who joined Zhuang in his cause would be defending the hard work of Wukan’s ancestors, preserving the village for future generations.

  If it weren’t for QQ, Zhuang might simply have called himself “Patriot.” The “Number One” was a feature tied to social media: if people joined him online, there might be Patriots Number Two, Three, and so on. It was marketable, he thought. And it was accurate.

  The morning after Zhuang papered the village with his open letter, people requested to join Zhuang’s QQ group faster than he could add them. Cell phone service was bad in the village, but Zhuang tried his best to keep up. He would add a slew of people, moving through the text messages one by one, and then his phone would stall. After his phone caught up, he would go back to adding people. For the first time in his life, he wasn’t scheming on his own. Hundreds of people joined his QQ group.

  The people who joined were all, like Zhuang, in their twenties or younger. They used the Internet and had QQ accounts. Most of them were migrants who worked and lived outside the village and used QQ to keep in touch. Zhuang joined the group, too, pretending he didn’t know Patriot Number One.

  At first Zhuang was thrilled by the idea of a little open rebellion. He went back to Shunde and kept up a steady stream of messages with his new allies. People in the group talked a
bout their struggles to find housing in their home village. They complained about the factories. On Wukan’s last big piece of open land, a sign had recently gone up—it looked like another factory was going to be built. Zhuang purchased a computer to keep up with his QQ habit and went about making friends online. He grew close to a twenty-five-year-old villager named Hong Ruichao, who had been one of the first to join the group. Later, when they finally met in Guangzhou, they would make an odd pair: Hong, tall and dashing, with a heavy, serious brow and a regal nose, and Zhuang, voluble with his crooked teeth, outsize grin, and small, energetic frame.

  Another villager, Zhang Jianxing, who was all of seventeen at the time, sought out Patriot Number One online and offered to help with running errands, gathering evidence, and promoting their cause. Jianxing was young and awkward, with hair that spiked across his forehead and a smattering of acne across his cheeks. Eventually, however, he would grow into his role as a protester, mastering every new app and online service, spreading the word farther than Zhuang had imagined possible.

  * * *

  • • •

  Zhuang and Hong Ruichao met on the street in Guangzhou, outside the headquarters of the Guangdong Provincial Government Propaganda Bureau. After a month of chatting online, the group had settled on a name, Wukan’s Hot Blooded Patriotic Youth League, and a course of action. A handful of the members—not quite twenty people—had decided to petition the provincial government in Guangzhou. It was, they agreed, the proper thing to do. Petitioning was a holdover from Imperial China, intended to give local people a way to bypass corrupt officials. Zhuang and his friends drafted a letter of complaint and planned to deliver it to the proper office in Guangzhou. If all went well, the provincial government, or maybe even the party secretary himself, would come to Wukan and investigate. Wukan’s local officials might not obey the law, but the Hot Blooded Youth were determined to do things by the book.

  Zhuang and his friends were not seasoned activists or dissidents. Most of the people in the chat group were afraid to reveal their real names. Among the few exceptions were Zhuang, who announced himself without revealing his connection to Patriot Number One, and Hong Ruichao. A few days before the group met in Guangzhou, he made a point of using his name: “I am Hong Ruichao, and I am going to attend this action!”

  As soon as the Hot Blooded Youth decided to petition, however, they realized the QQ group was not secure. The party secretary from the village called Zhuang Liehong and urged him not to go to Guangzhou. A deputy party secretary from the village showed up at the home of Hong Ruichao’s father and asked the older man to corral his son. Later, when Hong told Zhuang the story, he recounted his father’s answer: “My son is already grown, he makes his own decisions! I can’t tell him what to do!”

  The plan hatched by the Hot Blooded Youth was to meet on Sunday, June 21, and protest outside the provincial government’s propaganda bureau; they would submit the petition the next day. For the first day of protest, the group planned to meet at eleven a.m. outside the block of offices. Zhuang rented a car and penned another open letter, this one to the Guangdong Provincial Government, about corruption in Wukan. He blew it up and pasted it onto a wooden board. On Sunday he showed up with a car full of supporters—mostly strangers whom Zhuang had coordinated with over QQ.

  Waiting for them, they encountered a group of Wukan Village officials, accompanied by a village security team, who had made the trip to Guangzhou to stop them. By Zhuang’s count, there were more than twenty. The village party secretary approached him. “Don’t do this,” he told Zhuang. “There’s a teahouse around the corner. Why don’t we go there and chat?”

  “Can we do it on another day?” Zhuang replied. “Today I’m busy.” He set up his blown-up open letter, leaning it against a fence. Village security officers gathered around him, arguing with him, telling him to leave, raising their voices. Zhuang argued back. “I am Zhuang Liehong!” he yelled at them. “I’m not afraid of you!” He held them off for two hours by himself, wondering if all the other members had forsaken him—the people he had arrived with were scared and had fallen back.

  And then, hours behind schedule, Hong Ruichao pushed his way toward Zhuang. “Where have you been?!” Zhuang demanded. “I’ve been here by myself!”

  “Lao Xiang!” Hong Ruichao responded, using a familiar greeting for a fellow villager. “I meant to be here earlier, but there was terrible traffic!”

  With Hong by his side, Zhuang felt emboldened. The pair pointed to the supporters who were hanging back and encouraged them to step up. To Zhuang, the day felt like an enormous victory.

  That night seven protesters stayed over in order to submit their petition on Monday. They had rented a room with only three beds, and when they arrived, Hong Ruichao threw himself across all three of them. “They’re mine!” he said, and his friends tried to drag him off, euphoric. The village chief, Xue Chang, called Zhuang’s cell phone, and Zhuang put him on speaker. “We’ll stop protesting when you give us back our land!” he yelled into the phone as his new friends shouted their support in the background.

  * * *

  • • •

  On that first trip to Guangzhou, Zhuang felt as if he had found his purpose. The protesters looked to him for guidance and valued his opinion. Young villagers looked to him for instruction, volunteering to help him gather evidence of land grabs. The day after he met Hong Ruichao, someone photographed Zhuang and the group of petitioners walking on a street in Guangzhou, smoking cigarettes and looking tough. Zhuang looks thrilled to be there. His clothes aren’t quite as hip as the others’—his baggy white button-down shirt is no match for their leather jackets and faded jeans. His hair sticks up unevenly, and he has a hint of a smile on his face while everyone else looks thoughtful and serious. Zhuang couldn’t help himself. He kept grinning.

  Looking back, Zhuang would not say he had been naïve. He knew that challenging the local government could have consequences, but the Hot Blooded Youth made him a better man. He learned how to use a computer, how to write for an audience, and how to inspire others to action. He felt himself taking hold of his fate, rising above his circumstances.

  From that time on, they went to Guangzhou every few months, always on the twenty-first, to try again to submit a petition. Every attempt to reach the petition office resulted in another shouting match with the local Wukan officials who showed up to stop them. Zhuang, still preoccupied with respectability, worked hard to balance his naturally fiery nature—his talent for shouting down local officials in the street—with research. His instinct was to do things by the book, to assemble evidence and build his case. Zhuang made a habit of going to Internet cafés, trying to understand how much land had been appropriated. Young Jianxing wandered around Wukan taking photographs of walled-off pieces of village land—farmland that lay fallow for no apparent reason—and forwarding them to Zhuang on QQ. They all went about their daily business at the shops, boats, and fish stalls where they worked, then chatted on QQ at night. Now when Zhuang returned to Wukan, people on the street knew him. They had heard about his petitioning. People grinned back and shook his hand. They called him brother.

  Zhuang used his budding computer skills, along with his new zeal for documenting conditions in his village, to create promotional material for the Hot Blooded Youth. He downloaded video software and made short films in which photos of Wukan swirled and faded in and out. For music, he recorded a karaoke version of Michael Jackson’s “Earth Song.” He rewrote the lyrics and sang about local corruption:

  My home village Wukan, you’ve lost the sunrise

  My beautiful home, you’ve been polluted

  After four hundred years of hard times

  Of selfless dedication

  In clouds of sentiment

  We were assaulted with no warning!

  * * *

  • • •

  The petitioning began i
n 2009 and continued for two years. It became less glamorous and more routine. The early cloak-and-dagger methods of Patriot Number One seemed almost laughable by the summer of 2011. Protesting was not such a big thing, it seemed. So Zhuang and his friends decided to try a new strategy, something a little more daring. They decided to organize a protest in the streets of Wukan Village.

  The Hot Blooded Youth worried that their age undermined their message. None of the older villagers would listen to a bunch of twenty-year-olds. It didn’t help that most of the members were shy when it came to public speaking. Zhuang was confident in an argument, but he developed a stutter every time he had to speak in front of a crowd. So Hong Ruichao invited an impish, deeply tanned villager named Yang Semao to help them organize. Yang was in his late forties, a former fisherman and a successful entrepreneur. He was a strong swimmer and had the energy to match Zhuang himself. He was one of the rare villagers who could be found jogging on the streets around the village—sweating in the humidity and dust as the occasional car roared past him. “I grew up by the sea, so my mind is as broad as the sea,” Yang told his young companions.