The village had been blockaded for two days when Xue’s family got a phone call from an official in Shanwei, a prefecture-level city an hour’s drive from Wukan, one rung above Lufeng in the local administrative hierarchy. Xue Jinbo was critically ill and in the hospital, the caller told them. The police would send a car to pick up Xue’s wife and daughter on the outskirts of Wukan. Not knowing what to do, the two women collected his medical records and walked out to the street. A car pulled up, and the pair got in.
The road from Wukan to the county seat is indirect and full of potholes. And when the car carrying the two women finally got to the city, it did not take them to the hospital. It took them, instead, to the Meilihua (Beautiful Flower) Hotel. Mother and daughter were led into a hotel room with a circle of couches. A camera was rolling, and they seated the pair in the center of a circle of officials. The only person Xue’s daughter recognized was the mayor of Lufeng.
“Xue Jinbo has been charged with organizing an illegal gathering,” said an official from one side of the camera, reading off a sheet. “He has been charged with colluding with foreign powers.” They asked his daughter, Jianwan, questions about her father’s background, his interests, and his friends. It was a full half hour before Xue’s wife spoke up. She asked what had happened to her husband.
One of the officials took out a timetable. At such-and-such an hour, he read, Xue Jinbo was struck by an illness related to his heart. At such-and-such an hour, he received emergency treatment. At eleven p.m. on December 11, 2011, Xue Jinbo had died.
At first Jianwan didn’t believe them. Next to her, her mother started to cry, but Jianwan took out her cell phone to call her relatives in Wukan. When an official made a move to snatch it from her, she held it close to her body. “If you touch me,” she shouted, “I will sue you!” The videotape was still rolling. She called her relatives and told them to come to the city. It was one in the morning when they got there. It was two by the time the officials agreed to let Xue Jinbo’s family members view his body, as long as they handed over all their cell phones and cameras. They drove in a caravan to the mortuary. When they arrived, they found it surrounded by police cars. Inside, the number of police thinned out and were replaced by young people in street clothes, some of them armed with knives, some of them clutching brass knuckles.
It was three in the morning. The family were led into a back room of the mortuary, and the thugs filed in behind them. The room had a huge refrigerator in it. Someone opened a small door and pulled out a slab with a body on it, wrapped in plastic. When they unwrapped her father’s body, even from across the room, Brother Xue’s daughter could see the blood on his face.
* * *
• • •
The standoff in Wukan went on for thirteen days. On December 10, the day after Xue Jinbo was kidnapped, police cars came with water cannons and tear gas, but the villagers blocked the road. On the twelfth, the news about Brother Xue’s death made it back to the village. They set up teams to watch the roads, day and night, and alert the others when the police approached the village. Villagers contacted journalists who had visited Wukan in the past and did their best to sneak them past the police barricades. Everyone gathered in the square, outside the small pagoda with a tiered red tile roof, and cried. Led by Yang, crowds chanted about land and free elections. Banners asked the central government to help the people of Wukan, and village leaders were careful to emphasize the village’s continuing fidelity to the Communist Party. They demanded the return of the village land and focused their complaints on the corrupt local government. And then people started demanding the return of Brother Xue’s body. The protest turned into a wake.
Reporters from the Telegraph, the New York Times, Reuters, and the BBC all broke through the barricades. They set up a media tent and a communal kitchen as more people trickled in. Just down the road from the Wukan barricades, police set up checkpoints of their own. Fleets of boats prevented fishermen from leaving the bay, and police blocked any food or water from being transported into the village. Residents of neighboring villages started to carry in supplies on their backs.
The media coverage made Wukan a particularly hard case for local officials. In an internal speech that went viral on social media before it was censored, the party leader in Shanwei, Zhen Yanxiong, blamed foreign influence. “If you trust foreign media, then pigs can climb trees,” he said. “There’s only one group of people that really experiences added hardships year after year. Who are they? Government officials, that’s who.” But the attention worked. A few days into the siege, Yang Semao reported receiving conciliatory phone calls from the Lufeng government. Zhuang’s initial aim had been achieved—higher levels of government were starting to pay attention.
In the final days of protest, the deputy party secretary of Guangdong—the second-highest-ranking party leader in the province—was dispatched to negotiate with the villagers. According to the state-run media, he had called the demands of Wukan villagers “reasonable.” Their “extreme actions” would be forgiven if the villagers would agree to sit down with the government in good faith.
The standoff ended on December 21, and negotiations began. According to the villagers present, the deputy party secretary agreed, in the meetings, to release the village leaders still held in jail—including Zhuang—and to drop all charges. He agreed to return Xue Jinbo’s body and to launch an investigation into his death. The surviving twelve members of the negotiating council were given the authority to govern the village until an election could be organized in February or March. It was the first time in modern Chinese history that a protesting village had won this kind of compromise. Online, Western observers and hopeful Chinese activists spoke, tentatively, of a “Wukan Model.” Villagers started considering whether they wanted to run for election.
Zhuang had not been there for the barricade. He had spent twenty-one days in the Guangzhou prison, and by the time he got out, the siege of Wukan was over and his friend was dead. The village had won. Zhuang found it was possible to feel elated and brokenhearted all at once. He figured it was simple luck that while Brother Xue had been beaten, he had escaped unscathed. Maybe Brother Xue had run into a particularly sadistic prison guard. Maybe someone had paid the other inmates to rough him up and things got out of hand. Torture, in Chinese prisons, wasn’t unheard of. The Guangdong deputy party secretary had agreed to investigate Brother Xue’s death, but nothing would come of it. Zhuang, and Xue Jinbo’s family, would never find out what happened. Zhuang supposed that Brother Xue had sacrificed himself for the dream of what Wukan Village might one day be—its orchards restored, waters clear, and its villagers free and unified. He did not worry, yet, that the dream had died in that prison alongside Brother Xue.
9
Little Yan
小燕 / Xiăo Yàn
1986–2013
When Zhuang’s friend Hong Ruichao was kidnapped, his girlfriend promised, in a moment of passion, that she would wait for him however long it took. Little Yan had no such inclination. She had been there when Zhuang got arrested. She had watched the police drag him out of the hotel room kicking and yelling. She sat in the police precinct and answered their questions. When they finally agreed to take her home, she called through the door to her sister in their home dialect, and one of the men had growled at her, “Speak Mandarin.” They had tromped through her little home in heavy boots.
Little Yan had known Zhuang for less than a year. She respected his resolve, on the one hand. But she was practical. Women, she thought, can’t dwell on injustice or past humiliations. They are responsible for day-to-day survival—getting food cooked and children taken care of. Women aren’t allowed the same amount of outrage.
When Zhuang got out of jail, he heard about Hong Ruichao’s romantic moment. He asked Little Yan if she would have done the same as Hong’s girlfriend. “I told him, well, if he had been inside for a long time, I wouldn’t have waited for him.
My family would have opposed him,” Little Yan told me. “I was just telling the truth! It didn’t sound that good, but it was honest.”
Little Yan had grown up in a village even smaller and more impoverished than Wukan. She had been born on a farm in Guangxi Province, a neighbor to Guangdong. She was tiny from the start, and pretty, with an exceptionally flat face, clear eyes, and a jaw set in a determined but almost imperceptible underbite. Her parents named her Xiao Yan, or “Little Sparrow.”
Little Yan was the fourth baby girl in the family; her mother had wondered, as she gave birth to daughter after daughter, if the family was cursed. She had stacked her first four pregnancies one after another, each new birthday not much more than a year after the last. But after Little Yan, Chen Fengxian slowed down, waiting until the eldest could be more helpful on the farm. Her last three daughters were all born with the barest amount of breathing room between pregnancies, two years apart. She had seven girls in all—and no boys. The other women in the village were kept busy giving her pitying looks.
Girls, in Guangxi and Wukan alike, were undesirable. Thousands of years of tradition lay behind the distaste. Girls would eventually move in to another household, and it would cost money to get rid of them. It didn’t matter what the government said, girls would not be there to look after their parents when they grew old. Boys were more helpful. A boy was responsible for his family. A grandchild would belong in the home of his paternal grandparents. The preference was so strong that both Little Yan and Zhuang grew up with aunts and female friends who had been marked with names like Zhao Di, “Looking for Little Brother,” or Lai Di, “Little Brother Is Coming.”
It was no one’s fault, Little Yan thought. The preference for men was society’s fault, and she accepted the reality. And her household full of sisters had its advantages. Although she had been brought up to feel no claim on her home—women usually left when they were married—no brother was born whose status outstripped her own.
Little Yan was in the curious position of being a woman in a rural village where women had little value, but in a family dominated by women. Growing up, it was always Little Yan’s mother who dictated what was grown on the family’s land. Her mother, in fact, dictated almost everything in the household. If Chen Fengxian (whose given name means “Fresh Breeze”) told you to do something, you did it quickly and without complaint. Little Yan liked the pace of the countryside, but she never felt completely free. She was always bending her will to accommodate her mother’s. Chen Fengxian was laoda, the boss.
Little Yan’s mother was a model of practical womanhood. She insisted her daughters learn the imperative of eating bitter—a Chinese phrase for an ability to endure hardship. She operated according to the subsistence logic of a lifelong farmer and made sure everything, including her daughters, was put to its best use. After Chen Fengxian realized how much they could save if they didn’t buy vegetable oil, the family started cultivating peanuts. With a family peanut crop, Chen Fengxian could cook for all nine family members and not spend a penny on oil. The girls would pick the pods off the plants and hang them around the farmhouse, drying them. Then the peanuts, shells and all, would be spread outside in the sun, drying again before the family would shell the peanuts and press them into oil. At certain times of year, the little Guangxi farmhouse was draped and drowning in peanuts.
In addition to peanuts, the family grew its own vegetables. If there was excess, Little Yan’s father would take it to the local market, biking the uneven roads down the mountain. The only purely commercial endeavor her parents undertook was the raising of pigs. At any given time on the farm, a few enormous pigs were eating trash and getting fat enough to be taken to market on the outskirts of a nearby city. The money from pig sales went to pay the girls’ school fees, at least until the eldest went to work in the city and started sending money home.
* * *
• • •
Little Yan’s father was the softer of her two parents. He had gone far enough in school to be a village teacher, but Little Yan’s mother had no patience for that—a teacher could not make enough money to support and feed their growing family. And with her growing tribe of females, Little Yan’s mother could not manage the farming by herself. So Little Yan’s father stayed home, working in the fields until his skin was cracked and leathery and dark from the sun.
Even as the rest of the village shook their heads at the long line of daughters, Little Yan’s father loved them. He insisted that all seven go to school. He did not expect to turn out seven doctors and lawyers, his imagination did not stretch that far, but he hoped for someone to follow in his footsteps and become, maybe, a teacher. He did not want his daughters to work in the fields. He did not want to marry them off to other people’s families and never see them again. So he sent them to school. The village was so small that, by the time they reached middle school, they were sent to the closest town. They lived in dorms and walked two hours home on weekends. The family ate vegetables and rice most nights, but on the weekends Little Yan’s father would buy meat. He worried about the meals the girls were getting in their school dormitories.
Little Yan’s hometown lies near the city of Hezhou in Guangxi Province, which, in turn, lies to the west of Guangdong, bordering Vietnam. It is mountainous and wet, a frontier with a reputation for beauty and wildness that runs hundreds of years back into imperial Chinese history. She grew up on a green slope, the land below threaded with rivers and punctuated by karst rock formations that rise inexplicably out of the landscape in Seussian, forest-covered peaks. At the time of Little Yan’s birth in 1986, Guangxi was almost entirely devoid of industry. People in the province farmed or worked in manganese mines; even today Hezhou’s biggest industry is forestry. China’s economic miracle didn’t make it to the province until Chinese tourists with disposable income started showing up in Guangxi’s more pristine corners. Places like Guilin, where the Li River meanders around rounded peaks, grew rich on tourism. Little Yan’s village, where fields were planted into the side of a mountain, had no such luck.
News of China’s economic changes arrived in the village in rumors and gossip. Land there would never be worth much—although the village was almost the same distance from Guangzhou as Wukan, it was a world away from the sprawling influence of the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone. Her parents’ lives kept to the same rhythm it had had in her childhood. Little Yan’s eldest sister left in the late 1990s, looking for work in a nearby city and making the family’s first tentative steps into the wider world. Some of the sisters would leave for good and send money home when they could. Others would end up back in the village. No one from the village expected to turn out a factory boss or successful entrepreneur, and no one came back truly rich.
Out of all the sisters, Little Yan believed she was the least extraordinary. She spent her childhood lost in the din of her three older siblings. She did not excel at school the way her younger sisters did. She was tiny and quiet; she didn’t fight with her sisters. She was helping clean, cook, and pick peanuts as soon as she could take direction. She started working so young that she cannot remember what her earliest responsibilities were. Later she did everything. She carried water, tended to pigs, picked peanuts, hung peanuts up to dry, pressed peanuts into oil, and studied in her spare time. It sometimes seemed as if half of Little Yan’s childhood was spent preparing peanuts.
If Little Yan shared Zhuang’s sense of predestination—that she would live a different life, somewhere far from home—she felt none of his pride of origin. She didn’t grow up wanting to impress anyone. She felt no drive to rebel against the realities of her life; rebellion wouldn’t get her very far anyway. There had never been any question that her mother and father would make all her most important decisions.
That didn’t mean Little Yan was weak. She had her own, quietly kept opinions. She was not dumb or easily swayed when she had made up her mind. She had grown up taking care of herself. She
hoped for a small life that was more comfortable than her mother and father’s, with children and some small amount of money. She kept her expectations reasonable but resolute.
As Little Yan finished all the available school in the area, the family received pamphlets for newly opened vocational schools. She tested into a handful of schools, and they vied for her tuition, promising secure jobs and good salaries in the future. Her parents sifted through the choices and considered what would suit her best. Her father decided that she would follow in his footsteps and study to become a teacher. Little Yan was not scholarly enough to become a good teacher for older children, but she could take care of younger children. She was reliable and hardworking. She could teach preschool. It would be her best use. So they signed her up for a program that would prepare her to play educational games, sing children’s songs, and keep everyone safe. At the beginning of the semester, her parents put her on a bus heading out of the village.
* * *
• • •
In Guangxi Province, vocational schools have become big business. Subsidized by state government, the schools train rural students to work with military-style precision. They take orders from industry in coastal cities and offer a supply of laborers trained in whatever jobs are in demand. The schools focus on practical skills and “moral development.” In Guangdong, the students of certain vocational schools—those aimed at factory work—were in high demand. A vocational school graduate was considered cheap, efficient, and more manageable than a migrant worker who had arrived on his or her own. Guangxi Province was sending tens of thousands of graduates to factory towns every year.
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