That night, when Xiao, Yao, and Pang briefed other Liaotie worker leaders about the conversation, they concurred with the decision. Workers from factories across the city had united behind them, and both the foreign media and the party leadership in Beijing were paying attention. It had taken the Liaotie workers years of hard struggle to get to this point, and they wanted to keep the pressure on until the government made real concessions.
The next morning, the government made its move. Yao Fuxin went out early to purchase goods to stock his convenience store and never returned. At first, no one knew what had happened. The police denied they had arrested him, and because party officials had ties to organized crime, his family worried that he had been kidnapped or worse. Xiao raced around the neighborhood, searching for his friend. He found his moped discarded on the side of a road, and a resident told him that he saw three men seize Yao and take him away in a car. None were wearing police uniforms, but Xiao decided the workers needed to act on the assumption Yao had been arrested. As the news spread, people responded with outrage. The worker leaders convened an emergency meeting at Liaotie that night, but there was no need for debate. They all agreed to push ahead with the next day’s protest—and make Yao’s release their top demand.
Few of the worker leaders went home after the meeting. Most stayed with friends or relatives, because they were worried police would try to break up the protest by rounding up all the organizers. Xiao bundled himself up in a thick cotton coat and hid in one of the factory’s abandoned buildings. He found an empty room on the second floor with a broken window that afforded a view of the moonlit street below, then curled up in a corner of the cold, dirty floor. His body ached when he woke at sunrise the next day and set out to lead the protest. “At the time, my mind was clear,” he said. “All I could think was I needed to get Yao out, even if it meant risking my own life.”
The turnout was even larger than it was the first day, when as many as thirty thousand had marched, and there was a new, angrier edge to the demonstration as throngs of workers demanded the release of one of their own. The protesters hoisted banners denouncing Yao’s arrest, and elderly workers wept as they sang “The Internationale” and cursed the party. Xiao and Pang rallied the crowd outside the public security bureau, and Yao’s twenty-five-year-old daughter picked up the megaphone and demanded the police come out and tell them where her father was. Antiriot and paramilitary police surrounded city hall again, and in a sign that party leaders in Beijing were worried, a team from the Xinhua news service was sent to the scene with instructions to file internal reports about the demonstration.
The day ended without any response from the government, so the workers resumed the protests the next morning. Xiao spent the night in the abandoned building again, but he knew the police would eventually find him if they wanted. When he returned home after the second day of protests, they did. Instead of arresting him, though, they took him to a meeting room in the local police station. Four men were waiting—the precinct police commander, a security official from Liaotie, and two city officials—and they made an unusual request. They wanted Xiao to take a vacation in Yunnan Province, on the other side of the country. They had already purchased plane tickets for him and his family, and they put them on the table in front of him.
“As long you take the trip and forget about Yao, we’ll let bygones be bygones,” one of the officials said. “If you’re short of money, that’s easy to take care of, too.”
Xiao told the men his conscience wouldn’t let him enjoy a vacation while Yao was in prison. “If you want to find someone else, fine, but I can’t,” he said.
The official gave him another chance. “We’re going to squash you if you don’t go. This is the last time we try to change your mind.”
Xiao knew that his family didn’t support what he had been doing and wanted him to stop. He knew that it would be tough for them to make ends meet if he were arrested. But he stood firm. The entire conversation at the police station lasted less than ten minutes.
It was cold and raining the next morning, and only a few thousand workers showed up for the protest. As they demonstrated outside city hall, a paramilitary police commander used a loudspeaker to declare a curfew under martial law and order them to disperse. Hundreds of armed officers suddenly moved in and split the workers into two groups. Xiao and Pang were in the smaller one. As they marched home, plainclothes officers grabbed Xiao and stuffed him in a car before the workers could react. The police had a tougher time getting Pang. The workers formed a wall around him, trying to protect him, but the police surrounded the group and slowly tightened the circle, picking up workers and tossing them aside like garbage. As the injuries mounted, Pang offered to just turn himself in.
THE DAY AFTER the arrests, the government announced a concession: it would investigate the charges of corruption and begin distributing half of the back pay owed the Liaotie workers. At the same time, though, it warned that “a tiny minority of people with ulterior motives” would be held responsible for the demonstrations. The Liaotie workers’ movement was at another crossroads. With Xiao, Yao, and Pang in prison, a second tier of worker organizers was supposed to take the lead and organize protests to get them out. But it never did.
One of the men who failed to rise to the occasion was Chen Dianfan, the worker who had proposed that the protesters carry the Mao portrait. A stocky Liaotie employee in his sixties, he had worked alongside Xiao, Yao, and Pang since the first days of the protests, and he was considered one of the most enthusiastic and reliable of the labor organizers. But after the arrests, he disappeared. Months later, workers told me they believed Chen had been paid off by police. He landed a comfortable job in the cafeteria of one of the Liaotie plants, at a time when men half his age were struggling to find work and other labor activists had been blacklisted. Workers treated him as a pariah. Faced with the prospect of abandoning his family and going to prison, or living with the shame of abandoning his friends and fellow workers, he appeared to have chosen the latter.
Several months after the protests, I called Chen and tried to arrange an interview with him, but he said that his phone was tapped and that he couldn’t meet me in person because he was under police surveillance. When I asked if it was true that police had paid him off, he replied, “I can’t answer your questions.” Before hanging up, though, he said he still supported Xiao, Yao, and Pang, but was too frightened to continue with the protests. “They were candid and straightforward men, and all they wanted was welfare payments and better treatment for our workers. They were treated unjustly,” he said. “But you have to understand, I came under intense pressure from above after they were arrested. I was told I would be sent to prison if I dared do anything similar.”
There were more protests in the weeks and months following the arrests in Liaoyang, many of them led by Yao’s daughter, who succeeded in keeping the case alive in the international news for a while. But the movement gradually petered out as police moved aggressively to divide and intimidate the remaining labor leaders. Many of the workers went into hiding, and some burned their copies of Pang’s letters, worried that they might be used as evidence against them. Eventually, police made a list of worker leaders, and visited them one by one. In each meeting, they made a similar offer: spy on your comrades for us, and your financial problems will go away. The workers I met all told me they refused, but the damage was done. The police had sowed mistrust and mutual suspicion. “For a while, we were united, but there’s no worker solidarity now,” one of the protest leaders told me. “We don’t trust each other. And we probably shouldn’t.”
As police targeted the worker leaders, the government also tried to assuage the deeper anger that drove the protests. Over the course of a year, it arranged to pay the Liaotie workers much but not all of what they were owed. The party also decided to sacrifice and make an example of Fan Yicheng and seven other factory officials. State media reported that investigators discovered a hundred million yuan unaccounted fo
r at Liaotie, or about $12.5 million, less than half of what the workers alleged had actually disappeared. Fan was convicted of smuggling and fraudulent dereliction of duty and sentenced to thirteen years in prison; three other managers also received jail time. The provincial governor who approved the Liaotie bankruptcy was later implicated in a bribery case and imprisoned. But Gong Shangwu, the party official who was accused of collusion with Fan and bragged about the absence of unemployment in Liaoyang, escaped punishment.
Prosecutors tried Yao and Xiao on charges of subversion in the winter of 2003, after a long delay in which officials made contradictory claims about what crimes the men had committed. In the end, the government settled on an allegation that Yao had joined the China Democracy Party after all, and that Xiao was one of his accomplices. Over the objections of international labor and human rights groups, Yao was sentenced to seven years in prison and Xiao to four years. For a while, the two men spent time in the same prison as Fan Yicheng. Pang was released before trial and died of cancer a few years later.
The party never again faced a threat from laid-off state workers as serious as the Liaoyang labor movement. In the following years, the government finished privatizing the bulk of state industry, shrinking the number of workers in the sector to what it considered a sustainable level. At the same time, it succeeded in riding out a wave of mass layoffs and preventing a national labor movement from emerging despite widespread worker frustration. In effect, the party navigated one of the most difficult political challenges in the transition to a market economy, one that has often tripped up other socialist governments. Key to its success was its tight control of the media, which prevented news of labor protests from spreading from city to city. But also critical was its deft touch at containing unrest, its readiness to take a hard line or offer concessions depending on the circumstances. Party leaders looked the other way and let managers and local officials plunder state industries, providing the incentive that kept privatization from stalling in the bureaucracy. They kept workers divided and distracted by carefully distributing minimal welfare payments. When protests presented a threat, the party moved quickly to intimidate workers by arresting their most outspoken representatives. And if that wasn’t enough, it sought to calm the public by arresting a few of its own.
In the years after the Liaoyang demonstrations, the party leadership boosted investment in the rust-belt provinces and set aside more money for welfare payments to laid-off workers across the country. Some workers have managed to adapt to the market economy and prosper. But many, especially in the older generation, continue to live in poverty and remain bitter about how the state has treated them. In Liaoyang, unemployment seems to have fallen somewhat, but the divide between rich and poor is even more obvious, and residents continue to complain about work conditions and corruption. The daughter-in-law of a senior city official is said to have made a fortune with real estate from the Liaotie bankruptcy. And painted on the side of one of the Liaotie factories that has resumed production is a new slogan: “Work hard today, or you’ll be working hard looking for a job tomorrow.”
When I last saw Xiao, he told me he never regretted turning down the government’s final offer to him. “How could I have faced the workers and my neighbors if I had taken the vacation?” he said. “Anyway, I didn’t do this for personal gain. I always knew there were risks.” Four years of prison had been hard on him and his family, but he remained unbowed. He said he was still pushing for Yao’s release and willing to fight for workers’ rights. At the same time, though, he seemed torn about what his sacrifice had achieved. “Some people say we failed because we were imprisoned,” he said, “but I think we succeeded.” He mentioned the payments to the workers at Liaotie, and the increased welfare benefits for laid-off workers nationally. “This is the result of our struggle,” he said.
But as we continued to talk, Xiao belittled the payments, saying they helped the government put off demands for more fundamental change, such as the right of workers to organize. “It’s nothing but a way to shut workers up,” he said. “The workers didn’t see their long-term interests. They were paid once, and that was it.”
So the party won? I asked. “The party was very successful,” he replied.
6
THE RICH LADY
When the bulldozer pulled up to his house—the house he built brick by brick with his sons, on land his father bought with thirty-six bolts of cloth from a middleman in an old Beijing teahouse—Liu Shiru was standing a good distance away, hiding behind the throng that had gathered to watch the demolition, and trying to avoid being spotted by his brother. It was a cold morning in the winter of 2000, and Liu shivered in a thick cotton coat as he studied the crowd. There were a few city officials, some men from the real estate company, a group of construction workers, and a handful of police officers. Several of his neighbors had bundled up in warm clothes and were also standing outside, but most residents had already packed up and moved out of the neighborhood. Liu’s house was one of the last on the street, and by day’s end, he knew, it would be gone, too.
Liu was a large, pear-shaped man, not yet fifty years old but almost bald, with only a thin, buzz-cut crop of graying hair. He worked as a salesman at a struggling electrical equipment factory, and he knew he would never be able to afford another home like the one he was about to lose. From the street, it looked like a small, simple structure, with no more than a room or two on each of two floors. But tucked behind the building was a traditional courtyard, with an apple tree and a grapevine trellis and extra rooms on the other side. The location of the house was what made it especially valuable. It sat in the heart of central Beijing, not far from the glitzy Wangfujing shopping district, on a quiet lane steeped in history. The street was a narrow alleyway known as a hutong, a Mongolian word imported into Chinese when Kublai Khan rebuilt the city and made it his capital. Liu’s particular hutong was named Suianbo, after a Ming Dynasty nobleman who lived there in the fourteenth century. More recent, distinguished party and military officials occupied some of the houses on Suianbo Hutong. One of them, Deng Tuo, a prominent writer and a former editor of the People’s Daily, committed suicide in his courtyard at the start of the Cultural Revolution.
Chen Lihua
Liu’s father purchased the original house at No. 10 Suianbo Hutong a year before the Communists came to power. He was an illiterate repairman at a local hospital who had managed to build a business making medical instruments, and the house was the result of years of sweat and savings. The family moved in soon after Liu, the youngest of five sons, was born. The early years there were difficult. Despite his humble background, Liu’s father was persecuted as a capitalist and forced to turn over his business to the state. But Liu clung to more pleasant memories of growing up in the hutong—the meals his mother prepared on the festival days, the bag of sand he tied to the branch of a mulberry tree in the courtyard to play at boxing, the warmth of family life before his family fell apart. Liu’s brothers got married in the house and moved into different rooms around the courtyard to raise their own children, the oldest of them not much younger than Liu himself. A lifetime later, after his brothers stopped speaking to him, Liu would smile as he recalled how he and his nephews and nieces used to chase one another around, clambering up trees and onto the tiled roofs of the buildings, filling the courtyard with laughter.
The idyll of Liu’s childhood ended when the Cultural Revolution began. In the summer of 1966, the party labeled homeowners members of the capitalist class and ordered them to turn in their property deeds to the government. Liu’s parents were frightened, and his brothers were busy at their work units, so at age seventeen, Liu submitted the certificates himself. The family began paying the government rent, and the government assigned two other families to live in the house with them. Two of Liu’s brothers were forced to move out, and after graduating from high school, Liu was sent away, too. Like many his age, he was sent to the countryside, where he spent the next eight years doing farmwo
rk. As the Cultural Revolution ended, he was assigned a job at a state coal mine. It was not until late 1989, more than two decades after he left, that Liu was allowed to move back to Beijing. By then, everything had changed. His father had passed away, and his mother had had a falling-out with his brothers. The government returned the deed to No. 10 Suianbo Hutong to the family, but there were squabbles over the property. Liu took his mother’s side in the family disputes, and before she passed away a few months later, she bequeathed the house to him. Though relations were strained, one of Liu’s brothers continued living in rooms on the courtyard’s south side, while Liu took over the rooms on the north side with his wife and three sons.
A few years later, Liu and his sons rebuilt the north building, adding a second floor. The original building had been falling apart, but there was another reason for the renovation. Liu was thinking of his two eldest sons, then in high school, and their marriage prospects. Many parents wouldn’t let their daughters marry anyone without an apartment. But there was a severe shortage of housing in Beijing, and an affordable place to live, especially near the center of the city, was almost impossible to find. Liu wanted to make sure there was enough room for his sons to stay in the family courtyard after they married. They could raise his grandchildren there, he thought, and maybe the laughter would return to No. 10 Suianbo Hutong.
Liu knew there could be a hitch in his plans. Beijing was changing quickly, and old hutong neighborhoods across the city were being demolished to make way for modern office towers, high-end shopping malls, and luxury apartment buildings. Such redevelopment lifted the value of prime downtown real estate. But for homeowners like Liu, that could be a curse as much as a blessing. Rising property prices attracted developers, and they could pay good money for valuable land. Much more often, though, they found a way to take it on the cheap. A year after Liu finished renovating his home, the hutong where his sister-in-law lived was slated for demolition to make way for a new complex of office buildings called Financial Street. She and other residents who owned houses in the construction zone never received an offer to buy their properties. Instead they were just evicted and assigned to new apartments on the outskirts of the city worth a fraction of their original homes. Altogether, some four thousand houses were destroyed and more than twelve thousand people were relocated. Liu followed the situation closely, and he worried the same thing might happen to his neighborhood.
Out of Mao's Shadow Page 18