Out of Mao's Shadow

by Philip P. Pan

  Zhang Xide

  Wang Xiangdong, one of the Wangying Village peasant leaders

  There was little doubt among the residents of Wangying Village who was behind the raid and what message it was meant to send. The most powerful man in Linquan County, the party secretary, Zhang Xide, was upset with them. A month earlier, a hundred villagers had traveled to the county seat in tractors and trucks and confronted Zhang outside his office, demanding a refund of illegal taxes that his underlings had collected. The villagers had already challenged his authority in late 1993 by going over his head and petitioning for help in Beijing. When the police stormed the village, officers went looking for the men who had led that appeal. All of them had fled, so police ransacked and trashed their homes, taking everything of value and smashing the rest. One of the men returned to find that they had even dumped a stock of rat poison into his grain silo, mixing it in with shovels and rendering a season’s harvest worthless.

  The party later investigated the events in Wangying Village and confirmed that Zhang ordered the police raid. But one official report after another declared he had acted properly. The party referred to the episode as the “April 2 Incident,” because in the official version of events, the police were sent to Wangying to rescue an officer who had been taken captive and lost his gun the night before. “The response to the April 2 Incident was timely and handled correctly,” the authorities said in an open letter to residents. “There should be no criticism. This should be fully regarded as positive. The county committee gave careful consideration and acted according to the law. On this subject…the provincial and local leadership have all given their full approval.”

  For years, the residents of Wangying Village lived quietly with this verdict, and few outside the remote and poverty-stricken community heard about the April 2 Incident. As the villagers buried their anger and suppressed their outrage, the police went unpunished and the party boss won a promotion. But in 2003, the story of what happened in Wangying Village was published in a literary magazine, and then in a book. Across the country, people shook their heads in sadness and frustration as they read about Wangying Village and the party boss Zhang Xide. The villagers, it seemed, had gotten the last word.

  A SHORT, SQUAT MAN with a receding hairline and small, narrow eyes, Zhang Xide was working in the party leadership of the city of Fuyang, not far from his old turf of Linquan County, when the story was published in the literary magazine. “You should read it,” one of his colleagues told him. “They wrote some terrible things about you.” At the time, he was vice chairman of the city’s People’s Political Consultative Conference, a ceremonial government body that did little more than hold banquets and convene meetings. The job gave Zhang access to a research library, so he ordered the staff to get him a copy of the magazine. At the time, he wasn’t very worried. The magazine was printed by a state publishing house, and the censors were pretty good at hiding the party’s misdeeds from the public, so how bad could it be?

  Zhang had spent almost his entire adult life serving the party in the rural counties around Fuyang where he was born and raised. At the age of fifty-eight, he could look forward to retirement on a government pension and back on a comfortable if unexceptional career in the apparatus. The places where he worked remained poor but he believed he had helped promote economic growth and improved the lives of the peasants in the area. His parents had been illiterate wheat and bean farmers, but he had made something of himself, and now he had a son who was a judge and a daughter who worked in the tax bureau. In many ways, he was a typical party official, one of millions of loyal and anonymous cadres who believed in the one-party state, benefited from it, and helped sustain it.

  So Zhang was understandably upset when he saw how he was portrayed in the magazine story, “The Slow Petition Road,” which was scheduled to be published as a chapter of the book An Investigation of China’s Peasantry. Near the start of the piece, the authors wrote that Zhang “bore undeniable responsibility and played an extremely dishonorable role” in the April 2 Incident. Then, it got worse:

  As for Zhang Xide, he was already familiar to everyone in Linquan County from television: He had a “five-short figure”—two short arms, two short legs and a short neck—and he liked to wave his hands when he spoke. The reports and speeches he delivered most certainly were written by his assistants. He could speak pretty well, but as soon as he departed from a prepared text, he sounded not unlike an uncouth lout. At one meeting, while emphasizing that birth planning workers must not allow births to exceed quotas, Zhang Xide waved his fist and babbled: “I’d rather see seven headstones than one extra head!” When he said this, everybody grimaced. This murderous and bloody sentence spread far and wide, and sent a chill down the spines of all who heard it….

  The fact that Wangying Village traveled en masse to petition in Beijing reverberated in Linquan County, and the county party secretary Zhang Xide panicked. His first thought was still not how he might calm the villagers’ intense dissatisfaction with their unbearable burden. Instead, he clearly still believed that high pressure or even suppression was the most effective way to put an end to the petitioning.

  The article told the story of the villagers’ campaign to seek redress against high taxes between 1993 and 1996—and of his efforts to stop them. With each page, Zhang grew angrier. He had no regrets about his tenure as the party chief in Linquan County. He felt he had done a good job, and he considered himself one of the best leaders the county ever had. Now he was being painted as a vulgar tyrant, held up for the nation to mock and condemn, and it was infuriating. He recognized the authors’ names. He had had a run-in with one of them before, and he was sure the writer was trying to get back at him. But there was more to his outrage than that. These writers had gone too far, he thought. Their article wasn’t just an attack on him, it was an attack on the Communist Party, on the political system that he had devoted his life to and believed had made China a great nation. The way they portrayed the party as incapable of responding to people’s concerns, the way they accused local officials of taking advantage of the peasants and covering up one another’s crimes, the way they depicted the police as thugs who engaged in torture—to Zhang, it was all an attempt to discredit one-party rule and pander to those who believed China needed democracy.

  “The book incites the masses by publicizing all these things,” Zhang told me after it was published. “It clearly has an anti-Party tendency…. It catered to this kind of thinking, that’s why it became so popular. This is all obvious.

  “I can’t understand it,” he continued. “Rationally speaking, during these years of reform and opening, there have been great changes. The planned economy has opened up, and there has been great progress in the environment for speech, in the construction of democracy and rule of law. What I can’t understand is why people fall for this book…. It’s clear that it rejects the Communist Party’s leadership.”

  After reading the article, Zhang flew to Beijing and went to the magazine’s offices. He tried to persuade the editors to retract the story. When they resisted, he went to see the editor in chief of the publishing house, and urged him not to release the book, or at least to revise it and edit his name out. He invited the editor to send people to Linquan County and see for himself if the book was accurate. He offered to open up the county’s archives and to cooperate fully with their investigation. But a few days later, the editor called him and said he had consulted with the book’s authors. They stood by the book and provided evidence to back up the Wangying Village story. And so the publishing house was standing by it, too.

  “I listened and was filled with anger,” Zhang said. “I told him, ‘See you in court.’ And then I hung up.”

  LINQUAN COUNTY SITS on the flatlands of central China between the Yellow and the Yangtze rivers, in the far northwest corner of Anhui Province. A rural backwater afflicted by sandy soil and frequent flooding, it is one of the most populous and impoverished counties in the nation, with nearly tw
o million residents who make on average barely $250 a year, less than a sixth the national average. The villages of Linquan, scattered amid the rice paddies and wheat fields, have a meager, disorderly look, and there is a quiet emptiness about them, because many residents make ends meet by spending part of the year working in cities hundreds of miles away. Yet the rhythms and traditions of rural life seem to resist change. Pearl S. Buck’s 1931 novel, The Good Earth, was set not far from Linquan, and in much of the county the peasants continue to till the land the way they did in the book—with their hands, simple tools, and the occasional ox.

  More than a half century ago, it was the anger and frustration of peasants in places like Linquan that fueled the Communist Revolution and catapulted Mao to power, much more than the party’s early efforts to mobilize industrial workers. Yet the party’s policies have always favored industry and the cities over agriculture and the countryside, where most Chinese live. When the party did focus on rural issues, Linquan and the other counties of Anhui felt the extremes. As many as eight million people died in Anhui during the Great Leap Forward, almost a quarter of the population. But the peasants in Anhui were also among the first to demand a return to household farming after Mao’s death, a change that Deng Xiaoping then endorsed and implemented across the country. By dismantling the communes, leasing land to peasant families, and reintroducing the profit motive, the party sparked an agricultural boom that lifted the national economy and fueled double-digit growth in rural incomes through much of the 1980s. In the 1990s, though, rural growth slowed, and the party’s long-standing bias toward the cities again weighed heavily on places like Linquan.

  The party has always categorized residents of the countryside as nongmin, or peasants, and maintained policies that treat them as second-class citizens. Peasants are forced to sell grain to the state at artificially low prices to keep food costs down in the cities, and their children sometimes must score higher on exams than urban kids to get into college. They make up a majority of the population, but the state invests less in the countryside and spends less on services there—only 20 percent of all health-care funding, for example. At the same time, the government limits the ability of peasants to move to the cities, requiring them to apply for permits and restricting or denying them access to urban schools, health care, and other social services, as well as many jobs. On top of it all, through the 1990s and beyond, peasants have been forced to pay higher taxes. City residents only began paying taxes in 1994, and only if their monthly income exceeded 800 yuan, or about a hundred dollars, but peasants—hardly any of whom earn that much—paid taxes no matter how little they made. During the 1990s, taxes grew faster than incomes across the countryside, and by the year 2000, a peasant paid on average four times more in taxes than an urban resident despite earning six to seven times less.

  The rising rural tax burden was the most conspicuous symptom of a political structure in which local officials never had to answer to the public. The party was a parasite, living off the peasants and giving them little in return and no way to fight back. Local officials raised rural taxes to boost their own pay, and in many places they spent the entire budget on salaries and administrative expenses with nothing left over to fund services. As a result, they demanded more fees from peasants who wanted to send their children to “public” schools. Many officials used tax money to finance projects they hoped would impress superiors and lead to promotions. But the projects were often ill conceived and wasteful—factories that never made a profit, palatial government buildings full of empty offices, roads that went nowhere. Even when projects did make sense, peasants were resentful because they had no way to know whether officials were spending their money wisely. In the late 1980s, some officials even began diverting funds meant for grain procurement to their boondoggles and paying peasants with IOUs.

  The demand for taxes continued to rise as party officials created new jobs for friends and relatives. The process began in the 1980s, when the nation’s 56,000 communes were dismantled and replaced by 96,000 townships, creating an entirely new layer of government between the counties and villages that would have to be financed with money from the peasants. Over the years, every level of the bureaucracy expanded faster than the rural population. At the township level, the ratio of officials to the rural workforce grew tenfold between 1982 and 2000. The rural party apparatus expanded so quickly that often there wasn’t enough money left over to pay the salaries of teachers and other civil servants.

  As taxation without representation swelled the ranks of local bureaucrats, peasants complained about how these officials ate and drank at public expense. The authors of An Investigation of China’s Peasantry tell a story in the book about party officials who ran up an enormous tab at a restaurant in Anhui. After several years, the restaurant sued for payment and ended up taking ownership of part of the township government building. It was the third time, the authors discovered, that the township had been forced to sell a public building to cover the restaurant bills of its officials:

  The fact of the matter is the vast countryside of China has become a gourmand’s paradise. Like a cloud of locusts, officials with their appetites in tow descend on the countryside and are infinitely inventive in coming up with excuses to eat and drink: dinners for inspectors, dinners for conferences, dinners for rural poverty relief, dinners for disaster relief; dine if you can afford it, and dine if you can’t; dine on credit, dine on loan…. To eat free has become a sign of status, an index of position. The quality of a dinner may determine whether or not a project is approved or a deal clinched, or whether a promotion is in the works. It has become part of the political culture.

  Nationally, the authors wrote in 2003, government officials spend $10 billion to $13 billion in public money every year on eating and drinking, enough to host four Olympic Games.

  Beijing tried to rein in waste by reducing funding for local authorities in the mid-1990s, but rural officials responded by spending villages and townships into debt and squeezing peasants for even more in taxes and fees. I once visited a village named Xiaoeshan in a remote and mountainous part of Sichuan Province, a town so poor it had no paved roads, one telephone, and limited electricity. Peasants there ate most of what they harvested, and by selling the rest, they earned about $25 a year each on average. But local officials demanded about $37 from each resident in annual taxes and fees. The only way to pay the taxes, residents told me, was to supplement their farm income by pulling their children out of school and sending them to find work in the cities.

  When peasants resist paying taxes, local authorities send in “shock teams” of officials to collect, and if cash is not forthcoming, the teams confiscate property—livestock, televisions, bicycles—often worth more than the amount owed in taxes. In the 1980s and through the ’90s, resentment against the rising tax burden and against the government’s demand that couples have no more than one or two children, fueled waves of riots and other violent clashes between peasants and party officials in the countryside. In some villages, peasants fashioned homemade bombs and destroyed the homes of local officials. Alarmed by the unrest, the party leadership tried in 1993 to set a limit on peasant taxes of 5 percent of average local incomes and issued a series of edicts ordering officials to stop levying arbitrary fees, but little changed. Local officials ignored the regulations or found ways around them, sometimes coming up with ingenious new tax schemes. In Linquan County, peasants were required to pay one fee if they slaughtered a pig, and another fee if they didn’t. In other counties, there was even something known as the “attitude tax”—a tax on peasants who resisted paying their taxes.

  WHEN THE WRITER Chen Guidi first met Zhang Xide in the summer of 1994, he didn’t think he was such a bad guy. On the contrary, the party chief of Linquan County made an excellent impression. He seemed more open-minded and honest than most party officials Chen had met in the countryside, more willing to speak frankly without worrying about the political ramifications or slipping into empty ideologi
cal jargon to protect himself. Chen was working for a party newspaper in Anhui’s provincial capital at the time, and he had traveled to Linquan to conduct interviews for an article about a local corruption case involving a businessman who had defrauded the county and escaped conviction by bribing the province’s top prosecutor and other officials. The story was a blockbuster but also a political minefield, and most officials would have been reluctant to discuss the subject. But not only did Zhang cooperate, he arranged for Chen to meet all the officials in Linquan he wanted.

  In some ways, Chen knew, Zhang was acting in his own interests. It was under his leadership that Linquan County had solved the case and arrested the crook, and such an accomplishment could boost his chances for a promotion. But the provincial prosecutor who accepted the bribe and overturned the case was an official of much higher rank. By speaking out, Zhang was risking his career. Yet he seemed genuinely unafraid. “He’s just the provincial prosecutor!” Zhang told Chen at a banquet he hosted for the writer. “He’s not a big player behind the scenes at all!” Chen wasn’t sure if this was bluster or daring, but he admired Zhang’s guts. He was also impressed that unlike many rural officials in Anhui, Zhang had attended university in Beijing, earning a degree in agriculture. Here was a party official with a future, Chen thought, someone with the confidence to take risks to get things done. “A lot of officials I met at the time were cowards,” Chen told me years later. “They didn’t like to take responsibility for anything. But Zhang seemed different…. I thought he was a very good county party secretary.”