The first hint that all was not as it seemed came the next day, when Chen encountered a crowd of peasants outside the Linquan County courthouse. He asked them what was going on, and they explained they were protesting the arrest of fellow villagers. Then they handed him a stack of papers. It was the summer of 1994, not long after the April 2 Incident, and the peasants were from Wangying Village. The next day, Chen asked Zhang about the protest. The party boss laughed dismissively. “The peasants are running wild,” he said, complaining that they were always petitioning the government about one thing or another. Chen made a joke, too, and the conversation moved on. He continued working on the Linquan fraud story, filed away the papers from the villagers, and forgot about them.
A few months later, after the first part of his report on the Linquan corruption case was published, Chen received a late-night phone call from Zhang. The party boss sounded like a different person, nervous and timid. His voice was shaking as he told Chen that people were furious about the article, and that his job was in jeopardy. Even though he had been given an advance copy of the report and cleared it, Zhang pleaded with Chen not to publish the rest of it and to return any evidence that he had signed off on the article. Chen was upset. By backing down, Zhang was leaving him and his newspaper vulnerable to discipline by the propaganda department. “If you take the materials back, that’s like kicking me when I’m down,” Chen complained. In the end, the newspaper ignored Zhang and published the rest of the report, and Zhang saved his job by denouncing it. Chen concluded that Zhang was an ordinary official after all, more concerned about his career than the truth, and after some time, he forgot about him.
Six years later, in 2000, Chen and his wife, Wu Chuntao, began conducting research for a book about the peasantry. The couple lived in the provincial capital, but both had been born to peasant families. Chen was a native of Anhui, a tall, serious man with sharp features who had once labored on the docks of the Huai River. At fifty-seven, he was the more accomplished writer of the pair, the author of an award-winning book about pollution of the Huai, as well as a few plays and novels. Wu had also distinguished herself as a writer, but primarily in local literary circles. She was twenty years younger than him, a small, affable woman with a youthful face and a gentle manner. They met in a writing class and had been married for nearly a decade when they had a son in March 2000, and saw a young peasant couple in the maternity ward make a devastating decision. The man had brought his wife to the hospital because she was bleeding, but doctors would not deliver their child unless they paid 3,200 yuan, or nearly four hundred dollars, much more than they could afford. Forced to check out, they returned to their village, where it only cost 200 yuan to deliver a boy and 100 yuan for a girl. A few days later, Wu heard an anguished cry in the next room. The woman’s bleeding had continued, and she had been rushed back to the hospital, but it was too late. Both she and her baby died, and her husband was banging his fists on the floor in grief. It was then that Chen and Wu resolved to write An Investigation of China’s Peasantry.
They began to hear stories about Linquan County soon after they started—about the punishing taxes that peasants had to pay, about an official who lived so well he hired nine nannies and maids, about a party boss who drove around in a Mercedes-Benz. Chen recognized the name of the party boss immediately—Zhang Xide—and then he remembered the papers that the peasants had given him outside the courthouse. When he dug them up and finally read them, he was moved by the plight of the residents of Wangying Village, and he realized just how wrong his first impression of Zhang had been.
When the couple finally visited Wangying Village in January 2001, the peasants were reluctant to talk. Though more than six years had passed since the April 2 Incident and Zhang Xide had long since moved on, the villagers were still afraid of provoking the government, and they doubted this couple from the city could do much to help them. But Chen and Wu persisted, slowly winning their trust. When villagers expressed concern about being caught talking to them, the writers drove them to another town and put them up in a hotel. When people important to the story were away working in the cities, the writers tracked them down or arranged to meet them back in the village on other trips. The couple collected a stack of documentary evidence—diaries, official reports, tax receipts. Gradually, over the course of eight visits to Wangying, they pieced together the story of the village’s tax revolt.
THE TAX REVOLT began with a television set. In the autumn of 1993, a party “shock team” was collecting taxes in Wangying Village when an elderly woman refused to pay a new seventy-five-cent fee. The officials responded by seizing her television. That year, the villagers made an average of about thirty-four dollars for a year’s labor in the fields, less than usual because of a drought. But local officials reported figures four to five times higher to impress their superiors and demanded a total of about twenty-one dollars from each villager in taxes, far above the national limit of 5 percent of the average local income. The incident with the television set was just the latest outrage, and as word of what happened spread, residents began swapping stories about similar abuses and sharing information about their tax burdens. Three young men in the village, all of whom were surnamed Wang, emerged as leaders of a campaign to appeal for help. They began by taking their complaint to the township that governed their village, and when they were brushed off there, they moved up the bureaucracy and tried the government in Linquan County. After they were rebuffed again, the three Wangs decided to bring the village’s problem to Beijing.
Chinese use the word shangfang to describe the act of petitioning a higher authority for justice. The phrase literally means “upward visit,” and the practice has been a part of the nation’s political culture for centuries if not millennia. For much of Chinese history, it referred to an appeal to the emperor or one of his ministers to right the wrongs committed by a lower official. Today, shangfang continues in slightly modified form. Many Chinese believe they have a better chance of winning redress of grievances by directly petitioning a higher level of the party than by filing a lawsuit because they know the party controls the courts and is above the law. The modern-day version of the imperial appeals bureaucracy is a system of what the party calls “Letters and Visits” offices. Almost every state and party organ in China has one, and the busiest ones are in Beijing. Huge numbers of petitioners from across the country converge on the capital every year clutching sheaves of papers outlining the injustices they have suffered. Many of these people end up living in slums and camping outside the Letters and Visits offices, which are usually located on backstreets away from the gaze of tourists. Their grievances are varied but they share a common hope—that an upright party official will somehow see their complaint and intervene on their behalf. It almost never happens, but that doesn’t stop the masses from coming. They stay in Beijing for months, years, even decades, because they refuse to give up or because they feel they have nowhere else to go.
The three Wangs joined the throngs of petitioners in Beijing in the winter of 1993 after the villagers took up a collection to pay for the six-hundred-mile train journey. In the capital, they lodged complaints at the Letters and Visits offices of the Central Committee, the State Council, and the Ministry of Agriculture. At each office, they presented bureaucrats with evidence of the taxes paid in Wangying Village, and the bureaucrats promised they would investigate. The official at the Agriculture Ministry went a step further, giving the men a letter endorsing their complaint to deliver to provincial authorities in Anhui. When the men went to Anhui, officials there read the letter and gave them another one addressed to officials in Linquan County. Armed with the two letters supporting their position, the three Wangs led a group of three hundred villagers back to the government offices in Linquan County, optimistic that their tax problems would soon be resolved. What they didn’t realize was that the Letters and Visits offices had little real power and often gave out such letters just to get petitioners to go home. The Linquan County officials
who met with them, on the other hand, understood this, and they were noncommittal about the peasants’ complaints. One expressed skepticism and said the county wouldn’t be able to function if it cut taxes to the levels indicated in the letters. Frustrated, the villagers demanded to see the county party chief and refused to leave until they did.
Hours later, just before dusk, the residents of Wangying Village caught their first glimpse of the most powerful man in the county. They were camped outside the government building when Zhang Xide arrived by car and walked over to them. The peasants quickly surrounded him, and many got down on their knees in supplication. They told him about the illegal taxes in their village exceeding the 5 percent limit, and showed him the letters they had obtained in Beijing and the provincial capital, Hefei. At first, Zhang defended his record, saying he had not raised taxes. But the peasants wouldn’t let him leave and pressed him to read the letters, which he did, slowly. He did not look surprised by what he read, nor did he appear nervous about the emotional crowd around him. Finally, Zhang looked up and spoke again. “If the township increased the peasants’ tax burden, I’ll ask them to return the money to you,” he said. The three Wangs asked him to put it in writing, and Zhang scribbled a note for them.
“The masses from Wangying Village have petitioned seeking the return of funds for village administration collected in excess,” it said. “Please work diligently, and return all of the funds collected in excess according to the agreed amount in a timely fashion.”
The wording was vague, but the villagers were elated. “We believed we had obtained an imperial order from the county party secretary,” one of the petition leaders, Wang Xiangdong, recalled. “We thought the money would be returned to us for sure.”
Over the following weeks, local officials went through the motions of conducting an audit in Wangying Village. A few tax payments were refunded, and a few village officials were fired. But they refused to return the rest of the money. Then the three Wangs ran into problems. One lost his job in the township land bureau. The other two were jumped by thugs and roughed up after they were summoned to a meeting with township officials. The villagers concluded that township officials were exacting revenge on their representatives and resisting Zhang’s order, and about a hundred of them went to see him again, intercepting him on the steps of the county’s party headquarters as he was going in for a meeting.
At first, they recalled, Zhang tried to brush aside their complaints, saying he had already directed the township officials to return their money. “If they won’t do it, what can I do?” he said. “I can’t control them.”
But the peasants kept pressing him. Wasn’t he the county’s party chief? Didn’t the township officials report to him? Couldn’t he fire them if they refused to return the taxes? The peasants wouldn’t let him leave, and suddenly, Zhang lost his temper. “What do you think you’re doing?” he said to the group, raising his voice. Then Zhang told them flat out that he wouldn’t return the taxes. “I’d rather lose an arm than return the money!” he said.
The peasants were surprised, and some threatened to return to Beijing and file a complaint against him. “If you can make it to Beijing, then go!” Zhang shot back. “If you have the guts to go to Beijing, then go!” The party boss was furious and challenged the peasants to make trouble, saying that would only make it easier for him to punish them. “Come over here!” he shouted. “If you have the guts, come over here!” Zhang took out his cell phone and called his police chief. Within minutes, a large group of officers arrived and forced the peasants out of the party compound.
The violent police raid on Wangying Village that became known as the April 2 Incident occurred just a few weeks later. Over the next year, conditions in the village grew more desperate. Zhang issued arrest warrants for the three Wangs, and two of them were caught after traveling to Beijing again and petitioning for help at one of the Letters and Visits offices. The third continued to lead groups of villagers to Beijing to complain about Zhang’s abuses but their appeals were ignored. After all, Zhang was the party’s man in Linquan County.
In October 1995, seventy-four residents of Wangying Village and forty-six peasants from elsewhere in Linquan County traveled to Beijing again and staged a public protest by kneeling in Tiananmen Square. That same month, another peasant from Linquan upset about the confiscation of his land to build a police station committed suicide by jumping from the roof of a shelter run by one of the Letters and Visits offices in Beijing. The two incidents finally led national party leaders to order a more impartial investigation into the events in Linquan. This time, the party agreed that the villagers had been forced to pay too much in taxes, and acknowledged that “extreme behavior by a small number” of police officers during the April 2 Incident “hurt the feelings of the masses.” The three Wangs were cleared, and some of the tax money was returned. But the party again stood by Zhang Xide, and promoted him to a higher-paying position in the nearby city of Fuyang.
The residents of Wangying Village saw Zhang one last time before he left the county. The news of his imminent departure had spread quickly, and a crowd of as many as five thousand peasants came to settle old scores on one of his last days of work in March 1996. Some were seeking refunds of taxes they had paid, worried that the new party chief would refuse responsibility for Zhang’s excesses. Others just wanted to vent their anger, about the torture they had suffered at the hands of the police, or the abuses committed in the name of the one-child policy. When the peasants didn’t find Zhang at party headquarters, they forced their way past a security gate into the leafy residential section of the party compound and gathered in front of his five-story building. He lived in a three-bedroom apartment on the top floor, and he must have heard the people assembling below. The crowd shouted for him to come out, and finally, Zhang showed himself.
“I’ve already resigned,” he told the peasants. “Go deal with the other officials.”
But the crowd pressed in on him, shouting and cursing. The bravado that the villagers had seen before was gone now. Zhang was alone and surrounded, and he looked smaller than they remembered, almost pitiful. None of his colleagues at party headquarters came to his aid. As Zhang tried to walk away, there was a scuffle. A few of the peasants slapped him, and he fell to the ground. Finally, a team of police officers rushed over and dragged him into another courtyard, locking the gate behind them. The peasants followed, knocking down the wall and rushing in. But Zhang was gone. He had slipped away, out the back.
THE STORY OF Wangying Village was one of several told in An Investigation of China’s Peasantry, and hardly the most damning. There was also the profile of Ding Zuoming, a peasant who was tortured and beaten to death by police after leading a decade-long campaign against illegal taxes and fees in his village. There was the case of Shen Keli, an idealistic party official devoted to fighting poverty who became a village tyrant. There was the tale of Zhang Guiquan, a corrupt official who murdered four peasants who had tried to audit his accounts. And then there were all the party officials who tried to cover up these crimes. Amid this cast of characters, Zhang Xide came across as only a minor villain. But a few weeks after the book was released, he filed a defamation suit against the authors and their publisher, accusing them of libel and demanding a public apology and about twenty-five thousand dollars in damages.
Published in December 2003, An Investigation of China’s Peasantry was an immediate hit. Interviews with Chen and Wu appeared in newspapers and magazines across the country, and the authors were booked on the major television talk shows. Their gritty portrayal of rural conditions found an eager audience among city readers, many of whom knew little about the countryside and saw peasants only as an uneducated mass of cheap labor. The book became a bestseller, beating out the sex novels, get-rich-quick guides, and other fluff that dominates Chinese bookstores. The first print run of one hundred thousand copies sold out within a month. The book was a success because Chen and Wu gave readers something they rarely saw
—and the censors rarely allowed: an honest look at some of the darkest aspects of party rule, complete with the names of officials and the details of their crimes. The authors were careful to praise the efforts of the party leadership to reduce the rural tax burden and improve the lives of peasants, but they also declared their policies a failure and placed the blame not on economic conditions or natural disasters, as the party often did, but on the political system and its inability to curb the abuse of power by rural officials.
As the book became a media sensation, the propaganda czars decided it was too much. Less than two months after it was released, as another session of the National People’s Congress was opening in Beijing, the authorities prohibited any further coverage of the book in the media and ordered the publisher to stop printing new copies. The publisher complied, but the ban came as the book’s sales were gaining momentum, and pirates quickly stepped in to satisfy demand, printing and selling as many as seven million more copies across the country. Even party officials wanted to read it; sales were brisk at the hotels in Beijing where delegates to the National People’s Congress were staying.
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