by Liu Zhenyun
Li Xuelian broke in on Wang’s long-winded oration:
“You can stop working on Qin Yuhe. Even if you talk him around, I won’t marry him a second time.”
“If not, how will you prove that your divorce was a sham? And how will you prove you’re not a Pan Jinlian?”
“I no longer want to prove those things,” Xuelian said.
“You’ve been trying to do that for twenty years, and now this year you’ve changed your mind? Who do you think will believe that?”
“I told you. I’ve seen the light.”
“How can you be so stubborn, Cousin? What you just said shows that you still plan to stage your protest. I’m telling you, forget about everyone else, just do it for me. Twenty years I’ve slaved away at this, you’ve seen that with your own eyes. I’ve done things I shouldn’t have done, all because of you; I’ve fallen down and picked myself up. Becoming a chief justice was not easy. If you don’t protest, I’ll keep my job. But if you go on this way, I could be fired, just like Chief justice Xun twenty years ago. My future lies in your hands.”
“If that’s the case, then you can stuff your heart back into your stomach. I’ll tell you again, no protest this year.”
“Cousin,” Wang said, on the verge of tears, “how can you look me in the eye and lie like that? We’re like brother and sister, and we ought to be able to have an honest, open conversation, don’t you think?”
“Who are you calling a liar?” Xuelian tensed. “I’m telling you the truth. Believe me or not, it’s up to you.” She picked up her bag from the step under the jujube tree. “You’re not going to believe me, no matter what I say, so I’m through talking. I’m going to my daughter’s. You can hang around here if you want, just be sure to shut the gate when you leave.”
She walked out the gate. Wang Gongdao ran after her.
“Wait up. What’s your hurry? I can drive you there, even if it’s only for a family visit.”
2
The new county chief, Zheng Zhong, had been in office only three months. He alone, among all the leading cadres, was unaware of how formidable Li Xuelian could be. That did not mean he’d come to office ignorant of the fact that she was a modern-day Little Cabbage, that classic thorn in the side of officials. By staging a protest, she had been responsible for the sacking of a string of officials, but the effect of this knowledge on Zheng was a feeling that the local officials were too timid, like the person who sees a snake once and has a fear of ropes for a decade. How, he wondered, could a simple peasant woman strike fear in and hold such sway over the lives of so many high officials? Allowing someone access to your weaknesses closes off all routes of escape and no one knows peace any longer. Stability is a good thing, as is harmony, but that is not the way to achieve either, just as concessions must not be made to terrorists, since they’ll keep upping the ante. Negotiations are not foolproof. In his eyes, the local officials had been too soft; they should not have backed down when firm measures were called for. There’s nothing wrong with letting an incident occur; if the terrorists want to open fire, let ’em. Granted, a mayor, a county chief, and a chief justice had been sacked when an incident occurred twenty years earlier. But that was precisely the reason not to be fearful now. Where the sacking of officials was concerned, history would not repeat itself, and the world’s most dangerous spots often turn out to be the safest.
Not only was Zheng Zhong aware of all this, he had personally dealt with a grievance as executive deputy chief in another county, and that experience had taught him a lesson. The situation back then had been far more serious than Li Xuelian’s protest. When the government and peasants were unable to reach agreement on compensation for two hundred acres of village land on which the county planned to build an industrial park, more than a thousand peasants, men and women, had staged a sit-in in front of the government offices. Ten rounds of talks with the peasants by County Chief Xiong had produced no agreement, as the ranks of protesters swelled. Xiong asked the mayor, Ma Wenbin, to send in the police. Ma’s response came in the form of three words:
“Resolve it peacefully.”
Under assault from above and below, a worried Chief Xiong was hospitalized, which shifted the responsibility for resolving the matter to Zheng Zhong, who knew that his boss was faking an illness to keep from getting stung. But Zheng also knew what to do. Seeking no instructions from above, he summoned the protest leaders to the government compound to open an eleventh round of talks. As soon as they entered the conference room, they were surrounded by a phalanx of police who, without a word, spun them around, snapped on handcuffs, put gags in their mouths, and manhandled them out a back door. When news reached the protesters that their leaders had been arrested, more than a thousand of them stormed the government compound, smashing windows and overturning three cars, which they torched. This was the moment Zheng Zhong had been waiting for. Without warning, the ransacking peasants discovered a massing of security forces on all sides, eventually numbering as many as four hundred uniformed policemen, some armed with loaded weapons, others with police batons. Zheng had mobilized all the police in the county. When the unavoidable clash broke out, he ordered the police to fire into the air; the protesters scattered like frightened birds and beasts at the sound of gunfire. Two retreating peasants were injured by stray bullets, but the revolt was quashed. The detained representatives were released, seven or eight of the leaders of the rampage were arrested and ultimately sentenced to three to five years in prison for “public disturbance,” “preventing the carrying out of official duties,” and “destruction of public and private property.” The government then paid the original price to the farmers for their land; the villagers accepted the amount offered, no one caused a stir, and work on the industrial park got underway. Injuries caused by the stray bullets led to a reprimand for Zheng Zhong. Mayor Ma was not well acquainted with Zheng before this incident, but he now found a lot to appreciate in his subordinate. Not, of course, the fact that gunfire had resulted in injuries, but that he’d had the guts to deal with the problem on his own initiative, without instructions from above. In other words, he had fearlessly taken on the responsibility. A year later, the chief of Li Xuelian’s county was reassigned, and Mayor Ma appointed Zheng Zhong to the post, despite the black mark on his record. When Justice Wang informed Zheng of the situation with Li Xuelian, he wondered glumly if Li was planning to stage another protest this year; Zheng was not concerned.
“Over twenty years,” Wang said, “that broad has become impossible to handle. The more she denies her desire to protest, the less I believe her. I can’t figure her out.”
“Then stop trying. Let her protest.”
Wang waved his arms frantically. “You’re new here. You can’t let her do that.”
“Where does the Constitution say you can’t protest?”
“She’s not lodging it in our county courts,” Wang explained. “That wouldn’t bother me. No, she’s taking her complaint to Beijing. Even that wouldn’t bother me, in most cases. But the National People’s Congress is about to take place. If she crashes her way into the Great Hall of the People again, everyone, from the mayor to you and down to me will be out of a job.”
Zheng Zhong smiled and repeated his theory that the sacking of a string of officials twenty years precluded its happening a second time. Wang disagreed:
“You may not want to hear what I’m about to say, Chief Zheng. I understand that things are different now, but that only means we can no sooner fathom what our superiors are thinking these day than what Li Xuelian is thinking. Are you one who believes that senior leaders feel bad about sacking cadres? China may lack a great many things, but not party cadres. The leaders can sack a slew of cadres and replace them with their own people.”
This was something Zheng hadn’t thought of. He sat back in his chair.
“They can sack me if they want,” he said. “I’m not crazy about this job anyway.”
“It’s not you who makes these decisions,” Wang sai
d anxiously. “You may not like your job, but what about the mayor?” He lowered his head. “And I’d like to keep mine.”
Seeing that Wang was not a devious man, Zheng could only laugh.
“Are you telling me that a countrywoman can effectively hamstring people at all levels of government?”
“That’s what I’m saying,” Wang said, “and she’s done it for twenty years. The problem is, we could deal with her if she were only one person. But she’s actually three.”
“How’s that?”
“We see her as a ‘Little Cabbage,’ her husband has labeled her a ‘Pan Jinlian,’ and she calls herself ‘Doue,’ after the wronged heroine in the famous play. See what I mean? Three people. All capable of making trouble, and none that can easily be separated from the others, which makes her superhuman. Like the legendary Madame White Snake, who perfected her martial arts skills, she’s been refining hers for twenty years, to a point where she’s almost supernatural.
“To pacify her,” he continued, “we’ve given her everything she wanted. I’ve personally given her seventeen or eighteen ham hocks. People give officials gifts all the time, but when was the last time you saw an official give a gift to a village woman? There are too many NPCs,” he groused, “a small one every year and a big one every five. This year’s special, a fifth-year congress where a new slate will be elected. She can’t be allowed to interfere with that. We must be careful.”
He sighed. “Everything’s turned upside down. If you’d told me that a countrywoman could one day become a matter of national interest, I’d never have believed you.”
“That’s because of how you people handled it,” Zheng Zhong said. “She is what you made her.”
“I’m just telling you where things stand, Chief Zheng. I’m a minor official. She won’t listen to anything I say. But you’re in a position to talk some sense into her.”
Zheng smiled. He knew that Wang was hoping to dump the problem on him to keep from getting stung himself. He may not appear devious, Zheng was thinking, but there’s larceny in his heart. But he didn’t let that bother him. Better to attack from another angle.
“Can we take a closer look at the woman to see if there are skeletons in her closet? Theft, for instance, or fighting, or gambling, anything like that.”
Wang saw where Zheng was going with this.
“I wish she did, but anything like that would have gotten her arrested long ago. That would have taken me off the hook, since it would have been the security people who had to deal with her.” He stopped and scratched his head. “We’ve watched her for twenty years. A countrywoman wouldn’t have the guts to commit a crime and she certainly doesn’t have money to gamble with.”
That was not Zheng’s view, however:
“Based on your description, it’s not that she wouldn’t have the guts, but that she has good character. Let’s look at it from a different angle. What if we work on the ex-husband, see if he’ll consider remarrying her. That way there’d be no need for her to protest any longer.”
“We’ve also tried that for twenty years; I’ve personally tried hundreds of times, but her ex is too pig-headed. He said he might have considered it if she hadn’t raised such a stink all these years, but not now, not if she was the last woman on earth. Besides, he found another woman, and they have a child who’s nearly twenty. To remarry Li Xuelian he’d have to first get a divorce. Not only that, Li Xuelian doesn’t want to live with him again. She wants to marry him so she can divorce him. In a word, she wants to hound him into proving that she isn’t a Pan Jinlian. Well, she hasn’t been able to hound her ex,” he said with a sigh, “but she sure has managed to hound us. Twenty years, Chief Zheng, there are times when I’m so depressed all I want to do is to quit this job and open a shop.”
Zheng Zhong laughed.
“If that’s what she’s done to you, I guess I ought to meet the woman.”
Wang jumped to his feet.
“That’s the ticket, Chief Zheng. Tell her whatever you have to in order to get through this month. Once the NPC has ended, she can protest anywhere she pleases. We can rest easy as soon as this critical moment has passed.”
Zheng Zhong shook his head.
“How in the world did this county produce a Pan Jinlian?”
“By accident,” Wang replied, “purely by accident.”
The next morning County Chief Zheng traveled to Li Xuelian’s village to meet her. Justice Wang went with him. Zheng wanted to have a talk with her not only as a result of Wang’s persuasive arguments, but also because Mayor Ma Wenbin had phoned after Wang had left to inform him that he’d be leaving for Beijing in ten days to participate in the National People’s Congress, and to remind him of a woman named Li Xuelian from Zheng’s county who had caused a commotion at the congress twenty years before and kept it up every year since.
“I’ll be in Beijing for the Congress,” Ma had said, “so let’s see that Li Xuelian won’t be.”
Zheng could have taken Wang Gongdao’s spirited warning to heart or not, but he could not and dared not ignore Mayor Ma’s phoned message. In any case, he wanted to meet Li Xuelian to see if she impressed him as supernatural in her ability to successfully hound every official in the chain of command for twenty years. But then he met her: an ordinary gray-haired, thick-waisted, soft-spoken woman from the countryside. She was surprised to see Wang Gongdao.
“Weren’t you here yesterday?” she asked. “Why are you back today?”
“That was yesterday, Cousin. Today’s different.”
He pointed to Zheng Zhong.
“This is County Chief Zheng. I didn’t have the standing to talk you around yesterday, so I’ve invited the county chief to come try.”
They sat beneath the jujube tree in her yard.
“Dear Sister-in-law,” Zheng began, “I’m someone who prefers to get right to the point, and so, to make a long story short, since the National People’s Congress will open in a few days, tell me if you plan to lodge a protest this year.”
Li Xuelian pointed to Wang Gongdao. “I told him yesterday I don’t.”
Zheng Zhong’s next question did not differ from those Wang had asked.
“And why is that?”
Xuelian’s answer also did not differ. “I hadn’t seen the light in the past. Now I have.”
Wang Gongdao smacked his palms together.
“The more you say things like that, the less assured I am. You say you’re not going to do it means you are.”
Zheng Zhong stopped Wang with his hand.
“Justice Wang doesn’t believe you,” he said to Li Xuelian, “but I do. Since you say you’ve seen the light, you can prove it with a letter of guarantee, what do you say?”
She hadn’t seen that coming.
“What’s a letter of guarantee?”
“You sign your name as a guarantee that you won’t stage a protest.”
“What good will that do?”
“If you go ahead and stage a protest, you’ll be in violation of the law.”
“Then I won’t do it.”
That gave Zheng paused. “You say you’re not going to protest, so why are you afraid to put it in writing?”
“I’m not afraid. It’s about more than this, and so was my reason. I don’t have to make an appeal for justice if I don’t want to, but I’m not going to put that in writing. Writing a guarantee is like an admission that I’ve been in the wrong. It’s no big deal to be wrong once, but that would mean that I’ve been wrong for twenty years.”
That too gave Zheng pause. This was no ordinary woman he was up against. What she said had not occurred to him.
“Dear Sister-in-law,” he was quick to respond, “it’s not as serious as you make it out to be. It’s just a formality.”
“A formality now,” she said, shaking her head, “but in the future, if anything happens, you could use that piece of paper to come after me.”
Zheng Zhong now realized that handling the woman was not going to be
easy. She was everything others said she was. She’d seen through his strategy.
“That’s not how it’s meant to be used,” he hastened to explain. “It’s intended to put people’s minds at ease. How are we supposed to come to an agreement if you’re free to say anything you feel like?”
Wang Gongdao took a form out of his briefcase; it had been filled in.
“We’ve written out the agreement. All you have to do is sign it in front of County Chief Zheng.”
He took a fountain pen from his coat pocket. “Sign this and I won’t bother you anymore.”
She shocked them by knocking the pen to the ground.
“I hadn’t planned on staging a protest this year, but you won’t leave well enough alone. So listen to me, I’ve changed my mind. I’m taking my protest to Beijing again this year.”
Zheng Zhong froze. Wang Gongdao picked his pen up off the ground and smacked it against the agreement in his hand.
“There, you see, the truth is out.”
3
Mayor Ma Wenbin censured County Chief Zheng to his face for exacerbating the dispute between the government and Li Xuelian. During his tenure as executive deputy chief in a neighboring county, Zheng had exacerbated the volatile situation of a mass demonstration at the government office building by farmers. He’d been correct in doing so then, but not this time. A countrywoman had staged a protest twenty years in a row, then surprised people by stating she would not do so this year. Whether she was being truthful or not, it was the first time in all those years that she’d taken the positive step of saying there would be no more protest. Even if she wasn’t telling the truth, she hinted at a desire to change the method and momentous nature of the protest, an incentive for them to lead her in a positive direction. But everyone, from the chief justice to the county chief had thrown cold water on that possibility by insisting that she was lying, and in order to turn her lie into the truth, insisting that she sign a pledge and bind herself legally to it. So what happened? They ruined something that had started out as positive, a desire to do the right thing. And how had it all started? By not trusting her. How do you expect someone to trust you if you won’t trust her? A dog will jump a wall if it has no choice. Their tactic backfired; they got the opposite of what they’d hoped for. The woman had told them there’d be no protest this year, but was forced to change her mind. Now they knew it would be harder than ever to turn her around. When a person wants something constructive, you are all working toward the same goal. But when that person digresses from you, then you must start from the difference, working from a divergent direction toward the same goal, and that means more work. More because of whom? Not because of the countrywoman. No, because of the people trying to work on her. The approach was flawed, and not just in its appearance, but in its essence, in its attitude toward the people. They won’t trust you if you don’t trust them. The way you approached the matter shows that you did not consider yourself a civil servant but a bureaucratic official. An even greater mistake in trying to resolve this matter was Zheng’s inability to see the big picture. In two weeks the National People’s Congress would convene, and once the countrywoman and an event of national importance came together, she would no longer be an ordinary countrywoman, though in our work we had treated her as one. After crashing the People’s Congress twenty years ago, she had witnessed the sacking of a string of officials who had dealt with her just as we are doing. Wouldn’t you think we’d have learned something after all that time? But politics is what really counts here. This year’s congress will differ from those that have preceded it, since it is time to vote in a new administration; the eyes of China and the rest of the world are on it. In previous years the woman disrupted an ordinary congress, but if she tries again this year and is successful, the political impact and ramifications will be extraordinary. In a word, it will be big news, especially given the Internet and the blogosphere. The whole world could know about it within a day, and we, like our predecessors, can count on being sacked, or worse, since China’s prestige will suffer in the eyes of people all around the world.