BOOKS:
China's Dirty Little Secret

By Samantha Sault

Samantha Sault on Will the Boat Sink in the Water? The Life of China’s Peasants by Chen Guidi and Wu Chuntao.

China’s magnitude and mystique — and its most confounding government — bewilder Westerners. One who has never visited can experience through photographs and films only a pale reflection of the magnificence of the Great Wall, the congestion of the bustling cities, or daily life under the Chinese Communist Party (ccp) government. But the hardship of peasant life in China has been particularly shrouded by the country’s growing potential as an economic superpower and the media’s inability — due to the ccp’s continuing cover-ups — to capture the realities of rural life. With Will the Boat Sink in the Water? The Life of China’s Peasants, award-winning Chinese journalists Chen Guidi and Wu Chuntao add their voices to a growing body of work aimed at opening the world’s eyes to the suffering of China’s peasants.

The husband-and-wife team is well equipped to investigate the lives of the peasant population, as both grew up in poverty in rural China. Chen Guidi, in fact, spent his childhood in Anhui Province, a destitute locale central to their investigation. John Pomfret, then West Coast correspondent for the Washington Post, notes in his introduction that the government banned foreigners from visiting regions such as Anhui to hide the “widespread misery” of the peasants. What are everyday occurrences in rural China would be considered dreadful tragedies by Westerners and their governments. Little wonder, then, that Chinese authorities have routinely hidden these abhorrent incidents from the media and the world.

Guidi and Chuntao detail the peasants’ suffering in this dismal exposé of the local corruption and crime that is rampant throughout rural China, and they strategize solutions for change. The fact that the Propaganda Department of the Central Committee quickly banned their book is evidence that the authors make a strong case for what they describe as “the vicious circle that ensnares the peasants of China, where unjust taxes and arbitrary actions — or total inaction — sometimes lead to extreme violence against the peasants.” Guidi and Chuntao illuminate this injustice with snapshots of individual peasants and villages and the media’s response to village incidents. The result is a vivid mosaic of scenes depicting both complete despair and heroic peasant uprisings, peppered with startling facts about the world’s most populous country.

China’s economy is on the rise, but decades after Mao, rural China is home to innumerable impoverished villages, and their residents are defenseless against corrupt local governments. Mere hours away from the skyscrapers and Starbucks of Shanghai, criminal village leaders murder those who are attempting to exercise their rights and make their local officials, and the ccp, accountable to them. Villages such as Luying and Zhang contrast sharply with the familiar scenes of industrious, wealthy cities like Beijing — the site of the 2008 Olympics, a growing market for McDonalds and American hotel chains. Still, given the praise heaped upon this book by Chinese media outlets, it is clear that Chinese citizens are ready to have the suffering of their peasant population brought to light, and this the authors do through a catalogue of incidents.

Luying village, 1993. The “godforsaken hole” of Lixin County, Anhui Province, this agricultural community is a “poverty-stricken backwater,” invisible to the world prior to Guidi and Chuntao’s investigation.

Ding Zuoming was a Luying village peasant knowledgeable about the ccp’s policies on taxation limits. Realizing that the villagers were being taken advantage of by local officials, Ding Zuoming embarked on a mission to reveal the excessive taxation. Guidi and Chuntao note that Luying villagers make on average $50 U.S. per year yet are taxed more than five times the Party limit. These peasants find it increasingly difficult to survive, let alone exercise their rights.

Ding Zuoming rallied a group of villagers to audit the village finance books. The leaders were outraged by the peasants’ request, particularly the vicious Village Chief Ding Yanle. After being (rightfully) accused of embezzlement and extortion, Ding Yanle sent his thugs to beat Ding Zuoming to death for showing the audacity to question the leadership. Upon learning of his death, the peasants reportedly cried, “What! Is there no law under the Communist sky?” Though authorities supposedly investigated the incident, the Anhui provincial government learned of the incident not from Luying village leaders, but rather from the General Office of the State Council in Beijing, which had read a report by an Anhui journalist.

In 1998, Zhang village peasants confronted Deputy Village Chief Zhang Guiquan, demanding an audit of the village finances. The enraged Zhang Guiquan and his sons killed three of the auditors and one bystander in a bloody, early-morning massacre. County television stations initially broadcast the official government reports, which described the murders as “manslaughter” following a “civic dispute.” Officials refused to accept responsibility for Zhang Guiquan’s actions and told the villagers to keep their mouths shut and never to question the authorities about the incident. Zhang Guiquan, a previously convicted criminal, was not convicted of these murders, and most Chinese were unaware of the event.

Reporters eventually caught wind of the Zhang Village incident and reported the facts. Although Zhang Guiquan was never brought to justice, the villagers could take some comfort in knowing that their story had been made public.

Guidi and chuntao itemize events in order of increasing violence. The Gao Village “anti-tax uprising,” which ended in bloodshed, is recounted in a chapter that underscores the miseries of peasant life. Gao peasants were fed up with their situation and willing to risk their lives, even traveling as far as Beijing to take action. Details of the Gao Village incident, during which township officials arrested and assaulted villagers, including a toddler and an elderly woman, are appalling, but the authors detail worse in their climactic account of events in 1993 in Wang Village, Baimiao Township, Linquan County, “the Siberia of Anhui Province.”

Baimiao was the type of township where “the peasants could not afford to eat their own vegetables” and where angry Party officials poisoned a poor farmer’s entire crop storehouse because he refused to pay an exorbitant tax. The young villager Wang Junbin and two friends appealed to higher levels of the county government, desperate for justice. When their pleas were ignored, the three young men decided they must turn to the Party Central Committee in Beijing.

After receiving a surprisingly “warm reception” in Beijing, the Wang villagers were sent home with a note to the provincial Peasants’ Burden Relief Office, which was also supportive. Linquan County Party secretary Zhang Xide, however, was angered by the peasants’ impertinence. One April day in 1994, 100  armed township police invaded the village, presumably by Zhang Xide’s order, “and gave a vicious beating to everyone they could lay their hands on.”

Wang villagers took five trips to Beijing, despite the possibility of arrest and torture by Zhang Xide. In the book’s most poignant passage, Guidi and Chuntao give an account of the fifth visit as the Wang Village peasants congregated in Tiananmen Square, a symbol of Chinese democracy, and fell to their knees in “supplication” to the Chinese flag. The peasants had the government’s and the media’s attention, and thus “the nation’s attention, and the nation was shaken to its core.” Readers, too, are shaken by the authors’ vivid account of a China that is more like Mao’s tyranny than a modern-day nation stumbling toward democracy.

The Wang Village story had a happy ending: Beijing officials discussed the situation with the peasants, who were not punished further. Zhang Xide was transferred, departing amid the cheers of the villagers.

Still, notwithstanding the success of the Wang Village heroes, corruption is a pandemic infiltrating rural China and possibly more damaging than the avian flu. Guidi and Chuntao see the peasants’ plight as a “vicious circle”: As peasants take action and Central Party leaders issue directives to end their extortion, local leaders continue to commit atrocities against the peasants.

In an interview with the authors, Lu Zixu, an honest and uncorrupt Anhui provincial officer, concurs:

Over a thousand years ago, Emperor Taizong said, “Water holds up the boat; water can also sink the boat.” Water here refers to the peasants. Emperor Taizong realized the importance of the peasantry. Each and every dynasty understood full well the importance of the peasantry, but once they are in power, they turn around and exploit the peasantry, even suppress the peasantry.

The Wang Village peasants did indeed sink the Linquan County Party officials, and Guidi and Chuntao, in their visits to 50 counties, found many peasants willing to confront their leaders. Wangyang villagers even attacked tax collectors with garden tools. But many others are simply unable to remedy the injustices they endure in their villages.

The peasants’ problems are manifold and involve seemingly intractable variables — corruption, debt, and adverse agricultural conditions among them — and they are compounded by the secrecy in which they are veiled. Peasants are “chain[ed] . . . to the countryside,” unable to obtain the required residency permits to live in urban areas that provide services such as “education, health care, health and disability insurance, [and] retirement pensions.” Not only are rural Chinese denied the economic rights endowed to their urban neighbors, but they are grossly underrepresented in the National People’s Congress. Urban areas provide one delegate per 250,000 citizens, while rural areas provide one delegate per 900,000 citizens.

Moreover, the rural tax system can be complex and bizarre. Guidi and Chuntao discovered hundreds of tax categories, ranging from the acceptable — such as those levied to build township facilities — to the ludicrous — such as those to pay for officials’ entertainment and an “attitude tax” for peasants who give tax collectors a bad attitude. Many villages are also deeply in debt, because local officials exaggerate production numbers for a given year and thus tax villagers even more to pay the debts to the government.

The authors are relatively upbeat as they begin their final chapter with the story of Huang Tongwen, an uncorrupt official of Changfeng County who destroyed his career by truthfully reporting the poverty in Changfeng and refusing to tax excessively. Nevertheless, despite the appearance of honest officials and peasant uprisings in increasing numbers, corruption remains endemic today. Even Wang Junbin, the fed-up Wang villager who knelt in Tiananmen Square, was reportedly a corrupt official. The “vicious circle” has continued into the twenty-first century despite the peasants’ efforts.

Guidi and Chuntao close with a catalogue of proposed solutions to the peasants’ problems and ways to implement reforms. Economist Du Rensheng says China must provide a guarantee to the right to private property for all peasants. Economic reform specialist Wen Tiejun counters that reform will work only if the government develops “a comprehensive approach to the reform of agriculture.” Other proposed reforms focus on the government and social conditions. Sociologist Lu Xueyi thinks that the gap between urban and rural counties must be closed and rural interests must become a major priority. Li Changping, editor of China’s Reform magazine, argues that the major priority should be reform of the “county bureaucracy,” reducing the number of officials. And Yu Jianrong, an agriculture specialist, believes that Chinese peasants must “form their own organization and replace the current local bureaucracy by peasants’ self-rule” before reform will work. Though the authors do not seem to favor any one over another, they clearly believe only ccp-implemented reforms can address these issues.

I never dreamed,” one Luying Village incident investigator remarked, “that so many years after Liberation, the peasants are still so poor, their lives so hard, their tax burden so heavy, and they are so badly treated by the cadres.” The peasants’ situation is intolerable and the local officials’ actions deplorable. Yet Chen Guidi and Wu Chuntao, like their subjects, remain hopeful. In fact, the peasants’ hope is the one inspiring aspect of this otherwise depressing book. All have faith that if someone, somewhere, will listen to their tales of corruption and violence they will no longer be tormented by their leaders. And, no matter their situation, the villagers remain optimistic that the wealth of the capitalist cities will soon reach their remote rural Siberias. It will certainly take radical change — and some more quality investigative journalism of the kind these two authors have produced — to rid China of its dirty little secret.