|
Bringing Revolution to China's Villages
Democracy Activists Challenge Old Guard
By John Pomfret
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, September 15, 2002; Page A01
DONGTAN VILLAGE, China -- When Yao Lifa and Yan
Qingjin journey down the dirt road to this riverside
village, they are greeted as conquering heroes. The
village committee crowds around, and the village chief
hustles in from harvesting his crops. There's even
talk that some babies will be named after the pair.
"Victory is inevitable," Yan shouted to the assembled
leaders during a recent trip, sounding like an
underground Communist agitator during China's
revolution in the 1940s. "Victory belongs to the
people!"
Yan, 68, and Yao, 45, have brought a revolution to
Dongtan village, located in Hubei province 500 miles
west of Shanghai. But it is a revolution that has
profoundly disturbed China's authorities. Over the
past two years, Yao and Yan have helped the hamlet of
1,500 boot out village leaders installed by the
township government, hold a new election for village
chief, prod police into investigating shady dealings
of former village bosses and launch a tax strike that
continues to this day.
Yan and Yao are foot soldiers in a revolt in the heart
of rural China, home to over 70 percent of China's 1.3
billion people. They are an unlikely pair; Yao, a
local legislator, is famed for his fiery temper and
barnyard tongue, and Yan is a retired teacher who
repeatedly suffered during China's political campaigns.
The twosome is part of a new breed of Chinese known as
"peasant heroes" who are challenging China's rural
authorities to live up to Chinese law, allow farmers
to elect village leaders, and fight the imposition of
rapacious taxes.
The village revolts offer important insights about
power in today's China. Despite 15 years of allowing
China's poorest people to vote for village leaders,
the attempt to introduce a measure of democracy
remains elusive -- blocked by authorities afraid of
ceding power to the very people upon whom the
Communists relied to carry out their revolution. The
conflicts also reveal deep fissures of discontent in
China's countryside and the beginnings of activist
networks dedicated to challenging the party's eroding
authority.
The leaders of China's Communist Party will huddle in
Beijing on Nov. 8 for the party's 16th Congress. The
event may result in a passing of leadership to a new
generation, the most important political transition
since the crackdown on pro-democracy protests around
Tiananmen Square in 1989.
But a month of travel in five Chinese provinces
underscored the increasingly strong support -- among
the most common of China's common people -- for
broader and more systemic political change than the
party is contemplating. This story, part of an
occasional series on how power is exercised in China,
highlights the deepening gulf that separates China's
peasants from its leaders.
For the farmers and their peasant heroes, the stakes
in this battle are high. Yao and Yan are routinely
threatened with prosecution. Villagers who dare to
challenge local authorities are regularly beaten or
jailed, occasionally killed, and most often simply
isolated by local authorities. Villagers are
frightened, and government officials are vigilant
about keeping them quiet.
To be interviewed, Li Yunzhi, a village leader in
northern Henan province, whose election in May as a
local legislator in Nanshe village was annulled by a
county government, was bundled into a car and driven
overnight to Beijing. He came fresh from his fields,
in his work clothes and wearing only flimsy yellow
flip-flops. In the capital, where he was just a
faceless farmer, he found it safer to talk, rather
than at home, where local authorities could prevent
him from speaking out.
His election was the second the county government had
invalidated in less than a year since village leaders
had protested excessive taxes and years of government
corruption. In the earlier case, Kong Bubao, elected
chief of Nanshe last year, was not only thrown out of
office by the county government; he was thrown in jail
with a one-year sentence for "obstructing official
business," triggered when more than 1,000 police
officers invaded the village last November to quash a
tax protest.
In Anhui province, Xu Maolian, a village party
secretary, was on the lam for months because he led
tax protests against the township government. Xu, 58,
agreed to be interviewed, but only in a secluded pear
orchard after midnight. One of his closest colleagues,
a 73-year-old member of a team of four village
representatives fighting government tax-collection
squads, died in police custody last year. As a way to
pressure Xu, township authorities sentenced each of
his two sons-in-law to two-year jail terms for "obstructing
official business." Xu now has no help tending the
orchards, and his once-prosperous family is thousands
of dollars in debt, a big sum in rural China.
"I am broken man," Xu said, sitting on a flimsy fruit
carton among his pear trees.
'Model City'
China began allowing farmers to vote for village
chiefs in the late 1980s. The Ministry of Civil
Affairs, which oversees voting, says that 60 percent
to 70 percent of the elections in China's 800,000
villages are successful, "free and fair."
But Yao contends the reality is different. In an
August report of the 354 villages that belong to
Qianjiang city in Hubei, Yao concluded that less than
5 percent of the elections were democratic. He found
that authorities had illegally removed 187 elected
village chiefs from their posts and installed
hand-picked leaders since the previous elections, in
September 1999. One village leader, He Xiangui, a
49-year-old former soldier, was booted out of his post
four times and won it back five times.
"If the top says 'go,' you go. If they say 'stay,' you
stay," he said. Yao's report, to the Qianjiang
People's Congress, is significant because the civil
affairs ministry has named Qianjiang a "model city"
for village elections. Hubei provincial authorities
said they are investigating Yao's claims. His
conclusions have been reported in internal party
publications and were confirmed by a senior official
in Beijing, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
"If this place is a model, then you can imagine what
the trouble spots are like," Yao said. His findings
were bolstered by a recent document published by
China's State Council, issued on Aug. 18, which
ordered all local governments to stop interfering in
village elections. The document for the first time
publicly acknowledged that some local governments had
caused unrest because they "did not allow sufficient
democracy."
China began to experiment with village elections --
pushed in the 1980s by Peng Zhen, then the head of the
national legislature -- as an effort by the Communist
Party to enhance its control over rural areas.
At the time, China was dismantling the people's
commune system, established in the 1950s when the
country collectivized land ownership. In the 1980s,
China gave the land back to the farmers, allowing them
to lease plots for decades. But the breakup of the
communes caused a breakdown in local government.
Communist Party reports cited "paralysis" in the
countryside, where thousands of villages had exceeded
government control. Taxes were not being collected.
Primary education was being neglected. Irrigation
systems were falling apart.
"The elections were instituted as a way to control
society -- not to free it," said Yu Jianrong, a
leading Chinese social scientist who recently spent
several years researching rural problems in Hunan
province. "The goal wasn't democracy, it was a
reassertion of the party's influence in the villages."
But control has been difficult for the government to
achieve. Since the elections were instituted, rural
unrest has skyrocketed. Central China has been shaken
by a series of farmer rebellions, some of them bloody.
The origins of the village revolts are hotly contested.
China's old guard has blamed democracy, saying farmers
are too backward to handle the responsibilities of an
election. China's Western-leaning reformers have
blamed treacherous township governments that have
squeezed the farmers for more and more taxes.
The underlying causes, however, are a tangled web of
corruption, clashing interests and dysfunctional
bureaucracy in the countryside.
In the early 1990s, on average, each township
government had 30 employees. Now the average is more
than 100, according to Chinese researchers. In rural
China today, 70 percent of government expenditures are
absorbed by personnel costs. For peasants, the
explosion in the number of bureaucrats has meant
higher taxes -- in some cases 20 times higher than a
decade ago.
The bloated bureaucracy has emerged just as farmers'
incomes have suffered their worst decline since 1978,
when China launched economic reforms. That decline is
expected to continue. Township factories, an engine
for rural growth in the early 1990s, are collapsing
across China. The local plants contributed a
significant share of township revenue and farmers'
income. In addition, crop prices are expected to fall
further as China opens its markets to foreign
competition under the terms of its accession to the
World Trade Organization.
Farmers have been further burdened by the central
government's efforts -- backed by a 1994 tax reform
program -- to claim a greater share of the country's
tax revenues. That has left townships and counties
with less money to pay for such services as schools
and health care.
An April report by the World Bank concluded that
China's local fiscal system was "malfunctioning."
Towns and villages have responded to these shortfalls
by squeezing the peasantry with extra fees, and by
borrowing from banks. Chinese researchers say 44,000
townships owe a total of $24 billion, or about
$500,000 each. The total debt of China's 800,000
villages is believed to be twice as high.
Central government subsidies have not sufficiently
compensated for the shortfall. Following widespread
demonstrations and violent clashes over crushing taxes
imposed on farmers in Anhui province, Beijing ordered
the province to cut taxes. The central government
increased its subsidy to the region, but not
sufficiently to offset the tax cut.
"The farmers used to avoid taxes, but now they line up
to pay," enthused Zhou Zefeng, an official from
Dangshan county in northern Anhui province. But at the
same time, Zhou said, county revenues have dropped by
half. The result is that long-term needs will remain
unfulfilled. "If villagers want to build a school or
repair a road, now they will have to raise the money
themselves," he said.
'Study Class'
Taxes are at the heart of Dongtan's struggle. The
conflict sets the village against the township of
Zhugentan, to which the village belongs.
In the spring of 2000, township officials started a
tax collection campaign. They dispatched teams of
officials backed by local toughs -- given $4 in cash,
a carton of cigarettes, a toothbrush and a towel -- to
force villagers to pay what the township claimed were
back taxes.
In all, 19 villagers were beaten and locked up in what
is known throughout rural China as a "study class."
They were packed together into one room. There they
ate, slept and defecated.
"In China, a study class is like a barbershop," mused
Yan, the retired teacher. "They call it a barbershop
but we know it's a whorehouse. They call it a study
class but we know it's a jail."
Demanding Fees
One of the victims was Zeng Xiangjun. He was
incarcerated not because he was a tax deadbeat, local
officials acknowledged, but because he was a
malcontent. Most recently he had called attention to
the practice of village leaders demanding fees from
students, when schooling should be free. Such demands
are commonplace throughout the country, because of
corruption and a shortfall in funds. But they are also
illegal, and village and township leaders were angry
at being fingered by Zeng.
Upon his release, Zeng sought out Yan, the retired
teacher.
Yan said he has fallen afoul of almost every major
political campaign since the 1957 movement against
people who dared to criticize Chinese leader Mao
Zedong. During the 1959-61 Great Leap Forward, he was
denied work. During the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution,
he was forced to live in a cowshed and was publicly
beaten seven times.
"I have spent my life fighting the mistakes of the
Communist Party," he said. Yan has joined the party
three times and been expelled twice.
But Yan is also a respected retired high school
teacher. Many of the local officials were his students.
"Here," he said, "everybody has ties to everybody else."
Yan and Yao wrote a report in October 2000 to the city
government, documenting the abuses in the "study class."
Zhang Weidong, Qianjiang's party secretary,
recommended that officials involved should be "criticized"
but not prosecuted. Yao, Yan and Dongtan village kept
pushing.
During their research into the study class, Yao and
Yan discovered flaws in the village's previous
election, held on Sept. 28, 1999. One man voted 100
times, and candidates were first vetted by the party
-- both violations of central government rules.
For the next year, the village and the township
battled. In January 2001, the township agreed to hold
a new election but then reversed course and
unilaterally appointed a new village committee.
Villagers signed petitions and dispatched Yao to
Beijing to complain to the National People's Congress.
Yao and Yan continued to agitate among the villagers,
holding ad hoc classes on law, citizens' rights and
taxes. Undercover police recorded their speeches,
searching for anti-party statements.
"This was a face-to-face struggle," Yan recalled. "It
was a hell of a fight. They had cars and mobile phones.
We had the law."
Yan and Yao had other weapons, too, which reveal
important changes in the way China works. Yao has used
reporters on numerous occasions to expose problems in
his district. Both the Hubei Daily, the province's
most influential newspaper, and China News Service in
Beijing dispatched reporters who penned internal
reports for party leaders that helped Yao's case.
Southern Weekend, widely considered China's most
influential newspaper, put Yao's village election
report on its front page. Yao also has his backers
inside Hubei's provincial government and as far away
as Beijing.
"There is an informal network of people like us," said
the general director of a department at a powerful
ministry in Beijing who asked not to be identified. "We
know Yao Lifa. We try to protect people like him."
The pressure paid off. On April 6, 2001, Dongtan held
its first free vote. And the winner was Zeng Xiangjun,
the farmer who had been incarcerated for complaining
about the school fees.
Zeng's experience as a freely elected village chief
has been one of confrontation.
Zhang Bangbiao, the former village accountant, refused
to hand over the village seals that Zeng, 51, needed
to conduct official business. Zhang said he paid
$4,000 for the seals (which, villagers say, gave him
the ability to steal taxes) so he wanted someone to
buy them back.
The township has sought to block Dongtan's new village
committee from opening the old accounts, although two
corruption investigations have been launched.
One former village party secretary, Yang Xinwen, was
arrested after investigators found he had used $2,500
in village funds to send his daughter to private
school. Zhang, the former accountant, is also under
investigation.
As the probes began to look into earlier misdeeds --
implicating officials who now work in higher positions
-- they were stopped. Four years of accounting records,
from 1994-97, are locked up in a police station. At
least $100,000 in back taxes are unaccounted for.
The village rebelled with a tax strike. "So we stopped
paying taxes completely," Zeng said. "What could we
do?"
In Zhugentan township, officials display open disdain
for Zeng, the village rebel. "He's not a good village
chief," said Zhang Yiquan, a township official. "He
can't solve simple problems, isn't educated and can't
take notes during meetings."
Asked if democracy had helped Dongtan, Zeng shook his
head.
"Not yet," he said. "What good is democracy if you
can't get anything done?"
© 2002 The Washington Post Company
|
