Out of Mao's Shadow

by Philip P. Pan

  Zhang Xide welcomed the party’s decision to ban An Investigation of China’s Peasantry. He considered it an official endorsement of his view that the book was not only flawed but also subversive. Now that the book was gone, he could claim victory and quietly drop the case. But he didn’t. He wanted his day in court.

  It was a surprising decision, because party officials almost always dealt with books and articles they objected to behind the scenes, using the hatchet men of the propaganda department to silence their critics. Once they had succeeded in banning a book or recalling a magazine, it was considered bad form to draw further attention to the matter. Doing so would only remind people of whatever it was that the authorities didn’t want them to read, as well as the fact that the party still practiced censorship. From this perspective, a lawsuit against two bestselling, blacklisted authors seemed like a bad idea. Media and publishing circles were rife with speculation about Zhang’s motives. The book was set almost entirely in Anhui, and some believed Zhang’s superiors in the province were using the lawsuit to take revenge on the authors. Others were convinced the propaganda authorities were testing the use of the courts as a new channel for intimidating writers and journalists. But when I asked Zhang if anyone had asked him to file the lawsuit, he said no. Propaganda officials had promised to punish the authors if he prevailed in court, he told me, but the decision to sue was his alone.

  When I first met Zhang, he was waiting in a private dining room of the best hotel in Fuyang, a drab three-star establishment with dirty carpets that overenthusiastic proprietors had named Buckingham Palace. He was wearing a white short-sleeved dress shirt and dark pants, and he greeted me as “an old friend” before we even sat down. A younger man, one of his aides, was in the room, too, but Zhang never bothered to introduce him. Instead, he handed me a forty-six-page rebuttal of the Wangying Village story and immediately began bad-mouthing the authors. There was an oily quality about him; he spoke too quickly, and he often got worked up and raised his voice. At one point, he grabbed my copy of An Investigation of China’s Peasantry and began flipping through the pages, reading sentences aloud and then refuting them in the same breath. He even found it necessary to point out that the peasants of Wangying Village grew only scallions, not cabbage, as the book claimed.

  In fact, he denied almost every aspect of the Wangying Village story. “It’s all fabricated,” he said. “Everything they wrote about me, except my name, was a lie.” Zhang said that he kept taxes low, and that when the villagers complained, he immediately conducted an investigation, found some discrepancies, and refunded everything the peasants were owed. He said he paid special attention to the case because of the letters the peasants had obtained in Beijing and the provincial capital, and he denied ever losing his temper or challenging the peasants to go back to Beijing. As for the April 2 Incident, Zhang stuck to the party line and said he ordered the raid to rescue a police officer who had been disarmed and detained by the peasants, not to punish the villagers. He denied any police brutality or torture. An elderly villager died after the raid, he acknowledged, but from a heart attack, not from anything the police did. “I have no regrets about that incident, none at all,” he said. “The police had no contact with the masses. There was no clash.”

  When I asked Zhang why the peasants all told a different story, he asserted that they had been paid off by Chen and he launched into a diatribe against the writer, accusing him of harboring a personal grudge against him, of exaggerating and distorting the truth, of seeking fame, fortune, and “political capital” with the book, and finally, of pandering to and inciting antiparty sentiment. “Chen has fired the first shot in an attempt to overthrow the Communist Party!” he said.

  But if conditions were so good in Wangying, why were the villagers petitioning for tax relief? Zhang shifted to another explanation, saying a party official in a rival faction had egged on the peasants to embarrass him. “The tax burden on the peasants isn’t heavy here, but there are just some people who are unwilling to pay,” he added. Later, when I noted that the party’s own investigation concluded the peasants were forced to pay excessive amounts, Zhang offered a third defense, saying that lower-level officials may have demanded too much money and insisting that he was not to blame. If he had been responsible, he argued, the party would have disciplined him instead of giving him a promotion.

  Zhang seemed most upset by the book’s portrayal of him as a short, inarticulate bully who relied on his aides to write speeches, especially the description of his “five-short figure,” or short neck, arms, and legs. “It’s insulting. Only soft-shelled turtles have five-short figures,” he said. “I’m 165 centimeters tall. No matter what, that’s medium height.

  “And they said I didn’t write my own reports, but that’s exactly what I do. That’s one of my specialties. Did you know that?” He didn’t wait for me to answer. “When I was party secretary of Linquan County, other than the reports used for party conferences and the congress, I never used any prepared texts. I would just write an outline in my notebook and speak. After I went to the People’s Political Consultative Conference, I personally wrote several good investigative reports.”

  He went on for long stretches about himself. He said he had never told a lie in his life. He shared a story about turning down a bribe. He said he always worked late and never turned off his cell phone. While he was the party chief in Linquan County, he said, hundreds of township enterprises were established and tens of thousands of wells were dug. “Wherever I have worked, people always said that I have a good heart, that I’m amiable, and that I have an approachable, democratic working style,” he said. “I’ve worked in ten different places, and they all evaluated me this way.”

  When I asked about the pressures of governing a county like Linquan, he acknowledged serious financial problems. The county’s budget was limited, he said, and it was difficult to pay the salaries of all the people on the payroll. Especially after 1995, he said, townships and villages fell deep into debt as the ranks of officials mushroomed. “You help arrange a job for someone, and they arrange a job for someone else. Add it all up, and it’s taking ten minutes to take attendance,” he said. But when I asked him why so many officials were necessary, he replied, “Generally speaking, it’s to develop the economy, to make ordinary people rich.”

  Zhang said one of the most difficult challenges was enforcing the one-child policy. If too many children were born in excess of state quotas, he said, a party official’s career would be in jeopardy. But that never happened to him. On the contrary, Zhang said he handled his birth planning duties so well he was named a model worker and elected director of the provincial birth planning association. “I was very strict, and I established my own set of methods,” he said. What kind of methods? “I mainly relied on propaganda work, letting cadres take the lead,” he said. “I didn’t use coercive measures.” Then he told me how he handled a mother of two who was six months pregnant with a third child:

  Someone had informed on her, and she fled to her mother’s house. Her car was slow, and ours was fast, so we arrived as she got there. We just worked on her, and we wouldn’t stop until we finished the work. There was a deep river nearby, and that day she was in her father’s room. I sat on a stone near the front door. I sat there the whole day. She thought she would wait until I left, so it would be easier to run away. I couldn’t force my way into the house to grab her, so I just waited into the afternoon. Finally, she came out, but as soon as she came outside, she jumped into the river.

  Zhang started laughing, adding that the woman wasn’t wearing any underwear. I asked him to continue. He said the woman’s father pulled her out of the water, and eventually, as other relatives were summoned to put pressure on her, she agreed to an abortion. “Later, I talked to her and I said, ‘You already have two boys. The burden is heavy enough. How many more do you want?’ I said, ‘When your life gets better, you won’t curse me. You’ll thank me.’ We went to the hospital, and I waited there. She
said she would have the shot the next day, but I said no. You’re already here today. Have the shot today.”

  Zhang said he traveled to the United States in the early 1990s on an inspection trip arranged by the Ministry of Construction. The delegation visited several cities, but he was most impressed when he saw a group of Somali protesters outside the White House. “Public order was excellent. Shout for a while, sit down and rest, drink some water. The police weren’t even there, and order was great,” he said. In China, he said, you couldn’t do that. “People here have insufficient awareness of the law. If they do anything forcefully, they will break the law.” As an example, he cited the behavior of peasants such as those from Wangying Village who petition the county over grievances. “It’s our job as officials to solve their problems. On the other hand, we can see that even after the masses developed the beginnings of democratic awareness, they still lack awareness of law. For example, they block the roads. They block the gate. They curse at people,” he said. “Our problem is their awareness of law isn’t strong enough. They can’t use the law to restrain themselves.”

  This was one reason, he argued, why China wasn’t suited for a multiparty democracy. “China has China’s conditions,” he said. “The leadership of the Communist Party developed over a long period of time, and it has the public’s trust. If it were overthrown, the masses wouldn’t accept it. Free elections would lead to great disorder, because the masses are already used to the current system.

  “I’m an intellectual, and I’ve always believed in the Communist Party. There’s no doubt that some of our superstructure needs reform, but we must maintain the stability of the nation,” he added. “If there was chaos in the nation, no one would be able to endure it.”

  I suggested that some people believed the one-party system might be incapable of restraining officials and protecting the rights of peasants. Zhang shook his head. “It’s actually the opposite,” he said. “Only under this system, with China under the leadership of the Communist Party, can the interests of the peasants be guaranteed. Look how satisfied the peasants are now.”

  Part III

  STRUGGLE SESSIONS

  Jiang Yanyong

  8

  THE HONEST DOCTOR

  The men who ran the Communist Party had good reason to be pleased with themselves as they celebrated the arrival of the Year of the Goat in February 2003. They presided over the world’s most dynamic economy, which had recorded more than a decade of uninterrupted breakneck growth. They had put down the worker protests in the rust belt and survived the worst of the labor unrest caused by the dismantling of state industry. They were enjoying new influence in international affairs and making good progress with preparations for the 2008 Summer Olympics. And they were halfway through a delicate leadership transition. The general secretary who took power after the Tiananmen massacre, Jiang Zemin, surrendered the party’s top job in November to Hu Jintao, the colorless bureaucrat who had been his heir apparent for more than a decade. In March, Jiang was scheduled to step down as the nation’s president, too. It was an important milestone—the most orderly and peaceful transfer of power in the history of modern China—and it meant the party had avoided the kind of destructive succession fight that often plagued authoritarian governments.

  For many in China, the smooth transition was fresh evidence that the Communists had found a way to address the shortcomings of their autocratic political system without adopting democratic reforms or giving up power. They had already demonstrated that capitalism and authoritarianism could make a powerful combination: the party relied on its monopoly on power to push through painful economic reforms and used the prosperity generated by those reforms to strengthen its rule. The party’s experiment in grafting market-oriented policies onto the Leninist model of government had proved a smashing success, and in capitals around the world, politicians and pundits spoke of the Chinese model with awe, envy, and sometimes fear. Foreign investors and multinational corporations, meanwhile, flocked to the mainland in what seemed like the first gold rush of the twenty-first century.

  But if the Communists had shown they could deliver economic growth at rates rivaling those of any democracy, it was still unclear how well they could meet other expectations of an increasingly complex and demanding society. Could their profit-driven model of authoritarianism stop the coal mine accidents? Could it deliver clean air and water? If the party maintained its stranglehold on civil society—its obsessive effort to control churches, charities, advocacy groups, labor unions—could it narrow the gap between rich and poor, or build an effective social safety net? Without a free press or independent courts, could it curb corruption or the abuse of power? The party had made many people wealthier but could it count on their support in hard times or inspire their loyalty?

  An example of the limits of the Chinese political structure was the shameful AIDS crisis unfolding in central Henan Province. In the early 1990s, hundreds of thousands of impoverished farmers there contracted HIV by selling blood at state hospitals and private clinics run by local officials and their friends. These facilities often used unsanitary methods, including a process in which blood from several donors was mixed in a centrifuge to remove valuable plasma and then reinjected into them so they could recover faster and sell more blood. Such practices caused AIDS to spread quickly, and by the beginning of 2003, the disease had devastated villages across the Henan countryside. Bold leadership, grassroots activism, and the free flow of information are critical to stopping the spread of AIDS, but China’s rigid political system has never tolerated much of any of the three. Instead, the party’s instinctive response was to protect the officials who had profited from the blood trade—and to hide the outbreak. The police harassed and arrested activists who challenged the government to take action, and the censors restricted reporting on AIDS in the state media. The nation’s top leaders remained silent and devoted few resources to educating the public about the disease. In August 2003, I visited one village in Henan where desperate residents had staged a protest demanding better medical care. Local officials reacted by sending not doctors but riot police, who stormed through town and beat up sickly villagers.

  Despite such stories, which the foreign media and a few brave Chinese journalists had begun to expose, the AIDS epidemic in Henan barely registered a blip on the radar of the party leadership at the start of 2003. In a nation of 1.3 billion, outbreaks of deadly illnesses were a common occurrence, and the Ministry of Health received reports about them from the provinces every day. But career-minded local officials preferred to handle problems themselves rather than admit they needed help, and if they briefed Beijing on the diseases they were seeing, they were more inclined to downplay outbreaks than sound an alarm. Generally, the central authorities took notice only if a disease caused a serious public panic or represented a threat to political stability. And so, as the government prepared to convene the National People’s Congress in early March—an important session because Jiang Zemin would be passing the presidency to Hu Jintao—the leadership paid little attention to the AIDS crisis in central China, or, for that matter, to reports of another deadly disease that had made its debut in southern China a few months earlier. In party documents passing through internal channels, this other disease was described as an “atypical pneumonia.” Within weeks, the world would know it as severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS.

  THE FIRST REPORT of the illness to reach Beijing came in January. A chef at a restaurant that cooked wild animals to order in Shenzhen, the freewheeling metropolis across the border from Hong Kong, had come down with a fever and checked into a hospital in his hometown of Heyuan, another city in the southern province of Guangdong. The man was diagnosed with a serious case of pneumonia, but within days, several doctors and nurses at the hospital had also fallen ill. By the first week of January, provincial authorities had sent a team of medical experts to investigate. By the third week, a more serious outbreak had been reported in the city of Zhongshan near the
provincial capital of Guangzhou—nearly thirty patients in three hospitals—and a secret bulletin had been sent to the Ministry of Health in Beijing. In their report, the medical experts described a mysterious respiratory ailment, warned that it was “highly infectious,” and recommended that medical workers isolate patients and take precautions to protect themselves, by wearing masks and goggles, for example. It was a report that could have stopped SARS before it became a global epidemic, but the party’s knee-jerk secrecy ensured that it was never widely distributed among the nation’s hospitals. Instead, Beijing sent a team of its own experts to Guangdong, and they returned with reassurances from provincial officials that everything was under control. “We thought it was just high fevers, pneumonia, and a few deaths,” recalled Bi Shengli, a senior virologist in the central government’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention. “We figured they could handle it. We trusted them in Guangdong, because it’s a relatively advanced province.”

  Provincial officials immediately imposed a blackout on news about the disease. The day after the medical experts visited Heyuan, the local paper published the world’s first story about SARS under a headline that read “Epidemic Is Only a Rumor.” Officials later acknowledged that their primary concern was the provincial economy. The weeklong Spring Festival holiday was scheduled to begin on February 1, and local businesses were counting on people to spend money. “The most important vacation in the life of Chinese people, the Spring Festival, was coming. We didn’t want to spoil everyone’s happy time,” Feng Shaomin, director of foreign affairs for the Guangdong health department, told my colleague John Pomfret. “You can imagine how people would have reacted if we had told them about the disease. They wouldn’t eat out, nor would they go shopping or get together with family members and friends. If we had done it earlier, it would definitely have caused chaos.”