Out of Mao's Shadow

by Philip P. Pan

  Cheng still looked young, and he seemed as confident and intense as ever. He had not been allowed to return to the Southern Metropolis Daily or the Beijing News, and it clearly saddened him. More than once he told me he believed the two tabloids were the only publications in China that deserved to be called great newspapers. Both were flourishing and continuing to push the limits of press freedom under the leadership of editors he had trained. He, however, had taken a job editing the Chinese edition of Sports Illustrated.

  After we finished our meal, Cheng told me he once believed that the Communist Party could reform itself and that journalists could help it do so by speaking out for the weak and exposing the abuses of the powerful. But prison had changed him, and now he considered the party’s rule irredeemably corrupt. That judgment, however, left him with few options as a citizen and a journalist, and he was restless. “The worst thing that happened to me,” he said, “was that I lost all hope in the system.”

  Chen Guidi and Wu Chuntao outside the courthouse in Fuyang

  10

  THE PEOPLE’S TRIAL

  On the day that Cheng Yizhong was released from prison in Guangzhou in August 2004, I was watching another battle over freedom of speech unfold in the city of Fuyang, nearly seven hundred miles to the north on the wheat plains of Anhui Province. Cheng’s fate had been decided by party leaders who weighed the political costs and benefits of his imprisonment and judged that letting him go would better serve their interests. Legally, it was a decision for the courts to make, but the Communist Party exercises firm control over the judiciary and the word of a party boss trumps that of any law, judge, or prosecutor. There seemed to be little doubt, then, who would prevail in the libel trial that opened the same week in the Fuyang Intermediate People’s Court. At the plaintiff’s table sat Zhang Xide, former party chief of Linquan County and member of Fuyang’s party leadership. On the other side of the room was the couple he had sued, Chen Guidi and Wu Chuntao, authors of the banned bestseller, An Investigation of China’s Peasantry. Given Zhang’s clout in the city—his son was a judge in the same courthouse—and the attention that his lawsuit had received, it appeared that a show trial was in the making.

  There were reasons, though, to suspect the proceedings in Fuyang might prove more interesting. By the summer of 2004, hopes that Hu Jintao’s government would usher in real political change had already begun to fade. More than a year had passed since the party’s new leaders ended the SARS cover-up and abolished the shourong detention system, and there was no sign they planned to do much more. On the contrary, the evidence suggested they were as obsessed with challenges to the party’s rule as their predecessors. In November 2003, a group of residents in Hubei Province led by a schoolteacher and election reformer named Yao Lifa had attempted to run in local legislative elections, only to be subjected to a campaign of harassment, intimidation, and voter fraud that ensured, as usual, only the party’s candidates won. Yao’s appeals to the leadership were ignored. The crackdown at the Southern Metropolis Daily came soon afterward, sending a chill through the state media and dimming the optimism of journalists across the country. Then, in June 2004, the authorities detained the SARS whistle-blower Jiang Yanyong and suppressed attempts to commemorate the fifteenth anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre.

  If political reform was off the table, though, Hu and his premier, Wen Jiabao, seemed determined to address rising discontent among those left behind by the economic boom. They had sent more welfare funds to the industrial northeast, helping to tamp down worker protests in the rust-belt cities, but they still faced an explosive situation in the countryside, where taxes and fees levied by rural party officials were chipping away at peasant incomes. One of Hu’s first initiatives had been a plan to begin phasing out all rural taxes, and in a symbolic gesture, he celebrated the Lunar New Year with a peasant family, sharing dumplings with them on national television. Nearly two years later, though, rural conditions seemed to be getting worse. Rural officials in many places continued to demand exorbitant taxes, and a decision to relax investment controls to boost the economy after the SARS epidemic led to a rush of real estate and industrial projects in the countryside that required land—land that officials were seizing from peasants and selling to developers. The confiscation of farmland soon became a leading cause of rural conflict, as families accused officials of pocketing profits from the sale of their plots and demanded compensation. Meanwhile, Hu’s populist rhetoric only raised expectations among peasants, who were emboldened to resist local officials they believed were violating his policies. Unrest was on the rise, with police struggling to contain an average of two hundred “mass disturbances” every day in 2004, some of them violent clashes. Given the challenges in the countryside that the leadership faced, it was easy to imagine the trial in Fuyang sending the wrong signal to the public. In effect, Hu had staked his reputation on reining in the abuses of rural officials. Yet here was one of those officials trying to punish two writers who had dared expose his record.

  The trial in Fuyang also opened against the background of a surge in legal activism around the country, the result of a profound shift in public attitudes toward the law. For centuries, the Chinese have regarded the law as an instrument of state control, a way for those in power to regulate the behavior of their subjects and punish those who step out of line. The Communist Party shared the same view, adding the Marxist notion that the law should be a weapon used by the proletariat in class struggle. But after Mao’s death, the party began building a modern legal system suitable for a market economy, and soon a competing vision of the law emerged. People began to think of the law as a check on the power of government officials and a guardian of individual rights. They started to believe that judges should rule impartially instead of just following the party’s orders. They began to expect that everyone, even government leaders, could be held accountable in court. In an authoritarian state, these were subversive ideas, yet the party itself helped foster this rising legal consciousness. Ever since the chaos of the Cultural Revolution, it had bombarded the public with propaganda proclaiming its commitment to the rule of law. Now, in courtrooms across the nation, citizens were insisting that it live up to that commitment.

  Leading the charge, naturally, were the lawyers. They were a diverse, unruly bunch, men and women—mostly men—who were essentially establishing a new profession and figuring out how as they went along. Some were educated in the nation’s best universities. Others taught themselves the law and passed the bar on their own. Only a fraction took on the hard cases that challenged party officials or their cronies, cases that would be difficult to win and even more difficult to make money on. The risks were substantial. A vigorous defense of a jailed client or an aggressive lawsuit against entrenched interests could land a lawyer in prison. But there were rewards, too—prestige, self-respect, the satisfaction of fighting for justice. In the year before the Fuyang libel trial, these lawyers—some called themselves weiquan or “rights defense” lawyers—were beginning to come together, emerging as a diffuse yet significant political force. Some had organized to support a prominent colleague, Zheng Enchong, who was jailed in Shanghai for his work representing residents evicted by a corrupt developer. A few worked together to defend a well-known entrepreneur, Sun Dawu, who had angered the authorities with his criticism of the political system. So when the authors of An Investigation of China’s Peasantry were sued, there was a community of lawyers willing to help. One of those who volunteered was a lawyer named Pu Zhiqiang.

  A TALL, BRAWNY MAN with a square jaw and a crew cut, Pu looked more like a lumberjack than a lawyer, and when I met him, I was struck by how he sprinkled his sentences with both street profanities and classical Chinese, a mix that could confound even a native speaker of the language. Gregarious and garrulous, he was in many ways an example of the modern Chinese success story. Born in an impoverished village in Hebei Province, the youngest son of illiterate corn and potato farmers, he was now, at age thirty-nine, a p
artner in a successful Beijing law firm, enjoying a comfortable life in the middle class, complete with a high-rise apartment and a Volkswagen.

  Pu’s journey out of the countryside began when he was three months old. His parents entrusted him to an uncle and aunt to raise, because the couple had no children of their own and they lived closer to the county seat. Pu’s parents hoped that he would get a better education there, and as it turned out, he was among the first in his village to go to college, enrolling in the history department at Nankai University in Tianjin, the big port city east of Beijing. He was a good student and popular among his classmates, and the party tried to recruit him. But it was 1984, during the political thaw after the Cultural Revolution, and campuses across the country were buzzing with an intellectual fervor not seen since the Hundred Flowers Movement. Bookstores were full of works that had once been banned, the truth of the past was beginning to emerge, and Pu found himself questioning much of what he had been taught in school. Many of his classmates joined the party without hesitation, because party membership meant better jobs and valuable connections, but Pu spent a week in the library reading about history and politics. Then he turned the party down. Communism, he decided, was a sham, and he didn’t want any part of it.

  Pu Zhiqiang speaking to peasants outside the courthouse during a break in the libel trial

  After graduating, Pu taught at a small college in Hebei, then enrolled in graduate school at the China University of Political Science and Law in Beijing, where he studied ancient Chinese literature and legal texts. Like many of his classmates, his dissatisfaction with the party’s rule continued to grow. Inflation was spinning out of control and corruption seemed to be getting worse. Pu looked up to scholars who advocated democratic reform, such as the physicist Fang Lizhi, and with each attempt by the government to censor and suppress “spiritual pollution” and “bourgeois liberalization”—code words for the liberal ideas that threatened the one-party system—he grew more disgusted. Then, in the spring of 1989, a former party chief, Hu Yaobang, who had been ousted for being too soft on dissent, suffered a fatal heart attack during a Politburo meeting. Two days later, Pu joined tens of thousands of students who marched through Beijing to mourn his death. It was the start of the Tiananmen Square democracy movement.

  The movement was a turning point in Pu’s life. He was twenty-four, older than and respected by many of the undergraduates, and he emerged as one of the many leaders of the demonstrations. He helped organize the marches and the boycott of classes. He participated in the hunger strike. He delivered speeches and gave interviews to foreign reporters. It was an emotional time, and one of his teachers recalled that Pu struck his head with a bullhorn in frustration when party leaders refused to receive three students who knelt four hours on the steps of the Great Hall of the People with a petition. Pu spent weeks camped in the square, and he was there on the night of June 3, huddled with a few thousand others near the Monument to the People’s Heroes, when the army began shooting protesters as it entered Beijing. Fires around the city gave the sky an eerie glow, and loudspeakers in the square repeated the government’s martial law warnings again and again. Pu could hear the crackle of gunfire, dull and distant at first, then sharper and closer. He decided it would be safer to stay in the square than try to leave, and he was right. The bloodshed took place on the streets outside Tiananmen. On the morning of June 4, when soldiers occupied the square and ordered the tearful students to clear out, Pu was among the last to leave but he was unharmed.

  The party conducted investigations at every university afterward, but many officials sympathized with the students and there was a perfunctory quality to the process. It might have been possible for Pu to escape punishment by going through the motions of criticizing the protests, voicing support for the government and condemning the party leaders who were purged. But he couldn’t bring himself to do it. “I have a stubborn disposition, and I didn’t think I had done anything wrong,” he wrote in an essay published overseas more than a decade later.

  At the same time, it occurred to me that millions of people around the country had participated in the movement, and I didn’t think it would be appropriate if the majority all examined their thinking and raised their understanding, and it was as if Zhao Ziyang had tricked everyone. Some people had to take responsibility. I was just a student, and of course, I didn’t have the status or influence to take any responsibility. But if I loudly declared that the Communist Party was right and I was wrong, when I hadn’t come around to that, I would have let down my conscience. It also would have easily sent the Communist Party the wrong signal. So, in the end, I couldn’t give those above me a conclusion that would satisfy them…. I didn’t see a problem, much less any need to hang my head and admit a mistake. We weren’t the ones who should be admitting mistakes, at least not primarily us.

  As graduation approached, university officials pressed Pu to submit a self-criticism. He responded with an essay he sarcastically titled “Baring One’s Heart to the Party,” in which he defended his activities during the demonstrations, arguing that he had acted with good intentions. “At the time, I thought the government was ridiculous,” he wrote of his participation in the hunger strike. “We were nearly starving to death, but you were still so devoid of human sympathy. As a result, my attitude hardened. I believe my thinking was the same as others. We were all trying to help the Communist Party and the government correct their mistakes.” One of the professors assigned to Pu’s case asked why he couldn’t include just a few boilerplate sentences endorsing Deng Xiaoping’s “Four Cardinal Principles,” the ideological underpinning for one-party rule. Pu replied that he opposed the principles, and said he would say so in the essay if the professor insisted. The professor just shook his head and told him to leave the essay the way it was.

  Considering his refusal to toe the party line, the university could have expelled him, but instead it let Pu graduate with a “serious administrative warning” in his file. The warning ended his dream of a career in academia, because it meant no university or government agency would hire him. “Thinking about it today,” Pu wrote later, “maybe the Communist Party didn’t really want people to examine their thinking and sincerely submit. Maybe from the start, it wanted to make people hang their heads just superficially, to make everyone despise themselves and face that reality. I didn’t do it, and my mind has always been at ease. Although I lost many opportunities over the years, I never regretted it.”

  For years, Pu drifted from one job to another, working as a salesman, a secretary, even at an agricultural market. Then, in 1993, a friend urged him to try a career in law, because his master’s degree was technically a law degree. Pu began studying for the bar and took the exam twice before managing to guess enough answers to pass. He was not enthusiastic about his new profession, but he was almost thirty, married, and the father of a two-year-old boy. “I didn’t do it because I thought it would be interesting. I did it because I had nothing better to do,” he told me. “I had to make a living, and with June fourth on my record, I couldn’t get a better job.”

  The legal profession was still in its infancy in China when Pu began practicing. Mao had all but dismantled the nation’s courts during the Cultural Revolution, and the government was essentially starting from scratch when it began rebuilding the judicial system in the 1980s. It took time, but gradually lawyers shed their traditional role as civil servants loyal to the state and became independent advocates devoted to their clients. The first private law firms opened in 1992, and Pu started taking on cases just a few years later. He helped companies declare bankruptcy and settle business disputes, and studied the law as he went along. But he quickly learned that a lawyer’s connections were more important than his skills. Connections brought in clients, and connections helped win cases. It wasn’t that evidence and knowledge of the law never mattered, just that they didn’t always matter. Judicial corruption was common. There were late-night mah-jongg games, where lawyers were expecte
d to lose hundreds of thousands of dollars to judges. They also gave judges extravagant gifts, or simply paid them cash bribes.

  Pu found the legal environment depressing, but he prospered. In four years of college and three years of graduate school, he had cultivated a network of acquaintances who could help him find clients. “I had a lot of friends, and to be a good lawyer in China, you had to have friends,” he said. Soon he was handling twenty to thirty cases a year, earning a big portion of his firm’s profits and taking home a comfortable salary. At the same time, though, he struggled with his conscience. “If I told my clients I wouldn’t use my connections, they would never agree. So when they ask me if I have connections, I always say yes,” he told me. Pu tried to set limits. He resolved never to ask a friend to break the law or do anything dishonorable. He tried never to give bribes. If a client asked him to subvert the legal process, he would reply that the best he could do was slow it down. Still, sometimes he did things he wasn’t proud of. “Sometimes, I had no other choice,” he said.

  Pu didn’t handle criminal cases, but once, early in his career, he agreed to represent a peasant woman from a village on the outskirts of Beijing who wanted to sue the local police. Officers there had been running an extortion scheme, arresting women and forcing them to confess to prostitution, pay hefty fines, and implicate men who could then be shaken down, too. Pu’s client had been beaten badly for refusing to go along. When he accepted the case, pro bono, he believed that he was finally doing something good with his law license—seeking justice on behalf of an ordinary citizen. The local court, however, refused even to accept his lawsuit, and the police retaliated by framing and arresting his client’s brother-in-law. Pu was powerless to help, and the experience left him with tough questions: Did he take the case to make himself feel better about his job, or because he believed he could actually make a difference? Did his involvement only make the situation worse for his client? Afterward, Pu decided he would never again raise clients’ hopes if he didn’t think he could really help them.