Free Will the Boat Sink the Water?: The Life of China's Peasants by Chen Guidi, Wu Chuntao Page A

opinion as to the nature of the incident, insinuating that it was the result of tempers getting out of hand rather than revenge against the peasant auditors.
    It began with a carefully crafted background description: “The deputy village chief was offended by the extremist language of the villagers; supported by his sons he got into a fight with the latter, the incident ending in four deaths.”
    The reader would easily come to the conclusion that the villagers’ extremist language had initially given offense, which led to the deputy chief’s explosion of anger, which led to the killings. According to this version of events, the villagers were the troublemakers and those who had been killed had brought about their own deaths.
    But a careful reader could not help noticing the gaps between the lines: Since it was a “fight” between two groups, why was it that only people on the villagers’ side had died? And why did this deputy village chief want to fight the villagers to the death? What exactly was the “extremist language” used by the villagers? What were the words that infuriated the deputy village chief so that he went on a killing spree? The article did not
    the village tyrant

    answer any of these questions, perhaps it could not, or dared not, spell out the truth.
    The article completely ignored the plain truth: that the villagers had demanded their democratic rights and refused to bear excessive financial burdens. These important facts were intentionally ignored, and therein lurks a conspiracy. Thus, a conflict that many Chinese would consider a life-and-death struggle between good and evil, civilization and barbarity, progress and regression was distorted into a fistfight in which some foul-mouthed village ruffians ended up dead, and deservedly so.
    The people of Zhang Village were once more up in arms. They challenged the publisher of the newspaper: “This is a mat-ter of life and death! How dare you publish that trash without checking the facts!”
    But, the editors countered, how could they check into every report that crossed their desks? They explained that they had followed the proper procedures, and that the report carried the official stamp of the public prosecutor’s office, which absolved them as editors from the necessity of checking the facts.
    The situation was very clear. This atrocity took place in the spring of 1998—not, like the Ding Zuoming case, in 1993. In the meantime, the Party Central Committee had repeatedly issued documents forbidding exacerbating the peasants’ bur-den, and had spelled out the punishments to be meted out to violators of such orders: township Party and government officials would be disciplined if villages under their jurisdiction were overburdened, and the same up the ladder: the county’s Party and government officials must submit written self-criticism to their superiors. When the Anhui provincial authorities were informed of those harshly worded directives, they added a rule of their own to demonstrate their determination to implement the Party Central Committee’s orders: the Party and govern—
    will the boat sink the water ?

    ment authorities of the relevant cities and prefectures must also submit written self-criticism to them, their provincial superiors. The documents were timely and the spirit that they promoted was undoubtedly correct. The severe measures toward erring cadres were doubtless genuinely designed to protect the interests of the peasants. But can self-criticism really be counted on to
    magically solve the problems of cadres at the grass roots?
    Zhang Guiquan was not any ordinary deputy village chief of a village; he had become a village cadre while still a convicted criminal on probation. As serious as this was, he not only had increased the peasants’ burden but also had committed murder. The Party Central Committee had laid down clear guidelines: cases where peasants’ excessive burden led to one death or to more than six peasants’