Will the Boat Sink the Water?: The Life of China's Peasants by Chen Guidi, Wu Chuntao
Authors: Chen Guidi, Wu Chuntao
Tags: Asia, History, Politics & Social Sciences, Social Sciences, Economics, Ethnic Studies, china, Poverty, Human Geography, Asian, Politics & Government, Specific Topics, Economic Conditions, Communism & Socialism, Specific Demographics, Business & Money, International & World Politics, Ideologies & Doctrines, Political Economy, Special Groups
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drinking at public expense, one picture showing their desks laden with wine bottles, and another showing them with cigarettes stuck between their lips as they stepped over the bodies of peasants bent prostrate before them. The article matching the cartoon was written by Dang Guoyin, a fellow of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, in Beijing. Guoyin’s indignation fairly burst off the
*In some areas it was standard practice for each village household to be fit-ted with a speaker that could not be turned off.
the village tyrant
page: “We have a government that has signed the international convention regarding human rights, and after all we are in a civilized age, how could we tolerate such rampant evil among us.” He pointed out, “It is of course necessary to discipline the cadres who violate the policies and laws of the country, and such discipline will probably bear results to a certain extent, but that is only scratching the surface of the problem. A thorough solution is to allow the peasants to be well-to-do, to allow them to organize themselves, and to confer legal status on their organization so that the peasants will be empowered to resist the political machine in the countryside.”
Around this time, three reporters from the magazine Democracy and Law also went down to Zhang Village, and published their on-the-site report in the seventeenth issue of their journal. The title was blunt—“Villagers’ Representatives Trying to Audit the Village Books Were Brutally Murdered”— and the report was riveting in its graphic description and thunderous in its denunciation. One very curious fact first revealed in this report was that one of the murder weapons, the bloody knife that had been wielded by Zhang Guiquan’s son number six, was still lying in a drawer in the village clin-ic and had been totally overlooked all this while. The reporters took a photo of this piece of evidence and published it along with their report.
With the media’s attention now focused on the crime and numerous articles appearing in the national press, the case of peasants being killed because they wanted to audit the village books could not be covered up any longer. Only then did things take a turn for the better.
Tangnan Township officials took steps to provide for the two orphans of the dead Zhang Hongchuan.
At the Dragon Boat Festival, which fell on the fifth day of the
will the boat sink the water ?
fifth month by the lunar calendar, the county government gave one hundred yuan in consolation money to each of the afflicted families.
Moreover, during the harvest following the Dragon Boat Festival, several officials from the Guzhen County administration came down to the village and helped the afflicted families take in the harvest, working through a long morning without complaining of tiredness, nor touching a drop of water nor a grain of the families’ rice. This went some way toward convey-ing to the families the warmth of the Party’s and government’s concern for them.
On August 8, 1998, the High Court of Anhui Province issued the final sentence on the case of Zhang Guiquan and his sons. The sentence and the list of charges differed little from that of the Bengbu Intermediate Court, and the peasants of Zhang Village could not help being disappointed at the legal system.
But from one important point the villagers drew some comfort: in the final paragraph of the indictment it was pointed out that Zhang Guiquan and his sons had no grounds for claiming self-defense, that the offense of Zhang Guiquan and his eldest son, Zhang Jiazhi, sixth son, Zhang Chaowei, and fifth son, Zhang Yuliang, was not merely intent to “inflict bodily harm” but that they had committed acts of violence with intent to kill, and that their claim of lack of intent to kill was without merit and could not be considered. That was some consolation to the villagers of Zhang Village, which had been devastated by the crime.
3
the long and the
*In some areas it was standard practice for each village household to be fit-ted with a speaker that could not be turned off.
the village tyrant
page: “We have a government that has signed the international convention regarding human rights, and after all we are in a civilized age, how could we tolerate such rampant evil among us.” He pointed out, “It is of course necessary to discipline the cadres who violate the policies and laws of the country, and such discipline will probably bear results to a certain extent, but that is only scratching the surface of the problem. A thorough solution is to allow the peasants to be well-to-do, to allow them to organize themselves, and to confer legal status on their organization so that the peasants will be empowered to resist the political machine in the countryside.”
Around this time, three reporters from the magazine Democracy and Law also went down to Zhang Village, and published their on-the-site report in the seventeenth issue of their journal. The title was blunt—“Villagers’ Representatives Trying to Audit the Village Books Were Brutally Murdered”— and the report was riveting in its graphic description and thunderous in its denunciation. One very curious fact first revealed in this report was that one of the murder weapons, the bloody knife that had been wielded by Zhang Guiquan’s son number six, was still lying in a drawer in the village clin-ic and had been totally overlooked all this while. The reporters took a photo of this piece of evidence and published it along with their report.
With the media’s attention now focused on the crime and numerous articles appearing in the national press, the case of peasants being killed because they wanted to audit the village books could not be covered up any longer. Only then did things take a turn for the better.
Tangnan Township officials took steps to provide for the two orphans of the dead Zhang Hongchuan.
At the Dragon Boat Festival, which fell on the fifth day of the
will the boat sink the water ?
fifth month by the lunar calendar, the county government gave one hundred yuan in consolation money to each of the afflicted families.
Moreover, during the harvest following the Dragon Boat Festival, several officials from the Guzhen County administration came down to the village and helped the afflicted families take in the harvest, working through a long morning without complaining of tiredness, nor touching a drop of water nor a grain of the families’ rice. This went some way toward convey-ing to the families the warmth of the Party’s and government’s concern for them.
On August 8, 1998, the High Court of Anhui Province issued the final sentence on the case of Zhang Guiquan and his sons. The sentence and the list of charges differed little from that of the Bengbu Intermediate Court, and the peasants of Zhang Village could not help being disappointed at the legal system.
But from one important point the villagers drew some comfort: in the final paragraph of the indictment it was pointed out that Zhang Guiquan and his sons had no grounds for claiming self-defense, that the offense of Zhang Guiquan and his eldest son, Zhang Jiazhi, sixth son, Zhang Chaowei, and fifth son, Zhang Yuliang, was not merely intent to “inflict bodily harm” but that they had committed acts of violence with intent to kill, and that their claim of lack of intent to kill was without merit and could not be considered. That was some consolation to the villagers of Zhang Village, which had been devastated by the crime.
3
the long and the
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