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

this background, never imagined that in trying to be clever and glossing over the problem, he was actually killing his own political future.
    Lixin County’s report was exactly the kind that the provincial Party and government leaders wanted to see, and they promptly wired the gist of the report to Chen Junsheng in Beijing.
    Secretary-General Chen of the General Office of the State Council was a careful man. Seeing the discrepancy between this report and the earlier Xinhua News Agency’s internal report, he realized that what was at stake was not so much the handling of the case as the nature of the case: Was it really a civil dispute, or was it revenge taken on the peasants for reporting on their excessive burden? Chen followed up with the Xinhua News Agency, which stood by its own story. But in the interests of
    will the boat sink the water ?

    thoroughness, they relayed Secretary-General Chen’s query to their branch office in Anhui. When the writer of the original report, Kong, saw the query regarding the discrepancy between the two stories, he of course stood by his own version. To clarify the problem once and for all, the Anhui branch office of Xinhua requested that the Party and government dispatch an investigation team down to the village to clear up the problem on-site.
    A joint investigation team was quickly formed, with members from the Disciplinary Committee of the Party Central Committee, the Legal Bureau of the State Council, the State Planning Commission, the Ministry of Agriculture, and the Supreme People’s Procuratorate.* They did not involve the provincial or local authorities, but left Beijing and headed straight for Luying Village. The local governments at various levels were in total shock when they realized what was happening right under their noses.
    The investigation team first offered condolences to Ding Zuoming’s family and then started meeting with the villagers. The investigation did not limit itself to Luying, but took in two neighboring villages as well. Local cadres were not invited to participate in the interviews, and the peasants the team interviewed were put under protection. News of the investigation spread, and peasants from more distant villages came over to talk to the investigation team. In no time at all, the news spread that a living “Judge Bao”** in plain clothes has arrived from the capital and was in their midst.
    *The people’s procuratorates are state organs for legal supervision. The Supreme People’s Procuratorate is the highest procuratorial organ. It reports to and is supervised by the National People’s Congress and its Standing Committee. For further information, see http://english.people.com.cn/data/ organs/procuratorate.html, accessed November 26, 2005.
    **Judge Bao was a judge of the Song Dynasty (960–1279) whose name became a byword for legal integrity.
    the martyr

    The Tears of the Joint Investigation Team Members
    Seven years later, on the afternoon of October 30, 2000, in an office in the Anhui provincial government building in Hefei, we met with Wu Zhaoren, who had been deputy head of the provincial Agricultural Economic Committee for seventeen years. Now retired, he was a consultant to the provincial government of Anhui and chairman of the Agricultural Economics Association. He started talking about the events surrounding the activities of the joint investigation team. It was as if everything had happened the day before. He had accompanied the joint investigation team back to Beijing by accident, he explained, because he himself was on a business trip to Beijing. But he did not hide the fact that his bosses at the Anhui provincial government were very curious to know what the investigation team had found out in Luying Village and what views they had formed. Wu said that even today he could remember the names of two members of the team who were from the Ministry of Agriculture: Li Xiangang, head of the Department for Supervising the Peasants’