A book exposing the mistreatment of peasants was banned in China - but still became a bestseller. Now the authorities can't decide whether to embrace or punish its two authors, writes Fintan O'Toole in Beijing
If you want to understand China's system of state censorship, the last people you should ask are two of the country's best-informed writers, Chen Guidi and Wu Chuntao. They have had a huge effect on government policy and won one of China's most prestigious literary prizes, the Lu Xun Literature Achievement Award.
Last month, the couple met the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, at her request, during a state visit to Beijing. Their book, A Survey of Chinese Peasants, has probably been read by about 20 million people. And, though it will be published in English this month, it is banned in China.
When I talked to Chen Guidi this week, it was over the phone from the southern province of Jiangxi, where the couple has effectively taken refuge.
"Our home in Anhui was attacked 20 times by hooligans," he says, "but the police were unwilling or unable to protect us and we had to move out." The ambiguity of their status - feted, influential, suppressed and under threat - sums up the deep uncertainties of public debate in contemporary China.
Chen Guidi was born in 1943 in the poor rural province of Anhui, and made his reputation as a novelist and short story writer. In the early 1990s, he and Wu Chuntao, who is 20 years younger, began to undertake journalistic investigations into corruption and, in particular, into the pollution of the Huaihe River, on whose banks Chen, the child of peasant farmers, had grown up. Then, in 2000, they went back to Anhui.
"I went back," says Chen, "expecting things to be getting better, as they were in the cities, but what we found was very different. The cities were improving by transferring the burden to the countryside."
They started a three-year-long investigation into the life of the villages of Anhui. What emerged was a shocking picture of a peasantry at the mercy of petty local tyrants, who cared as little for the ideals of the central government in Beijing as they did for those whom they were supposed to serve. Chen and Wu were under no illusions about the risks they were taking.
"We knew," says Chen, "that investigating would carry some danger and that publishing would carry more danger. But Chinese intellectuals have one advantage - they have a fine tradition of believing that it is their job to serve the people. They don't have power, and they don't have money, but they have this tradition to draw on. We ourselves are peasants' children. We could not allow any danger to prevent us from writing this book."
The book they published in November 2003, A Survey of Chinese Peasants, is vivid and often brutal, but it also has an undertow of deadpan irony. The irony is historical: if the book had been published 100 years ago, its protagonists - brave peasants standing up to swaggering officials - would now be official revolutionary heroes. It is not hard to imagine a statue in the socialist realist style commemorating Ding Zuoming, whose story is told in the book's opening. Growing up in the dirt-poor village of Luying, which Chen and Wu call "a godforsaken hole", he had the intelligence and the gall to put together a dossier detailing the illegal taxes and fees extorted from the villagers by local bosses. For his pains, he was beaten to death by thugs hired by a village security chief.
When, seven years later, a high-level investigation was launched, the arrival of the officials from Beijing created a scene that would not have been out of place in a movie about medieval times. In a country where old age is venerable, the sight of elderly peasants on their knees before them shocked the younger officials.
"The moment they arrived in the village, some of the older peasants fell down on their knees, supplicating for justice. It was heart-wrenching. Just think, if they had not been weighed down by grief unprecedented in their long lives, if not for their extreme feelings of oppression, how could these venerable elders have overcome their sense of humiliation and gone down on their knees in supplication to people who were their grandsons' age? Weren't these peasants the kind of people that we usually refer to as having reversed their fate under communism and become masters of the country?"
Ding Zuoming's murder, and the eventual exposure and punishment of the local tyrants, might have seemed like a watershed, but Chen and Wu discovered that even worse abuses had continued. They recount events in the village of Zhang in 1998, when a group of peasants succeeded in getting the district authorities to carry out an audit of the books of their local bosses. The deputy village chief, instead of cowering in shame as a crude system of extortion was exposed, attacked the home of one of the complainants with his sons. They stabbed four members of the family to death and seriously wounded another. In the course of their investigation, Chen and Wu discovered that the deputy village chief had been able to attain local power even though he had been convicted in 1992 of rape and embezzlement.
The massacre in Zhang was essentially covered up. The local TV station reported a case of "manslaughter" as a result of a "civic dispute". Local party leaders summoned the villagers to a meeting and warned them not to "talk out of turn" or "act irresponsibly". When the assailants were on trial, the families of the victims were not informed of the hearings. Nor were they allowed to see copies of the sentences (which included the death sentence for the deputy village chief and one of his sons). The official response to the atrocity thus seemed to be that the perpetrators would be punished severely, but the broader context of the crimes - the system of extortion by local officials - would not be revealed.
"A lot of peasants looked at what happened in Zhang and recognised similarities with their own situation," says Chen. "What we wanted to write about was not just the economic burdens of the peasants, but also their spiritual and psychological burdens. Those burdens were not just about being tyrannised, but about having no legal protection for their rights and no right to make their voices heard."
This broad critique of the system of governance was bound to make the book an uncomfortable read for the authorities, but it is obvious that many people within the system welcomed it nonetheless. In the stories the book tells, central government officials do not emerge badly. It is on central policy directives that the peasants rely when they challenge local bullies. It is to Beijing that they appeal for justice, travelling time and again to the capital in the belief that if only their situation is understood, the wrongs will be righted. And when they do get their messages across, government officials tend to be outraged by the injustices. They issue directives, launch investigations, punish the local bullies. But, in a closed system, they often have to rely for information on the very people who are covering up the problems.
Chen and Wu tell a story about one of the more outspoken Anhui officials, Lu Zixiu, a man with a strong grasp of the reality in the villages. At one point, the director of the General Office of the Communist Party's Central Committee arrived on an inspection tour.
Lu greeted him with the question, "What do you want to see, director, the true or the false? The situation as it really is, or the flashy stuff?"
The director smiled and said, "Let's take a look at both!"
The director who clearly understood the difference between rosy rhetoric and hard realities was Wen Jiabao, now the prime minister of China. The top leadership, it seems, is all too well aware of the gap between what should be and what actually is.
This may be why, somewhat to Chen's surprise, A Survey of Chinese Peasants was published. A shortened version appeared in November 2003 in the magazine Our Times. The issue sold out and versions of the articlebegan to appear on the internet. A month later, the full book appeared from the People's Liberation Publishing House. Chen and Wu were interviewed by dozens of TV and radio stations, newspapers and internet sites. The book, despite its academic title and stolid cover, sold 150,000 copies in a month.
The signs were that the authorities were sympathetic to Chen and Wu's argument that, as Chen put it to me, "Over 20 years of reform in China will be destroyed if the rural problem is not dealt with. China cannot achieve modernisation if the countryside remains feudal."
The official China Daily newspaper carried a "reader's recommendation" for the book, described as a "realistic report" that had "tears bubbling in my eyes". Then, two months after publication, an edict was issued by the Propaganda Department of the Central Committee: A Survey of Chinese Peasants was to be withdrawn from the shops.
Yet the edict itself was strangely ambivalent. It banned three things (the issuers of edicts are fond of threes): promoting the book, reprinting it and, oddly, criticising it.
The last of these suggested that, in spite of the ban, many within government were deeply influenced by the book and that attacks on Wu and Chen might be seen as attacks on party reformers. This interpretation is supported by the fact that government policy now echoes many of the book's conclusions.
"Although the book was banned," says Chen, "the government has made us very happy by stating its intention to tackle, one after another, the problems we highlighted: giving the peasants a voice in the election of village leaders; solving the problem of illegal fees and taxes; ending the former policy of forcing the peasants to sell grain to the government at a fixed price; giving free education to peasant children."
At another level, too, the ban on the book has been meaningless. With the book's reputation already established, pirate publishers recognised a market. Estimates of the numbers of pirate copies sold in China range from seven to 10 million.
"I really hate pirate publishers," says Chen. "But sometimes I really like them. Publishers and authors lose money from their activities, but in this case, the pirates have managed to get the truth out."
He also remains grateful for the small mercy that the book was published officially at all.
"I always thought that if our book was published for one day, it would be a victory. That it was actually published for two months before being withdrawn is a triumph."
Yet, in spite of the vindication implicit in the changes in government policy and in the massive sales of the book, Chen and Wu continue to pay a price for their audacity. In a move that Chen believes to have been prompted by a wider network of vested interests, one of the officials criticised in the book, Zhang Xide, launched a libel suit against the authors in January 2004. At the time, when the book was not yet banned, even the China Daily expressed worries that the trial in the local courts in Anhui might not be a fair one: "There are already worries [ that] the selection of a local court, which might fall subject to local officials' influence, will be disadvantageous for the accused. Given the close relations between many grass-roots courts and local authorities, such caution is reasonable." These worries were exacerbated by the ban: the media interpreted the prohibition on publicising the book as extending to coverage of the court case.
With peasants breaking cover to give evidence for Chen and Wu and local officials lining up against them, the court has been faced with a dilemma.
"If we win the case," laughs Chen, "a lot of officials would not be happy, and that can't happen. If we lose the case, the foreign media would write critically, so that can't happen either. So the case finished almost two years ago, but there's still no verdict."
The system can't decide what to do with Chen Guidi and Wu Chuntao, whether to embrace them as heroes of reform or punish them as disruptive elements, so for the moment it has settled for doing both. Both patriotic truth-tellers and dangerous pariahs, they symbolise the difficulty of making real the famous injunction of Deng Xiaoping to "seek truth from facts".
• Chen Guidi and Wu Chuntao's book will be published in English this month by Public Affairs under the title Will the Boat Sink the Water?: The Life of China's Peasants