Out of Mao's Shadow: The Struggle for the Soul of a New China (40 page)

W
HILE
C
HENG SAT
in prison, his colleagues at the
Southern Metropolis Daily
launched a campaign to win his freedom. They appealed to the party leadership, and then to the public on the Internet. Some of them, like the reporter Chen Feng, issued open letters on the editor’s behalf. Others quietly contacted me and other foreign journalists and fed us information. News of the arrests at the
Daily
spread quickly, and soon journalists across the country were signing petitions. Many of those who had campaigned against the
shourong
system now took up the cause of the three jailed newspaper executives. Xu Zhiyong, one of the young scholars who had requested the constitutional review of
shourong,
volunteered to help with their legal defense and called a news conference in Beijing. Behind the scenes, the Southern Newspaper Group mobilized the party’s liberal faction, and several influential figures, including three retired provincial party chiefs, called for a review of the case. Cheng never found out exactly what turned the tide, but the public outcry had an impact. About five months after his arrest, party leaders in Guangdong reversed themselves and released him. Yu and Li remained in prison, though their sentences were reduced and Li was later released, too.

I last saw Cheng in late 2007. We had lunch in a private room at an upscale Shanghainese restaurant in Beijing, and he spoke proudly, even defiantly, of his experiences. Yu was scheduled to complete his four-year sentence in a few months’ time, and Cheng planned to be there to greet him when he walked out of prison. He said he was still struggling with survivor’s guilt. “It makes no sense that he’s in prison and not me,” he told me. “The prosecutors said I was the chief culprit and he was the accomplice. So how could they release me but keep him in prison?”

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

O
n 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 partner 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