Out of Mao's Shadow: The Struggle for the Soul of a New China (43 page)

But on the second day of the trial, when Zhang’s lawyers began calling witnesses to testify on his behalf, the mood in the room changed. The experience of the first witness was typical. Han Yongzhong, a tall, lanky man who had served as one of Zhang’s subordinates in Linquan County, strode confidently to the witness stand and began reading from a prepared text, explaining how the residents of Wangying Village had never been levied illegal taxes and praising Zhang’s leadership skills. Before he could finish, though, Pu interrupted, pointing out that the defense was entitled to a copy of Han’s text if he planned to read it into the record. Judge Qian sighed, and told the witness to put the text away. Han looked stunned, did as he was told, and fumbled through the rest of his testimony, with the help of softball questions from Zhang’s lawyers. But when it was the defense side’s turn to question him, he got flustered. At one point, after being asked about the tax rate in the county, he hesitated and tried to steal a glance at his text again. The defense objected loudly, and the judge instructed the clerk to take it away from him. He looked like an overgrown schoolboy whose teacher had just seized his cheat sheet. Then Zhang tried to whisper the answer to the official, and the defense objected again. Judge Qian could barely hide his exasperation as he agreed to move the witness stand farther from the plaintiff’s table.

Han’s squirming continued as Pu began asking him about material he had discovered in the reports that had been entered into evidence. Pu read from one passage that indicated Han had collected illegal fines from residents who violated the one-child policy, embezzled funds that were supposed to be used to compensate peasants, and killed a person while driving drunk. “How did you get away with it?” Pu asked, prompting laughter from the gallery. The official bristled and snapped at Pu, saying his record had nothing to do with the case.

“This is slandering our witness!” Zhang’s lawyer objected. “The witness is here to provide evidence! The witness is not a criminal!”

Judge Qian admonished Pu: “Defense attorney, we cannot treat the witness as a criminal.”

“Yes, yes,” Pu replied, raising his voice. “But I just want to know, how could someone who has clearly committed a crime not only escape any punishment but then receive a promotion? If Secretary Zhang can interfere with the law—” But the judge cut him off.

By the time Pu finished his cross-examination, though, the mood in the courtroom had begun to shift. Now it seemed as if Zhang and his cronies were on trial, not the authors. Zhang’s lawyers called more than a dozen witnesses, almost all of them party officials who must have expected the trial to be just a formality. One after another, they took the stand and backed Zhang’s version of events. And one after another, they faltered under cross-examination, losing their temper and generally making fools of themselves. A senior police official denied that his officers had beat villagers, but when Pu pressed him, he shot back that his men “controlled” residents if they got in the way. Another official backed Zhang’s explanation that a rival party leader had encouraged the peasants to complain about taxes in an attempt to embarrass and undermine him. But when Pu challenged him to identify this rival leader, the official refused, saying it was “inconvenient” for him to say because it would hurt “party solidarity.”

Often the witnesses stammered in anger and just refused to answer Pu’s questions. They were men with power who were clearly unaccustomed to being challenged, much less being put on the spot and grilled about their work. Sometimes Judge Qian would intervene and direct them to answer a question, but they would ignore him, too. The highest-ranking official to testify, a haughty, gray-haired county leader named Li Pinzheng, demanded to know Pu’s name when he started quizzing him. He also answered his cell phone while on the stand. Later, when Lu Zhimin asked the official to pay attention, the man blew up. “You’re telling me to pay attention?” he shouted. “You’re the one who needs to watch out!”

As the defense pressed the witnesses, some revealed damaging details. The authors had described how officials in Linquan County punished peasants for violating the one-child policy by demolishing their homes and seizing their livestock, but one official who took the stand admitted the government had also forced couples to be sterilized, requiring it of women even if their husbands had already undergone surgery. The disclosure caused a stir in the gallery, and Pu spoke at length about how the policy violated not only the government’s own regulations but also universal human rights. Zhang’s lawyers denied it had ever been carried out. The issue came up in dramatic fashion during the testimony of Zhang’s last witness, a peasant named Dai Junming, who had agreed to speak up for the party boss.

Pu asked him how many children he had.

“Three,” he said.

“Have you taken birth planning measures?” Pu asked. “There was a policy in Linquan County in 1993. If you were under the age of forty-five, and you had two children or more, even if the man was sterilized, the woman was also required to be sterilized. Ten years ago, you were about forty years old. Were you forced to undergo birth planning measures?”

The room hushed. Dai stared blankly at the lawyer.

“I object!” Zhang shouted.

“This is a matter of the witness’s personal privacy!” his lawyer added. “Whether he has been sterilized, that’s private. You can’t ask the witness if he’s been sterilized.”

But Pu lowered his voice and addressed the witness again. “Have birth planning measures been taken against you?” he said softly. “Please answer. I sympathize with you.”

Everyone in the room was waiting for an answer, and Judge Qian seemed interested in learning the truth, too. “Witness, answer the question,” he said, surprising Zhang and his lawyers. There was another awkward silence. “Witness, answer the question,” the judge said again. “Have birth planning measures been taken against you?” When Dai refused again to say anything, the judge told the stenographer to record that the witness did not answer.

Finally, Pu asked Dai another question. “Do you think Zhang Xide was a good party secretary in Linquan County?” He didn’t answer that one, either.

O
N THE THIRD
day of the trial, the defense began calling their own witnesses, all of them peasants from Linquan County. Pu’s cross-examinations had put Zhang on the defensive, and now he seemed like a prosecutor building a case against him. One after another, the peasants took the stand and recalled the abuses described in the book in damning detail: the exorbitant taxes and fees that local officials had demanded from them; the one-child crackdown in which Zhang had declared it would be better to end seven pregnancies than to allow an extra child to be born; the appeals for help that took them all the way to Beijing, where they had knelt in protest in Tiananmen Square. One witness said Zhang’s minions had offered before the trial to pay him if he would testify on behalf of the party chief. Another said he had been sentenced to three years in a labor camp after getting in a scuffle with Zhang during one of the protests against him. While in custody, he said, the prison guards beat him while asking how he could dare hit a party secretary. When he was released, he said, he discovered that his elderly father had passed away while he was in prison and had been denied a chance to visit him.

“Allow me to express my sympathies to you,” Pu told the witness, his eyes tearing up. “It was your misfortune to be born in Linquan County.”

The most vivid testimony concerned the police raid on Wangying Village that the party had dubbed the “April 2 Incident.” More than a decade had passed since the authorities hushed up the raid, but now, at long last, the peasants were getting their day in court. One after another, they took the stand, spoke into the microphone, and described how the police had stormed the village in retaliation for their tax protests and beat anyone they found outside. “It was worse than when the Japanese devils invaded,” recalled Wang Yongliang, a white-haired farmer who looked old enough to remember the Japanese occupation. Another elderly resident, Wang Hongyan, testified that police grabbed him and dragged him away even though he had not been involved in the tax protests. They held him for seven days, poured hot tea on his head, and forced him to run laps in a courtyard with his wrists cuffed and his legs in shackles.

“Had you been impeding the police when they arrested you?” Pu asked.

“No, I was just pulling weeds!” Wang answered. “Why would I hinder the police?”

Two of the peasant leaders also described being tortured by police. “Every officer hit me, and they kept asking, ‘Are you tired of living yet?’” said Wang Xiangdong, a rugged-faced man wearing a mechanic’s shirt. “They would grab my hair and slam my head against the wall.”

The other leader, Wang Hongchao, said the police handcuffed his wrists tightly behind his back for an entire month, forcing him to eat and piss “like a dog.” His hands swelled up and when the officers finally unbound him, the cuffs tore away his flesh. “I would like to pay special tribute to Secretary Zhang,” he said angrily. “Thank you, Secretary Zhang!”

The last witness was a frail sixty-nine-year-old woman in a flower-print blouse, Zhang Xiuying. She recalled how her husband had shouted for help when police seized him during the April 2 Incident, then suddenly collapsed. The officers left him lying in the dirt unconscious. “He was just standing near the door when the three officers grabbed him,” she testified. “I went to see what was happening, and I heard him shouting, ‘Why are you arresting me? Why are you arresting me?’ After he fell to the ground, I rushed to find help, but everyone in the village had run away.” One neighbor was hiding in the fields, she recalled, but he was too scared to come out to help her.

“My husband died the next day!” she said, breaking down and sobbing on the stand. As she wept, I could see several of the peasants in the gallery were wiping away tears, too, as were Pu and Lu Zhimin. But Judge Qian seemed oblivious. “Witness, control your emotions!” he barked. “You are in a courtroom!” Then, after she finished testifying, the woman suddenly knelt down on the floor and cried out, “May the honorable judges render justice to my family!” Judge Qian shouted again for order, but another woman in the audience also knelt and pleaded for justice. The gallery erupted, and when the police moved to escort the women from the room, the peasants jumped to their feet, furious. Pu stood up as well, and calmed the crowd.

Zhang Xide, however, appeared amused by the scene. He had been sitting quietly at the plaintiff’s table through much of the trial, sipping tea from a steel thermos and excusing himself occasionally to use the restroom. He let his lawyers do most of the talking. But as the proceeding began spinning out of his control, he smiled less and spoke up more. “That’s a lie!” he blurted out occasionally, drawing rebukes from the judge and laughter from the gallery. For the most part, though, he stayed cool and casually dismissed the peasants’ testimony. From the plaintiff’s table, he said the party had long ago concluded that the police raid was justified and handled properly, and he rejected the corruption allegations against him as “just a few trifles.” Addressing the one-child crackdown, he maintained that “only twenty or so families had their homes torn down,” as if that were nothing to be concerned about. He also defended his use of county funds to buy a Mercedes-Benz. “I didn’t buy it for myself, but for anyone who needed the car for work,” he said. When Pu brought it up again, he retorted: “This has nothing to do with this case. I have my human rights!”

From beginning to end, Zhang maintained that the book was trouble for the party. “This book doesn’t encourage people to obey the law or work hard, but glorifies crime and violations of discipline,” he testified. “It incites the peasants to protest in large groups, launch surprise attacks on police, steal guns, insult county party secretaries, and so on…. If nine hundred million peasants are guided like this, what kind of result will there be for China?” When the defense noted that the book had been critically acclaimed, he smugly reminded them that it had been banned. “Why haven’t domestic newspapers and media said anything about it since March?” he asked, before answering his own question. The book, he said proudly, had been “strangled” by the party.

When it came time for Pu to question Zhang, he asked only one question. “I’ve been willing to believe you originally didn’t know the facts,” he said slowly. “But today, facing the suffering of these people, including suffering at the hands of your subordinates, do you have any regrets or remorse or a feeling you let these peasants down?”

Without even hesitating, Zhang replied, “No.”

T
HERE WERE MOMENTS
in the trial of
Zhang v. Chen, Wu, and the People’s Literature Publishing House
when I felt like I was watching history unfold. As I sat in the courtroom, scribbling notes on scraps of paper whenever the police seemed to be looking away and then hiding them in my socks, I wondered if years from now, people in China would look back and remember the case as a milestone, the moment when a team of lawyers representing two blacklisted writers made a stand for freedom of speech in a small city courthouse and prevailed. As the trial drew to a close, though, it occurred to me that something even more remarkable had happened. After four days of testimony, the original defamation suit had all but been forgotten. Pu and the other defense lawyers had presented such a powerful case that now it seemed as if Zhang, and the Communist Party itself, were the ones on trial.

In his closing statement, Pu repeated his argument that the law protected criticism of a government official’s job performance. Article 35 of the Chinese constitution, he pointed out, guaranteed freedom of speech for citizens. Article 47 guaranteed their literary and artistic freedom. Article 41 gave them the right to criticize and offer suggestions to the government. “As the masters of the nation, the masses have the right—and a responsibility—to criticize the government and its personnel,” Pu said. “Writers and intellectuals should be spokesmen for the masses. It is the writer’s duty to reflect the reality of society, so what the authors did was not illegal.”