China’s Red Tape

Wuo xiang zhongli suoshihua (I Told the Premier the Truth)
By Li Changping 366 pages, Beijing: Guangmin Ribao Chubanshe, 2002 (in Chinese)

The truth is generally a scarce commodity in authoritarian regimes. With the suppression of the press and civil society, absence of opposition parties, and a rigid hierarchical power structure that breeds sycophancy, collusion, and deceit, rulers in autocracies are often deceived and manipulated by their underlings, who supply a steady diet of false statistics and good news. Over time, rulers develop a false sense of security and become blind to the most visible malaise in their societies. Systemic risks accumulate as the regime grows more brittle.

So when someone inside Chinese Communist Party officialdom risks his political life to tell the truth about China’s unfolding agrarian crisis, the world should pay attention. To be sure, China watchers in the West are familiar with the most salient aspects of China’s rural problems: high taxes, structural inefficiencies that prevent large-scale farming, a crumbling infrastructure, 200 million to 300 million excess unskilled rural laborers, stagnant incomes, and inadequate basic public services such as education, health, and application of new technologies. What makes I Told the Premier the Truth by Li Changping unusual is not its recital of rural China’s woes but its insider analysis of their deeper roots.

To begin with, Li is not your typical Communist Party functionary. He has a master’s degree in economics and became a party secretary of a township of about 40,000 people when he was only 20. In 17 years, he served as the party boss in four different townships in Hubei province, a mostly agricultural region in central China.

In March 2000, this veteran of the Communist Party sent reformist premier Zhu Rongji a letter containing a shocking indictment of the regime’s rural policy, phrased in blunt, colorful language. Li described local government officials as "locusts" with insatiable appetites, vaunted government land leases as "chains on peasants" and official policies as "lies." He also detailed the mounting local public debts that have crippled township and village governments, the massive exodus of peasants to coastal areas in search of jobs, and farmers’ abandonment of large tracts of land (mainly because, with high taxes and low prices, peasants could not make a living working the fields).

Miraculously, Li’s letter landed on the desk of its intended recipient, a success akin to a small-town mayor in Mississippi dialing the White House operator and getting the president to take the call. Zhu duly dispatched two senior government officials from Beijing to investigate. This inquiry set into motion a series of events that provide a rare and revealing look at the political rot that is spreading in the lower reaches of the Chinese regime. Li’s letter raised a firestorm as it was circulated among top leaders in Beijing. Under pressure from the central government, Hubei’s embarrassed provincial leaders scurried to Li’s township in an attempt to set things right. A team of senior provincial officials stayed in the township for three months, ostensibly to implement the reforms pledged to Beijing. The county’s party boss suffered the indignity of having his scheduled promotion delayed.

But as soon as the provincial officials left town, the party bosses in Li’s county began to retaliate. The county government conducted its own investigation, with the sole purpose of disproving Li’s charges. They launched a smear campaign to discredit Li. They colluded to frustrate Li’s attempts to reform his township government by streamlining the bureaucracy and dismissing corrupt officials. When local party bosses learned that a private entrepreneur was peddling copies of Southern Weekend (China’s most daring investigative newspaper) that carried a story of Li’s letter to Zhu, they sent the police to confiscate all copies of the paper. The county government even dispatched agents to spy on Li when he was hospitalized in Beijing, fearful that he would expose their misdeeds. An unfounded rumor that Li was about to bring to his town the most influential investigative program of the national television network, known as Focus, (China’s 60 Minutes), panicked local officials, who convened an emergency meeting plotting what to do.

In the end, even a tough man like Li buckled under such pressure. Six months after he told the truth, he resigned abruptly and left to work for a private company in Shenzhen (the boomtown across from Hong Kong). None of the local officials responsible for the county’s mismanagement were punished. In fact, the party secretary of the county, Li’s chief antagonist in the book, received his promotion despite his miserable record. The reforms touted by local officials to their provincial and national superiors came to nothing. Even a powerful central leader like Zhu, who issued two directives to his subordinates to follow through on Li’s letter, appeared powerless against a group of conniving local fiefs, giving new meaning to the old Chinese saying "A dragon cannot fight a snake."

Luckily, Li himself landed on his feet. He was voted "Man of the Year" by Southern Weekend, beating out luminaries such as Long Yongtu, China’s chief trade negotiator, who was credited with securing the country’s entry into the World Trade Organization. The media coverage of Li’s travails also made him a hero for China’s liberal intelligentsia. After a short stint in the private sector, he became a journalist in Beijing and launched a one-man crusade for farmers’ rights. His book appears to be merely an opening volley.

For those familiar with a similar process of political decay in the former Soviet Union during the rule of Leonid Brezhnev, Li’s story strikes a powerful chord. As depicted in the book, the lower reaches of the Chinese state have been practically overtaken by a collusive officialdom that is impossible to reform or remove. Worse still, this apparat has begun to work with criminal elements to oppress the peasantry. "If such ‘mafia politics’ is allowed to continue," Li warns, "rural China will be an even darker place." Although several of Li’s former colleagues are men of integrity and sympathetic to his reformist ideals, the majority of the local officials one encounters in the book are, at best, party hacks preoccupied solely with their careers and personal interests. A large number are corrupt, vindictive, duplicitous, petty characters for whom the current Chinese political system seems to provide a particularly hospitable environment.

Li’s prescription for dislodging this local predatory state is simple: enfranchising and empowering the vast Chinese peasantry. He calls for the abolition of all types of restrictions on peasants so that they can become "free" and "genuine citizens of China." This veiled call for democracy may sound a bit naive or premature under current circumstances in China. But even this depressing book may shed a ray of hope: When a party insider like Li comes to this inescapable conclusion, publishes a book by an influential official press, and sells more than 40,000 copies, then real changes may soon be on the way.