Wild Grass: Three Stories of Change in Modern China
- Book Review,
by Ian Johnson
From Publishers Weekly
These three intimate case studies explore how China's recent reforms have opened avenues for dissent. Johnson portrays the upsurge of popular protests as the leading edge of an inchoate grassroots movement that will ultimately threaten Communist Party rule. He is skeptical about whether the Party can accommodate or co-opt expectations arising from a nascent legal system through which grievances are supposed to be channeled. The problem he illustrates is that petitioners too often lose, no matter the justice of their cause-the legal system is hopelessly skewed in favor of the rich and connected. The three cases studies are chosen to represent the variety of experiences of ordinary Chinese. The first involves a self-educated peasant lawyer who takes on the local political elite over the excessive and illegal taxation of impoverished farmers, and mobilizes thousands in the process. The petitioner is encouraged by a court victory in one village, but the demands are defeated and the protagonist jailed when higher authorities realize the danger of his appeals. The second case pits owners of homes in the historic heart of old Beijing against city planners who want to bulldoze nearly everything old to make way for high-rise developments. The third case exposes the persecution and determined persistence in her faith of one woman who joined Falun Gong protests. Johnson won a Pulitzer in 2001, as Beijing bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal, for his coverage of Falun Gong. While it offers insight into grassroots activity in China, this local focus makes the book less useful for understanding how factional fighting within the governing elite sometimes opens opportunities for successful dissent. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
During Chinese President Jiang Zemin's visit to France in October 1999, French President Jacques Chirac asked him why his government was so angry with a group of elderly Falun Gong members merely doing breathing exercises in neighborhood parks. In a revealing response, French officials later told me, Jiang asked Chirac how he would feel waking up in the morning to find his residence encircled by thousands of people he had not known existed. Jiang was referring to a most unusual demonstration that had taken place earlier in the year and startled China's communist leaders. As morning broke over the Zhongnanhai leadership compound in Beijing on April 25, the country's top officials found themselves under siege by about 10,000 members of Falun Gong, sitting quietly on the pavement in the meditative lotus position. Unbeknownst to China's security services, the group had managed to materialize in the heart of Beijing to hold a silent demonstration demanding that their religion be legalized. Beijing responded by labeling it an "evil cult" and launching a crackdown that saw some 30,000 sent to prison and 77 dead while in police detention. In Wild Grass, Ian Johnson, the Wall Street Journal correspondent who won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the Falun Gong, expands on various aspects of grassroots rebellion in China, offering a gripping tale of a few very ordinary people and their extraordinary courage in fighting for their rights against the Communist Party leviathan.In three decades of Deng Xiaoping-led economic reform, the party has relinquished control over many aspects of people's personal lives and has opened up spaces for individual freedom unimaginable under Mao. One can steer clear of politics and pursue the Dengist motto "to get rich is glorious." But as Johnson shows, beneath the surface of growing prosperity and loosening control, common people are waging a struggle to claim the greater freedom, clean government and rule of law that the party has promised but never delivers. The daily occurrence of such battles is a measure of the progress achieved since the dark days of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. But the fate suffered by the heroes Johnson portrays in this book also points to the long road ahead.The book is divided into three stories of unintentional heroes. First there is Ma Wenlin, a former Red Guard and a small town schoolteacher who taught himself law in order to become a government-sanctioned legal worker. Implored by local peasants to challenge various illegal taxes and levies imposed by local officials, "Teacher Ma" took up their cause. His class-action suit seeking relief was perfectly legal, but the local court refused to accept it. When he took his case to the highest authority in Beijing, Ma was beaten so severely by police that he lost 13 teeth -- and then was sentenced to five years in prison for disrupting traffic and other crimes.The second chapter tells the story of the demolition of old Beijing and the dispossession of 23,000 residents in the run-up to the 2008 Olympics, and of the tragic efforts of a few courageous individuals trying to protect history and architectural treasures from the bulldozers. Johnson first takes the reader through the charming old quarters of the capital marked for destruction after the expulsion of their legal occupants with pitiful compensation. Then he recounts how a bright architecture student meticulously documented the real estate deals and exposed official corruption involving an estimated $1 billion, but failed to move officialdom and finally left for America. The third and the most poignant account involves the rise of the Falun Gong and how one member, a grandmother named Chen Zixiu, got caught up in its fervor of healthy exercise and spiritual living. Like other Chinese discouraged by the rampant materialism and corruption of modern China, she sought solace in the movement's teachings of truthfulness, compassion and tolerance. Bewildered by the government's "evil cult" pronouncement, Chen set out for Beijing to correct her leaders' wrong impression. Arrested, fined and sent back home with a warning not to associate further with the movement, Chen stuck to her principles. Within six months she was found dead in a local prison, with smashed teeth and battered legs. The authorities refused to state the cause of her death. In her battle to obtain a death certificate, Chen's apolitical daughter ended up in jail herself -- with a far better understanding of her country and the cause her mother died for. Johnson's cloak-and-dagger quest to talk to the victims and his taut, perceptive writing make Wild Grass read in parts like a John Grisham legal thriller. Only here the good guys end up in jail, in the morgue or in self-imposed exile. Those thousands who appeared out of nowhere, near Zhongnanhai, to spook Jiang Zemin have not reappeared. If all goes well, Ma, the peasant champion, will finish serving his prison term on July 7 of this year. "Now is a time for waiting," grandma Chen's daughter told Johnson in her last interview. "China isn't ready for change." Reviewed by Nayan ChandaCopyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.
From Booklist
From the reporter-returns-from-abroad genre comes Johnson's portrait of contemporary China. Writing for the Wall Street Journal in the late 1990s, he covered such news as the repression of Falun Gong, the spiritual and exercise movement. In this work, Johnson profiles three ordinary citizens whom the government treats as obstreperous nuisances, and whose fortunes from protesting injustice illustrate the government's nervousness at the least manifestation of opposition. Ma Wenlin, currently in prison, is a self-taught lawyer who represented farmers aggrieved by tax rake-offs; Zhang Xueling wants answers about the death of her mother, a Falun Gong adherent, while in police custody; and Fang Ke is an architectural student opposing the razing of historical Beijing. Johnson focuses each personal story on the courageous decision to oppose rather than acquiesce to the caprices of officialdom. A perceptive observer, Johnson ably depicts the personal cost borne by individuals subjected to the authoritarian policies of the communist regime. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
“A captivating and an important study of what is happening on the ground in China today.” –The Christian Science Monitor
“Compelling. . . . Beautifully spare. . . . Johnson is to be commended for his sensitive rendering of his subjects.” –The New York Times
“Illuminating. . . . There is no better [book] on what life is like for ordinary uppity Chinese. . . . Johnson has not only lifted a corner of the curtain which covers China’s reality beyond its glittering eastern cities; he has drawn the whole curtain.” –The Times Literary Supplement
“Memorable. . . . Perhaps more than any other recent writer, Ian Johnson . . . captures [China’s] ‘slow-motion revolution.’ ” –The Baltimore Sun
“Elegant. . . . Through dogged reporting . . . we get an exciting inside view. . . . Wild Grass is journalism at its best.” –South China Morning Post
“A triumph. . . . Compelling. . . . A hopeful book. . . . The author’s reporting skills are phenomenal. . . . An invaluable aid for anyone . . . hoping to understand [China’s] economic and political struggles.” –The Washington Times
“A gripping tale of a very few ordinary people and their extraordinary courage in fighting for their rights against the Communist Party leviathan.” –The Washington Post Book World
“This year’s best general book on China.” –China Economic Quarterly
“Elegantly written. . . . Poignant. . . . Insightful, well-crafted. . . . Likely to find a broad readership.” –Boston Review
“Cause for hope for China’s future. . . . In vivid detail, [Johnson] recounts . . . cases . . . that show that individual Chinese at last have hope that the legal system can help.” –Foreign Affairs
“Gripping . . . taut, perceptive writing. . . . Reads in parts like a John Grisham legal thriller.” –Houston Chronicle
“Johnson is a wonderful storyteller. . . . His book is filled with evocative passages. . . . He captures the resilient spirit of many Chinese people.” –The Christian Science Monitor
“Johnson writes well, wielding a remarkably gentle pen against the grossest injustices or when describing the most remarkable instances of personal bravery. The people written about here could wish for no better chronicler.” –The Asian Review of Books
“This year’s best general book on China.” –China Economic Quarterly
Review
?Ian Johnson has written a book about contemporary China that is at once concrete and insightful. By profiling three individuals, he gives us a distinctive lens through which to view the landscape of unresolved contradictions and discontinuities that lie just beneath the surface of China?s much vaunted ?economic miracle.??
?Orville Schell, dean, Graduate School of Journalism, University of California, Berkeley
?Once in a very great while you open the paper, start to read, and within a few lines know that you?re reading a voice apart, a voice luminous with reality?a writer. That?s how I first encountered Ian Johnson and his China. His prose is limpid, his ironies gentle but insistent, and his characters so wily and intrepid that they break your heart. The narrative pace and moral pitch of Johnson?s prose put him in a tradition of literary nonfiction that began with Orwell in Catalonia and has given us a small but immensely impressive canon of modern masters. Johnson is one of them.?
?Jane Kramer, author of Europeans
?In the past decade, China?s national narrative has shifted from the epic to the subtle. There have been no earth-shattering events, no remarkable leaders, but the pace of change is almost over-whelming. By focusing on three citizens who test the limits of reform, Johnson captures the detail and subtlety of life in today?s China. This is the first foreign reportage that examines in depth the motivations, methods, and results of ordinary Chinese searching for a civil society.?
?Peter Hessler, author of River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze
From the Inside Flap
In Wild Grass, Pulitzer Prize—winning journalist Ian Johnson tells the stories of three ordinary Chinese citizens moved to extraordinary acts of courage: a peasant legal clerk who filed a class-action suit on behalf of overtaxed farmers, a young architect who defended the rights of dispossessed homeowners, and a bereaved woman who tried to find out why her elderly mother had been beaten to death in police custody. Representing the first cracks in the otherwise seamless façade of Communist Party control, these small acts of resistance demonstrate the unconquerable power of the human conscience and prophesy an increasingly open political future for China.
About the Author
Ian Johnson is the Berlin Bureau chief for The Wall Street Journal. In 2001, when he was the Journal’s Beijing correspondent, he won the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the Falun Gong. He lives in Berlin.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
The Peasant Champion
The photo of Ma Wenlin fluttered in my hand, catching the attention of the man sitting across from me on the train.
“He’s a lawyer,” I said. “I’m looking for him.”
The man was silent for a moment and then said, “He looks like a peasant, not a lawyer.”
The black-and-white picture showed Mr. Ma staring straight into the camera, his face expressionless except for his faint eyebrows, which arched slightly in a quizzical expression. His hair was short, almost crew-cut, and he had a light stubble above his lips. He wore a plain white dress shirt, buttoned to the neck but with no tie. There was no effort to engage the viewer, no grin, no smile. It was an old-fashioned photo of a man who didn’t pose for the camera as modern people do, a man who in the first half of his fifty-nine-year life had been photographed just once or twice.
“He represented peasants,” I said. “In a lawsuit against the government.”
Like all second-class sleepers, ours had six bunks and no door, allowing people to wander freely down the car, poking their heads in to visit friends and see who else was on board. But we were alone: the only other person in our compartment, a man in a middle bunk, was snoring lightly and the other passengers bustled back and forth in the corridor, concerned only with finding thermoses of hot water to make tea.
“Those kinds of lawsuits are complicated,” the man said ambiguously.
Then he paused and collected his thoughts. He had a shock of gray hair that hadn’t receded an inch from his tanned, creased forehead. His suit was Chinese style, the sort worn by the founder of modern China, Sun Yat-sen, and popularized by Mao Zedong, or Chairman Mao, communist China’s first leader. Like Mr. Ma, the man wore his shirt buttoned up to the neck, with a fountain pen sticking out of the left breast pocket. It was the outdated uniform of Communist Party cadres from a decade ago, one rarely seen in the country’s prosperous areas. But here, in a slow train leaving a remote county seat, it didn’t look quite so out of place.
“I’m sure he won’t be successful,” he continued, looking at me carefully. “This is a poor part of the country.”
I nodded but disagreed, casting a glance outside for confirmation. The windows of the train were streaked with rain, and through the blurred glass the denuded hills and earth-colored villages of the Loess Plateau rolled by. Once, this had been fertile forests and steppes, one of the birthplaces of Chinese civilization. Nearby was the grave of the Yellow Emperor, mythic founder of the Chinese people. Down in Xi’an, where we were headed, were the world-famous terra-cotta warriors that had been buried with China’s first emperor more than two thousand years ago. He and other rulers had protected this cultural heartland by building fortifications not far from here that later became known as the Great Wall. Seventy years ago the plateau’s mountains and gullies had sheltered the Communist Party for a decade, first during China’s civil war and later during World War II. It was a region oozing in history and significance but now was exhausted, poor and relatively obscure.
One commonly hears that these parts of the country are where change is least likely to happen. Instead, one is always encouraged to go to the prosperous coastal metropolises, such as Shanghai or Shenzhen, to look for China’s future. But the more I learned about Mr. Ma, the more I understood that this region’s backwardness had made it a precursor of change elsewhere in China—the poverty, the intransigence of local officials and the extreme environmental degradation bringing to a boil here problems brewing across the country.
“Well,” I said. “This was a poor place when the communists were here, and they ended up running China. Maybe it’s not so backward. Maybe it’s even avant-garde.”
We both laughed, relieved that we could safely turn the conversation to something less risky. We blew on our tea leaves, hurrying their descent to the bottom of the cup.
My cell phone went off. “If you want any information about Ma Wenlin, I suggest you ask me now,” a man said quickly. “Because by the time you arrive in Xi’an, I’ll be in jail. My phone is bugged.”
“I’ll call you when I get to Xi’an,” I said. “I’m sure there will be no trouble. We’ll have dinner tonight.”
“I won’t be around tonight. I will be in jail.”
“No, you won’t,” I said. “Let’s talk later.”
We hung up and I switched off my cell phone.
The old cadre sitting opposite poured some water from the thermos into our cups, filling them back up. He eyed me curiously.
“Retired?” I asked.
“Yes, going to visit family in Xi’an.”
“Your children?”
“Yes, they’ve moved to Xi’an and work there. I have grandchildren down there.”
I liked him, a retired official still dressed for work but on his way to baby-sit. He reminded me of Mr. Ma, who had also been a doting grandfather. It was hard to explain why I had Mr. Ma’s picture in my hand, and would probably have seemed incomprehensible to the old man if I had tried. He had been dubbed by locals a nongmin yingxiong, or “peasant champion”—a name that conjures up a reckless romantic stirring up revolt among the repressed. It seemed slightly absurd, like something out of a florid South American novel, yet Mr. Ma had scared the government enough to jail him for “disturbing social order.” This was a vague, almost meaningless charge, but what I heard about Mr. Ma before my trip only piqued my interest. People said that he had represented tens of thousands of peasants in a lawsuit against the government. Rumors, too, abounded that he’d led protests, traveling from village to village to whip up the peasants against the government. It all seemed a bit hard to believe, so I had come to find out what he had done. I wondered what it meant, at the turn of the millennium, to foment a peasant rebellion, a specter that for thousands of years has haunted China’s leaders and hastened the downfall of more than one dynasty. It was his history—the facts about who he was and what had happened to him—that I was after. I wanted to uncover one man’s story from the rumors and half-truths that silt up events in China.
We sipped tea and smiled at each other. The old man closed his eyes, trying to sleep. I stared at Mr. Ma’s picture, trying to figure out what I’d learned about him.
My eyes, however, kept wandering to the jagged landscape outside. The yellow alluvial soil that covers the plateau runs up to 300 feet deep and is so prone to erosion that geographers reckon it is the most uneven landscape made of soil in the world, constantly shifting and breaking. Grotesque outcrops rolled by, formed when huge chunks of loess soil break off the side of a hill vertically, like slabs of lava falling into the sea. Standing on top of such promontories, which centuries of human effort have inevitably turned into a small terraced cornfield or the site of a small temple, you can see dozens of other miniplateaus and fields, some just a few hundred yards away, but separated by cliffs and gullies that can fall hundreds of feet to a dried-up creek below. A newcomer can sometimes feel a sense of panic after scrambling along a few ridges in either direction and finding only precipices.
The cliffs sometimes gave way to the flat, dry riverbeds and smudgy vistas of hills beyond. Underpinning this monochromatic scenery was a supercharged environmental destruction. Each year thousands of tons of topsoil wash down the rivulets and streams into the giant Yellow River. The river, which skirts the plateau in a giant northern loop of several hundred miles, takes its name and silty consistency from the plateau’s discharge.
As our diesel locomotive carefully picked its way south, we were embraced by a warm yellow glow, the color of the soil, the water and, on days like this, even the sky. This had been my fifth trip to the Loess Plateau, and I got back about once a year, drawn by the scenery, the stubborn cultural traditions and the tensions bubbling up from below.
*******
I had set off to find Mr. Ma two days earlier, boarding an 8 a.m. flight from Xi’an to Yulin, a small city of 93,000 that boasts the only airport on the Loess Plateau. It was a Monday and the flight was full, a shuttle ferrying small-time officials on coveted trips down south to the provincial capital and back up with booty bought in Xi’an’s relatively swank shops.
Yulin has virtually no private enterprise to speak of, so no one but a bureaucrat or official from a state company could afford the $100 ticket, equivalent to the annual cash income of a Loess Plateau farmer. Unlike the train, there were no retirees on board, no students, no children and almost no women. It was all men, all in two- or three-piece western suits, many lugging consumer goods that were pricier or harder to find up on the plateau. One man had a video disc player in a box bound with twine, another carted a box of apples, a third hauled a wheel rim for a Chinese-made Audi.
An hour later I was in a taxi heading for town. It was only 10 a.m., but in August the sun was already high and we raised a cloud of dust as we raced through the parched streets. After a few minutes we entered Yulin, its roads lined with white-tiled buildings and dusty poplars.
This was a moment I’d rehearsed several times. I knew my driver was going to ask me where to go in Yulin and I knew I’d have to lie to him. What I wanted to do was go to a hotel in town, check in and meet a couple of lawyers who had known Mr. Ma. They had insisted on meeting in a hotel because they were terrified the Public Security Bureau would get wind of our talk if we discussed Mr. Ma’s case in public.
Hotels, though, are dangerous places, and I had to stay there for as little time as possible—an overnight stay was out of the question. That’s because guests in Chinese hotels are obliged to give their visa number. Mine was a journalist’s, with a “J” in front of the number. Each night, hotel guest rolls are handed over to the police and in the morning—depending on the vigor of the local police department—they are checked. The presence of suspicious types, including journalists, is reported to the local government, which then checks if the person has applied to visit its town—or is there illegally. By staying at the hotel for just a few hours, I minimized the chance that the Public Security Bureau would know of my presence in town; the bureau would have likely completed its morning check for that day, and it seemed unlikely that the hotel manager would call up the authorities and report my presence. After all, the Great Wall is located just a few miles north of the city and tourists were welcome.
But I couldn’t tell all this to the taxi driver. Taxis are scarce in small towns like Yulin, and drivers tend to hang around hotels waiting for customers. So, too, do security agents, who lollygag in lobbies watching the people go by. If the driver were to wait for me in front of the hotel, he’d likely get bored and go inside the hotel to chat, possibly with an agent, perhaps telling him about the foreigner he’d just picked up at the airport and taken to a hotel and who intended to go on later today to Yan’an—strange travel plans for a tourist. Another worry was that if the security bureau later checked the hotel rolls and noticed me, they might ask the hotel staff how I’d left town. The doorman or the other taxi drivers waiting at the hotel would probably be friends with my driver. A call to the taxi company would give them the car’s license plate and maybe the driver’s cell phone. That would allow them to trace me to Yan’an and spoil the rest of the trip.
From the Hardcover edition.
Buy from Amazon
Compare Prices
|
|
Home
