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From Publishers Weekly
What's most surprising about this exposé of the Chinese government's brutal treatment of the peasantry is not that it was banned in China, but that it got past the censors in the first place. The authors—a husband and wife team who have received major awards—recount how, in the poor province of Anhui, greedy local officials impose illegal taxes on the already impoverished peasantry and cover their tracks through double-bookkeeping. Outraged peasants risk their freedom and sometimes their lives by complaining up the command chain or making the long and costly trip to Beijing, but for the most part the central government's proclamations against excessive taxation don't effectively filter back to the local level. The authors criticize the central government for its own heavy taxation and underrepresentation of the peasantry, though in much more measured tones than they fault the local officials. "Could it be that our system itself is a toxic pool and whoever enters is poisoned by it?" they ask. As Westerners look toward China as the world's next superpower, this book is a reminder that the country's 900 million peasants often get lost in the glitter of Shanghai's Tiffany's. (June)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
"A revolution is not a dinner party," Mao Zedong wrote back in 1927, in a famous report on the condition of peasants in China's Hunan province. Eight decades later, two Chinese journalists have shown that the Chinese revolution is, in fact, a dinner party -- one that rural Communist Party chiefs are enjoying at the expense of China's peasants.

To explore how the bulk of China's population, which lives in rural areas, has been faring during the country's miraculous spurt of economic growth, the husband-and-wife team of Wu Chuntao and Chen Guidi traveled to 50 villages in Wu's impoverished home province of Anhui. The answer: not well. Local Communist Party chiefs have been enriching themselves by raiding village treasuries and imposing all sorts of taxes on rural Chinese, who still make up two-thirds of China's population. Citizens protest at their own peril; those who challenge local officials risk arrest or physical attack.

Scant surprise, then, that this exposé created a sensation in China. It sold an estimated 150,000 copies, plus 10 million more in black-market editions (at least according to its U.S. publisher). You might expect the government to have been galvanized into action by such a book, and it was, after a fashion. After initially allowing circulation of the book, Beijing recognized the volume's explosive impact, changed gears and banned it, thus continuing a tradition of pretending problems don't exist or blaming them on the messengers.

Yet the crisis in China's countryside is real, and Chen and Wu's superb shoe-leather reporting puts real faces to it. They introduce martyrs such as Ding Zuoming. Inspired in 1993 by the party's new policies limiting agricultural taxes to no more than 5 percent of a person's income from the previous year, Ding noted that people in his village were paying five times that limit. He challenged the village party boss over such exploitation, but got nowhere and appealed to higher-level party officials. He was then summoned to the local security office, where he was beaten to death.

The book also describes villains such as Zhang Guiquan, a deputy village chief who organized the murder of the members of an audit committee, and Gao Xuewen, who ordered the arrest of more than half of the 100 people in his village. They had protested when he struck an elderly woman who had questioned the government's double taxation of her house.

The problems of corruption and exploitation extend beyond these local tyrants, encompassing township, county and provincial officials who are too frightened, lazy or corrupt to do anything about them. As the Chinese saying goes, "Heaven is high and the emperor far away." The villagers of Anhui have been encouraged to question local authority by Beijing's pronouncements about rooting out corruption and pursuing grievances through the courts. But enlisting Beijing's help against a corrupt local party apparatus is difficult -- and in the meantime, the peasants remain vulnerable to retribution from vengeful local officials.

The plight of China's peasants isn't new, of course. They have never fared well, despite Mao's rhetoric about their centrality to his theory of revolution. The communist leader's "Great Leap Forward" (as his disastrous economic program of the late 1950s and early '60s was known) sapped the countryside of capital and even of farm implements for the sake of greater industrial production; it caused a famine that took the lives of an estimated 30 million Chinese. Later, the Cultural Revolution saddled peasants with people from the cities, whom the regime sent "down" to the countryside to learn new, proper values. And the current era of economic reform has layered on new rural bureaucrats and taxes while booming cities such as Shenzhen prosper.

Chinese President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao claim to be worried about inequality between China's wealthy coastal areas and its largely rural interior provinces. In March, Wen said rural taxes would be eliminated and promised that spending on rural areas would rise. If Hu and Wen really wanted to stop corruption from stifling growth in the countryside, they'd assign this book to party cadres instead of banning it.

Reviewed by Steven Mufson
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
deputy village chief, township leadership, township security, anticorruption bureau, village incident, village finances, township administration, son number one, village cadres, auditing group, village books, township officials, village representatives, township levels, disciplinary committee Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Ding Zuoming, Wang Hongchao, Zhang Guiquan, Zhang Village, Zhang Guiyu, Zhang Xide, Wang Junbin, Deputy Village Chief Zhang, Ding Yanle, State Council, Party Central Committee, Luying Village, Wang Xiangdong, Gao Zongpeng, Zhang Jidong, Gao Xuewen, Zhang Jiayu, Lixin County</