Wild Grass: Three Stories of Change in Modern China (Hardcover)

by Ian Johnson (Author)

Editorial Reviews

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.
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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 writi