China Witness: Voices From a Silent Generation

  People say: No comment.

  6. You go to school now, Mum's got to be off . . .

  When Huihui was born a girl, her father abandoned the family. For seven years, her mother endured all kinds of hardships to bring up her daughter. However, she was not a very capable worker, and life was indescribably hard. For seven years, she had not had any new clothes, for seven years, she had lived off pickled vegetables. If she did happen to buy a fish, she gave it to her daughter to eat. Even so, on Huihui's birthday every year, her mother would always buy her a birthday cake. But this year, Huihui's mother just couldn't get together the 100 yuan, so when Huihui had gone to school, her mother hanged herself. (Reported by Anhui Market News)

  People say: A harmonious society, huh!

  7. If you didn't force me, would I volunteer to go out and sweep snow in the streets?

  Sun Fengmei is a blind girl. After a snowfall, the local area committee asked Sun Fengmei to "volunteer for snow-sweeping" under threat of removing her minimum living standard benefit from her. When news of this got out, they changed their tune and said that even if she didn't, they still couldn't take away her benefit. At the same time, they absolutely deny that they ever said she had to sweep snow or they would remove her benefit. But Sun Fengmei asks: "If you didn't force me, would I volunteer to go out and sweep snow in the streets?" (Reported by Shengyang Daily)

  People say: It seems as if "volunteering" is often used as the opposite to its real meaning.

  8. I'm wearing my best clothes.

  Putting on his convict's uniform, Ma Jiajue said: "I'm wearing the best clothes I've ever had." Police officers who heard him say this could not help shedding a tear. Ma Jiajue was a murderer, but the law could not take into account how he had grown up. When his school grant was not approved, Ma was so poor that he did not dare go to school because he had no shoes to wear. His schoolmates remembered that, after this, his character completely changed, and he stopped talking to anyone. (Reported by Souhu Cultural News)

  People ask: Don't the poor also have their dignity?

  9. By the time you read this, son, I won't be alive any more . . .

  "Son, when you read my letter, I won't be alive any more, because I'm not capable of getting you into school, and I can't face you. Only with my death can I truly apologise to you . . ." When the son of Sun Shoujun, a Liaoning peasant, received his school placement letter, his father had no money to send him. So he left a suicide note to him and killed himself. (Reported by Xinhuanet)

  People say: Don't say stuff like if you don't go to university, you can still make a good life for yourself. Even comedian Stephen Chow's screen characters know everyone's desire to go to school gives you a way of deceiving people.

  10. I could have put up with it for three more days.

  Guan Chuanzhi is a miner. He was trapped in a mine shaft during a mining accident, where he survived for seven terrible days. The first thing he said when his rescuers brought him out into daylight was: "I could have put up with it for three more days." (Reported by Nanjing Morning News)

  People ask: Brother miners, good brothers, how long will you have to put up with this?

  Will Chinese law become the sticking point in China's progress to a democratic future? I know a lot of Chinese people are asking, and waiting, but we need many more Chinese people who will work hard for the law, like old Mr Jingguan.

  On 30 December 2006, I had just edited the second draft of China Witness to this point, when I got a phone call from the BBC World Service World Today programme, asking me to join a discussion on some news from the Xinhua News Agency in China:

  On 1 January 2007, the Supreme People's Court is to implement a policy requiring ratification by the Supreme People's Court of all death sentences handed down by lower courts. This is a historically significant step in the development of Chinese criminal law, not only for China's criminal justice work, but also for the progress and development of the Chinese legal system.

  With regard to criminal cases, China operates a system of the Court of Second Instance being the Court of Last Instance. Judicial review of death sentences falls outside the First and Second Instance system, and there are special procedures set up which are targeted at death penalty cases. After New China was established, the policy of retaining and strictly controlling the death sentence was implemented and the ratification system for death sentences was set up. In 1954, regulations on the organisation of the People's Courts were issued and these decreed that death penalty cases must be ratified by the Supreme People's Court and the Higher People's Courts. In a decision made at the fourth session of the First People's Congress in 1957, all death-penalty cases were thenceforth to be decided or ratified by the Supreme People's Court. Between 1957 and 1966, all death penalties were ratified by the Supreme People's Court.

  During the Cultural Revolution, the People's Courts came under heavy attack, and the system of ratifying death sentences ceased to operate except in name. In July 1979, the second session of the Fifth National People's Congress passed the Chinese Criminal Code and Criminal Procedure Law, revising the organisation of the People's Courts. It was decreed that all death sentences other than those passed by the Supreme People's Court, must be approved by the latter. However, in February 1980, not long after the Chinese Criminal Code and Criminal Procedure Law had been passed, another decision was passed by the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress, with the aim of meting out swift and severe punishment to criminal elements who had seriously jeopardised the social order: the Supreme People's Court thereby authorised Higher People's Courts to handle some death-sentence cases for a limited period. Following further reforms of the organisation of the People's Courts, and repeated delegation of authority, this system has persisted up to the present day.

  My first reaction was to telephone Mr Jingguan. I hoped I would hear him say: Finally the Supreme Court has reclaimed the right to confirm the death sentence, and removed it from the hands of muddled and incompetent judges who indiscriminately execute the innocent! But when I called him, just before the Spring Festival in 2007, to send him and his family season's greetings, and we talked about the new legislation, the old policeman said: "These are just words on paper, miles away from the heads of the people who deal with the cases. It's only when everyone is capable of understanding the significance of those words that people will understand the law, and the law enforcers will no longer dare persist in their reckless ignorance. How many people has China tortured? How many 'Clear Sky Baos' are there?"

  From the first Qin emperor of China, and the first law to operate on the principle that "the nine clans bore responsibility for the misdemeanours of their members", to a China, two thousand years later, which has just emerged from political adversity, the ghostly wails of the countless wrongly accused, victims of corrupt local officials who use their power to trifle with human lives, echo down the centuries. In two thousand years of Chinese history, for all our boasting about our ancient political and judicial system, there has only been one great judge, the Song dynasty's Justice "Clear Sky Bao", known to every Chinese for his uncompromising honesty. Just one.

  11

  The Shoe-Mender Mother: 28 Years Spent out in All Weathers

  The shoe-mender woman, Zhengzhou, was at first shy of our camera . . .

  . . . but later invited us home for lunch.

  MRS Xie, a shoe-mender, interviewed in Zhengzhou, capital of Henan province in central China, near the Yellow River. She has worked on the same street for twenty-eight years in all weathers, repairing the shoes of passers-by. At the end of the day she returns with her husband, a bicycle repairman, to the same place they have lived since she came to the city from the Hubei countryside almost thirty years ago: underneath some factory stairs. Yet, with their hard-earned savings they have sent both their children to two of China's best universities. Their son is starting his PhD and their daughter is studying for an MA.

  The way I saw it in 2006, there are five kinds of roads in
China.

  The first kind is what are called the national roads – fast highways planned and built at the national level and maintained by local government. I could clearly "feel" the difference between those built after 2000 and those built before; on the newer ones, you didn't get the stomach-churning effects of their appallingly fissured and bumpy surfaces. Nor did you need to hire a local guide to alert you to traffic hazards along the road, although not even the newest map could steer you accurately through the ever-changing road system. The toilets on the national highways are "national-grade toilets" and are, most of them, much better than the houses the local peasants live in. No wonder a lot of drivers say that these highways are not only good for driving on – you get "national-grade" treatment while you're at it.

  The second kind are city trunk roads built by the municipal government and generally very wide: six to ten lanes in big cities, two to four in smaller ones. The roadsides reflect a government image and vary little in their "local touches". They are uniformly lined with tower blocks and smaller buildings, flowers or sculptures. The wealthier municipalities have real flowers, the ones that have no money use plastic ones. In most cases, there are pavement studs for blind pedestrians. The traffic lights show a standing person on red, and a scuttling one on green. The most enjoyable thing about them for ordinary Chinese who can't afford cars is the wide green verges, squares and benches on which you can sit and chat and get a breath of fresh air. They are unlike the city roads of ten years ago. Then, scooters, mopeds, bicycles and pedestrians were all jumbled together. The narrow pavements were too packed to move during peak times, and all you could hear were car horns tooting in competition with each other, the endless cursing of drivers as they jockeyed for position, and the shouted admonishments of the traffic cops.

  The third kind are streets in working-class districts. There are more bicycles than people and cars, the streets are narrow, and there is only a single lane for scooters, into which vehicles going in both directions are squeezed by traffic jams on the main carriageway. The sides of the roads are crammed with daily necessities and everyday life, businesses and things. There you can see people who yesterday ran stalls, and today have opened shops. The space where goods are piled high during the day is converted at night into the place where the family eats and sleeps. These city streets are more or less equivalent to the high streets of a small country town, although with fewer agricultural items and cheap plastic goods.

  The fourth kind are the back streets and alleys which link the homes of the teeming populace. These are chiefly inhabited by small traders and craftspeople who have come in from the villages to "make their fortune" in the big city, and make a start by setting up stalls and kiosks. There are a few cars who don't believe that the streets are impassable to traffic until, half an hour later, they have proudly made it fifty metres through the people and goods only to discover that their triumphant vehicles are a mass of scrapes and scratches and bespattered in grime. These back streets are one big "breakfast bar" in the morning, a street market by day and a kind of leisure market in the evening, providing profits all day. The beneficiaries of all this activity are the residents' committees. In order to ensure that "no manure should escape onto someone else's land", the levels of administration are the most regulated in China; there are toilet attendants, security guards, overseers of regulations, administrators of local commerce, guardians of public order and of household registration. Then there are the "bound-feet vigilante aunties" with their "keep order" armbands, who focus on things that "don't look nice". These range from serious matters, such as accusations that city folk are treating peasant labourers unfairly, and the rights and wrongs of a fight between husband and wife, to the more trivial – a man with inappropriately long hair, or a woman with an indecently short skirt. City folk say that the red-armbanded aunties look after stuff that the government and people's families ignore. No matter what rank the administrators are, so long as they have a sleeve badge, wear a uniform and can show their certificate, they are all "supported" by the local stallholders who keep the local government or street committee going. Those who scrape along at the bottom of society are fleeced on a daily basis by one or other of these numerous administrative charges. But they still feel that they are living better than in the countryside. I sometimes think that their past lives must have been unimaginably hard.

  The fifth kind are the dirt roads of the countryside, and the "construction roads" of the cities. Twenty years of frenzied urban construction in China have given rise to many original ideas in the heads of those whose inspiration has been stifled for a century: why not install a "zipper" in the ground so that you don't have to dig down to make repairs? Why not set up a crane so that new-builds which have been "programmed out" can be lifted out of the ground and shifted to the countryside for the peasants to live in? Why not get an advance picture of what's in the minds of people who are going to be important officials in ten years, so that today's policymakers don't have to start all over again? So many ideas! And most of those who thought them up have trodden these "construction roads", quite a few of which are made from metal grids. These are fine in dry weather – apart from being wobbly – but when it drizzles, they turn very greasy underfoot, just the thing to send you flying head over heels! The worst sort are made of a dozen or so planks of scrap wood, and before you walk on them you have to check there's no one at the other end. There is? In that case, make sure you know who's the heaviest, or you may be "seesawed" into the mud on either side. And then there are roads made of bricks and stones, forcing you to "skip". Some of them simply take you over building rubble.

  While our group was on the road doing interviews, we became thoroughly familiar with the five kinds of roads of modern China. Not only that, but these roads somehow came to embody in a very real way the China Witness experience. Once off the plane, we would be on a state highway, the sort used by upper-class Chinese in their daily lives. When we interviewed famous people, we would take the city trunk roads to go and call on them – famous Chinese people invariably move into the cities, and always have done. Town streets were what we used most – breakfast, night markets, nosing around and making purchases, all were successfully accomplished there – and we had experience of construction roads in Gansu and Anhui. Finally, the back alleys "developed" by migrant workers gave us a story to add to our interview plan.

  On 10 September, we took a taxi to a chaotic and jam-packed back street in the Zhongyang area of Zhengzhou city, to interview an intriguing woman who had turned her back on her village to come to this back street and make her living as a shoe-mender. By dint of twenty-eight years spent repairing shoes in all kinds of weather, Mrs Xie had managed to put her son and her daughter through the best universities in China.

  As we drove, the female taxi driver said to us: "I can hear you speaking a foreign language. Which kind of English are you speaking? Which English-speaking country are you from? What have you come to do in this dirty old street?"

  We wanted to make sure she was not one of those Chinese taxi drivers whose "alertness and vigilance" might lead to trouble from the local police, so we earnestly told her about educational charity work we were involved with. She was so moved by our description that she refused to charge us. We wrangled for some time before we could get her to accept the fare.

  We went into the side street, past a store selling cigarettes and other sundries, a stall selling home-cooked flatbreads from a cooker, two carts with general household items, a fruit stall, and a cart selling cold dishes from a glass box mounted on it, before arriving at the shoe-mender's stall. This consisted of a crudely made cart topped with an old oil-paper umbrella. On the cart lay a collection of insoles, and an assortment of creams and folk remedies for foot problems, together with bits and pieces for repairing shoes, such as soles, heels, heel tips and so on. Her stock, while not large, was neatly arranged. A few customers waited by her stall, apparently queuing to have their shoes repaired. A man in his early forties sat o
pposite, and there was a middle-aged woman, and a girl in her teens.

  Mrs Xie did not look much more than fifty. Her dry, wispy hair was tied into a ponytail and she wore a Western-style, mixed-fibre purple top over a pair of very cheap denims. On her feet were a pair of ill-fitting leather shoes – which I guessed were someone's cast-offs – and her arms were covered by a pair of flower-patterned oversleeves. Nothing she wore appeared to match, city-style, but she was clean and neat.

  The friend who had set up the meeting for me went over to greet her: "Big sister," – country folk respectfully call women in the towns, big sister, and men, big brother, sometimes even when they are younger than them – "I often come and get you to mend my shoes. But you have so many customers, do you remember me?"

  *

  MRS XIE: Of course I remember you. You never try and bargain my prices down. Your husband is in the army. You're a good person.

  FRIEND: This is my friend Xinran, whom I've known for nearly thirty years.

  XINRAN: Hello. I'm delighted to meet you.

  MRS XIE: Hello. I've got a job in hand. Why don't you sit down?

  XINRAN: Can you mend my shoes? They've come unglued inside at the bottom.

  MRS XIE: I'll have a look. [Gives a quick glance.] Yes, I can, it's very simple. Wait till I've finished this pair, and I'll do them for you.

  *

  But the middle-aged woman customer sitting on a stool objected that she had been there first. And I quickly agreed.

  *

  MRS XIE [to the woman customer]: Don't worry, her shoes just need gluing. They'll only take a second to stick. Yours need new heel tips. She'll have to wait half an hour or more, and everyone's busy . . .

  XINRAN: No, really, I'm happy to wait my turn. It gives me a chance to learn your craft and chat to you. My friend told me that you've scrimped and saved your shoe-mending money to send your children to university. You're amazing!