Model Rebels: The Rise and Fall of China's Richest Village (review)

The village of Daqiuzhuang, a previously poor community located forty-five kilometers from the city of Tianjin, emerged during the 1980s as an industrial powerhouse under the leadership of its Party secretary, a canny, hard-driving, dictatorial egotist named Yu Zuomin. He had realized early in the 1980s, before other rural officials, that rural factories now had opportunities to compete successfully head-on with China's lumbering state-owned industry. In recognition of the village's subsequent leap into rapid industrialization, in the latter half of the 1980s Yu and Daqiuzhuang were designated as models for all of China. Over the next several years, in the full glare of national media coverage, production continued to soar, and by 1992 the village's collectively owned enterprises were churning out an astonishing 4.5 billion yuan of output and generating a staggering 510 million yuan of profits (p. 182).

Success went to Yu's head. Although he was able to lord over his village pretty much as he pleased, he carped at the existence of a Party organization above him in the county and Tianjin and refused to brook any show of interference at all. Twice in the early 1990s he covered up murders carried out by his close subordinates, and took extreme umbrage at on-again-off-again efforts from above to arrest the malefactors.

Bruce Gilley, while serving as a journalist in China, became intrigued by the Daqiuzhuang story and by the official media's reportage of Yu's proclamations and actions. Gilley is a deft storyteller, and the book often is an enjoyable read, but he adopts a point of view that ultimately greatly weakens the book. Gilley's analysis of the two murders exemplifies this weakness. Here, first, is his description of the initial murder:

While sitting at lunch one day in March 1990 in a crowded village canteen, Jade Field's eldest son, Liu Jingang, a vice president of the Daqiu Industrial Company, began to grumble to his driver about Boss Yu. The village leader was using several million yuan of village money to build luxury villas for his two daughters in the county capital, and his sons were lazy idlers living high off the village's wealth. What's more, it was an open secret that this supposedly virtuous leader was having affairs with several women in the village. . . . A week later, a seven-member group of village thugs, several of them cadres, marched to the Liu family home and dragged Jade Field into the streets. The proud family patriarch was forced to stand in the open, strip to the waist, and bow his head as criticisms of his failure to "discipline" his family were read aloud. Then things got out of control. . . . Belts, clubs, and steel bars rained down on the fallen figure. . . . By the time family members were permitted to come to his assistance an hour later, it was too late. . . . Jade Field was dead.

(pp. 74-75)

Yu Zuomin placed the victim's extended family under long-term house arrest to prevent news of the murder from leaking out of the village. When one of them escaped to Beijing to raise the alarm, Yu fought a determined, initially successful effort to prevent any prosecution. When an outraged journalist and an influential Beijing attorney finally caught the attention of national leaders, a court in Tianjin stopped dithering and found Yu's seven followers guilty.

What does Gilley conclude about this murder case? Oddly enough, that it "solidified Yu's image within the village as a leader whose causes should command allegiance" (p. 80). Gilley does not base this conclusion on any extensive interviewing with villagers. In fact, he only briefly visited the village once in his life, for part of one day, in 1992, and relies on official Chinese media reports for the great bulk of the...