Battle for China's Past : Mao and the Cultural Revolution

force of more than a hundred to suppress the ‘rebellion’. Before the
police reached the village more than a thousand people had fled to
Henan province (as the village is on the border between Anhui and
Henan). The police nevertheless arrested twelve villagers, mostly the
elderly, women and children. Some men were beaten up and were
shackled, and they were asked to pay 7 RMB for the cost of the shackles.
Wang Hongchao, Wang Xiaodong and Wang Hongxin, who also
escaped, set off for Beijing again but were ambushed by the county
police, who had been waiting for them.
Meanwhile a villager Li Xiwen, also from the county where the
Wangs were suppressed, killed himself by jumping down from the
Beijing Letter and Complaint (Xin fang ban) reception building in his
despair at finding no way of redressing what he considered an injustice.
And there is more. On 29 October 1994, a clear Sunday, 74 villagers
sneaked into Tian’anmen Square and knelt together before the national
flag of the People’s Republic of China, asking for justice. Only then did
the central government urge Anhui to solve the problem. Wang
Xiaodong was released after 19 months imprisonment and Wang
Junbing was appointed party secretary of the village committee to
replace his corrupt predecessor.
Rural Chinese: beasts of burden on whom modernity is built
Why is it that so many central government documents and decrees
could not stop the ever increasing tide of levies and taxes? According
to Chen and Chun (2004), more than 90 different levies and taxes that
had been imposed on the Chinese peasantry in Anhui province from
various departments of the central government, and an additional 269
were imposed by local governments. The central government issued
decrees and documents in general terms with instructions to reduce
taxes and levies, like the stipulation that total taxes and levies on any
household should not be more than 5 per cent of the family’s annual
income. But in practice financial and fiscal policies and revenue and
expenditure regulations designed for and by the central government
actually led to an increase in the burden on rural residents.
Taxation reform
THE PROBLEM OF THE RURAL– URBAN DIVIDE
One of the reforms designed by Premier Zhu Rongji was to establish a
two-tiered tax system, one tier for the central government tax and one
for the local government tax, called guo di shui fenjia (separation of taxes
collected by [the central] state and taxes and levies collected by the local
governments). The intention was to make sure that central state government
tax revenue would not be infringed upon by local authorities. The
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