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The Mad Monk
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of Ice Cream
Mar 2000
time: 23:30
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quote:
Detoured On His Road To Democracy
Chinese businessman jailed after speaking out
By Edward A. Gargan
ASIA CORRESPONDENT
August 10, 2003
Langwuzhuang, China - A meandering concrete road, dappled by sunlight shining through bordering plane trees, has brought this village of 1,800 souls closer to the rush of commerce and modernization that lies beyond their fields of corn.
Still, this village of huddled brick homes with red, clay-tiled roofs is tinged more with the poverty of the past than with the new wealth radiating from Beijing, an hour's drive away. More than in China's south, villages of the north remain steeped in the rules and slogans of the communist past and harnessed by the petty tyrannies of local autocrats.
The people of Langwuzhuang and neighboring villages in Heibei Province lived at little better than a subsistence level until the mid-1980s. But change has seeped in, notably since the day Sun Dawu quit his job.
Sun, born to farmers here, seemed to have made good with a job in a local branch of the Agricultural Bank, but he gave it up in 1985 to grow fruit on 2 acres of rocky soil. By this year, Sun, 50, had built one of China's biggest companies, an agricultural conglomerate. He opened a bank, built a high school and paved the road linking his village to the outside world.
He also began declaring - loudly enough to be heard nationally - that democracy is the only way to solve the problems of rural China.
In May, on the night Sun disappeared into the black hole of China's legal system, local police came to his office, forced open a safe and emptied it of cash. Since then, he has been held nearly incommunicado in jail.
Sun Dawu's rise and fall is a tale of personal accomplishment and generosity, of communist obduracy and cronyism. It is a tale of rural China.
Sun managed to make it only through high school before joining the army, a path taken by millions of rural youngsters who have sought more in life than steering a wooden plow behind an ox.
In the 1960s, China was emerging from years of famine and heading into a decade-long maelstrom of political violence incited by the country's leader, Mao Zedong. During Mao's Cultural Revolution, Langwuzhuang was soaked by every ideological wave because of its proximity to Beijing and its tendency to rural radicalism.
In the 1980s, when Mao's successors began swerving to capitalism to rescue China's economy, much of the country's coastal region, in particular the south, embraced the new, anti-socialist ideas: free markets, private ownership of land, real estate speculation, private investment. But in Langwuzhuang, the cadres of the state, champions of Maoist collectivism and guardians of their bureaucratic prerogatives, resisted the onslaught of change.
Sun, home from the army, had found work in Xushui, the local county seat, at the Agricultural Bank, an institution rooted in the leaden political culture of a quickly fading era. But with the breezes of opportunity wafting even here, Sun and his wife leased land to start a private farm.
"My father began his business in 1985 with a small-scale fruit garden" of just under 2 1/2 acres, said Sun's son, Sun Meng. Besides planting fruit trees and sunflowers, the couple started raising chickens and pigs and, after a time, built a small mill to make animal feed.
By 1989, Sun formally registered his growing creation as the Dawu Farming and Husbandry Group. By 1995, it had become one of China's largest private companies, an integrated enterprise involved in feed grains, poultry, food processing and education. In 1996, Xushui county declared Dawu a "key township enterprise," recognition that it was an economic engine of the region. Nearly 2,000 people worked in Sun's businesses.
Sun's road to Langwuzhuang helped local farmers move their produce more cheaply to markets. He built a high school with several buildings that was the area's biggest, serving as many as 2,500 students.
As his business expanded, so did Sun's opinions about the problems of the countryside and the political changes needed to address them. He began speaking, notably at Beijing's prestigious Peking and Tsinghua universities. And his company's Web site began posting his views.
"Farmers should stand out and speak for themselves," he declared. "They should have their own organizations and have their own demands."
Treading onto the thin ice of permissible public discussion, he wrote that "in socialist countries, those who are restrained are not only capitalists and landlords, but most of the people in the country. People only have the right to say 'Long Live,' but they don't have the right to say 'No.' A free society should pay attention to human rights first."
Frustrated by being denied loans that he sought from the government, Sun established what in essence was a financial cooperative that operated much like a small, private bank. It took deposits from residents, lent for a fixed time and paid interest rates two or three times higher than those offered by state-owned banks. It was inundated with local families' savings.
Sun used the funds to expand his businesses, scrupulously paying his depositors, said local villagers and his lawyer. According to the state-run newspaper Financial Daily, as of May 27, the Dawu Group had 4,742 depositors with deposits of about $4.3 million. Sun told a former senior agricultural official last year that his businesses were worth $25 million.
But what was good for the Dawu Group was bad for the state banks suddenly stripped of their deposits. "The head of a bank in Xushui said that Sun Dawu had disturbed financial order," said Zhu Jiuhu, Sun's lawyer in Beijing.
Early this year, as his company and his bank expanded, Sun became more outspoken. The problems of rural poverty, he wrote, stemmed not only from unjust economic policies, but from the political calcification of the countryside.
In speeches and on his Web site, Sun began to question the viability of the Communist Party, a taboo sentiment in what remains a totalitarian police state, and to suggest that multiparty democracy was the only solution for China's rural population.
He recommended transforming the marble mausoleum containing Mao's preserved corpse into a hall for use by political parties. "Anything wrong with having many politicians?" he asked on his Web site.
He mocked Mao: "I've said Mao Zedong was a great proletarian revolutionary who made the country's people stand up. Chairman Mao was also a great feudal sentry who made the country's people kneel."
He warned of continuing unrest in the countryside. "How can there be farmers' rebellions unless there is government oppression?" he asked of students at Peking University in March. "What's the situation now? Farmers cannot see any hope; the countryside is a land of desperation. That's why I've said farmers need a third liberation."
He lambasted the central government. "The government should be blamed for the bad credibility of our country," he told the students in Beijing. "The masses have begun to understand democracy and the rule of law," he wrote on his Web site two months ago. "They have a common yearning for democracy."
Sun's son described what happened next.
"My father was deceived by a friend," Sun Meng recounted. "On May 27, he called my father and said that the newly elected party secretary in Xushui wanted to have dinner with him. Later, we heard that my father was actually taken away by the Xushui Public Security Bureau. Nobody knew where my father was kept until we were informed he was formally arrested on July 5 and kept in the Xushui Police Station."
The night his father was taken away, Sun Meng said, the police forced open a company safe and took a large amount of cash. They also detained 10 senior managers of the Dawu Group.
"I became his lawyer because they wouldn't let any local lawyers represent him," said Zhu Jiuhu, an accomplished attorney at one of Beijing's most prestigious local firms. "But even I wasn't allowed to see him the first and second times I went there. Only on the third time I tried was I let in. Under Chinese law, I should have been able to see him after 48 hours."
China's legal system, like its business environment, is murky, and arrests without clear justification are common. Officials have announced no charges against Sun, but Chinese newspapers report that he is accused of illegally accepting financial deposits and Zhu said it is clear that Sun's opening of a bank riled the local establishment.
"The local credit co-op and banks are very angry because the villagers won't deposit money in them," Zhu said. "All the money [was] ... going into the Dawu Group."
"One thing is for sure," continued Zhu, "no one who lent money to Sun Dawu filed charges. It should be proper competition. That's what people say."
But Li Zhi, a senior researcher at the Chinese Association for the Promotion of Rural Development, a think tank under the agriculture ministry, said Sun faces problems with local officials and with higher authorities because of his outspokenness on rural issues.
"He refused to pay bribes," said Li. "For a long time, officials tried to get money from him, but he refused."
"In the last two years especially, he's been very active in politics," Li continued. "When discussing rural problems, you have to get into political problems. Anyone who wants to study rural reform seriously has to deal with political reforms. Because of what he's been saying, Sun has become very influential nationally."
Sun's arrest stunned Langwuzhuang. His son, Meng, is trying to keep the businesses running.
"He's a good man and has done nothing wrong," said Lu Fengqing, a 55-year-old farmer who bounced her grandson on her knee as she talked in her three-room house sided in white tile, the latest fashion. "Most of the villagers here depend on him to make a living. My husband drove for Sun's company to deliver chicken feed and received 660 yuan [$80] a month from him. My son worked at his feed mill and my daughter-in-law worked in his vineyards."
"You can go to any families here and ask around," she continued. "Can you find anyone speaking any bad words about him? He's not like a rich man. He's not into gambling and wenching. He and his family live simple lives.
"The government said Sun was arrested because of illegal fund-raising, but I don't think there's anything wrong about it. He's honest and generous. He paid higher interest rates to lenders and lenders wanted to lend him money."
The local government and the police have refused to discuss Sun's case and have tried to bar reporters, including Chinese reporters, from interviewing villagers here. But a reporter for the Financial Daily managed to pry information on Sun's condition from officials in Xushui.
"Sun Dawu is now in good spirits," the paper reported Aug. 2. "He hasn't shaved off his hair and hasn't dressed himself in prisoner's clothing."
Zhu, Sun's lawyer, also said his client was holding up well, although he said there was no chance of bail.
"Sun Dawu said the reason for his arrest was a series of articles he posted on the Web and his recent speeches," Zhu said. "But the police say he was illegally attracting public deposits."
"I think it's legal," Zhu said. "No one forced anyone to lend Sun money. That's their right to control their own property. They have the right to lend money to whom they want."
Zhu, an unhurried man in an open-collar shirt and casual slacks, leaned back in a padded chair in his firm's conference room in Beijing. "I read somewhere a story about a foreigner, probably an American, who left all her money to her dog," Zhu said. "If an American can leave money to a dog, why can't a Chinese lend money to whom they want?"
Copyright © 2003, Newsday, Inc.
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http://www.newsday.com/templates/mi...onworld%2Fworld
This is just sad. If China's central government has any brains, they'll put the smackdown on the local yokels who did this.
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David Floyd
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The bottom of a large bottle of beer
Jan 1970
time: 05:30
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UR? I'm sure he'll turn up somewhere...
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David Floyd
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The bottom of a large bottle of beer
Jan 1970
time: 05:30
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Assuming you aren't trolling:
If his business was so bad, and so damaging, then why did the local citizens invest millions with him, as opposed to the State banks?
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mindseye
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A Yankee living in Shanghai
Apr 1999
time: 13:30
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Fascinating story, thanks for the post!
I had not heard of this guy before, but his story tells a lot about changing political realities in contemporary China .
Just five or ten years ago in China it would be absolutely inconceivable that anyone could publicly speak out so strongly against the Party itself. Yet, this guy was actually allowed to very publicly persist making these kind of statements, apparently for some time. That's the part that boggles me. After making statements like these to students at Beijing University, he was permitted to make them at QingHua! These are considered to be China's #1 and #2 universities, the Harvard and Yale of the PRC!
This guy wasn't arrested because he advocated political reform. This guy was arrested because he interrupted local official's gravy train.
The Party's idealogy has morphed so far from its origins (e.g. capitalists allowed to hold high positiions in a ruling Communist Party) that idealogy is no longer the dominating force. Rather, it is simply lust for power and wealth.
As I've posted before, China's government poses little threat to the typical citizen (most generally approve of it, as well as the Party). BUT: threaten some official's power or income, and you are going to be interacting with officialdom very soon. And they don't play games when their gravy is threatened.
edit: removed spurious "the"
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24-08-2003 06:39
I agree entirely.
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