Country Driving [129]
In China such lack of transparency is common, especially in the countryside. If the Party Secretary had profited from these deals, she was smart enough not to show the money. Her house was the nicest in the upper village, but it wasn’t extravagant, and nothing about her appearance changed. Whenever I saw her, she greeted me with the same friendly gruffness as always: “Hey! You just get here?” But some villagers believed that she had stashed money in a Huairou bank account, and her son had recently purchased a new apartment in the city. Soon, people began to talk about something else: the upcoming village elections.
In Chinese villages, two political offices matter most: the Party Secretary and the Village Chief. The Village Chief is elected directly by all residents, through secret ballot, and candidates are not necessarily members of the Communist Party. But only members can become Party Secretary, which is the highest position. In Sancha, Liu Xiuying had begun her political career as Village Chief. She first won that position in 1993, and five years later she was elected Party Secretary. Since then she had held both offices simultaneously, a situation that has become increasingly common in rural China. The government encourages it, so bureaucracy will be streamlined, but it also serves to consolidate power.
In Sancha there had never been a serious challenge to the Party Secretary’s authority. But by 2006 the situation had changed, and the difference was money. In 2001, when I moved to Sancha, the per capita income was around two hundred and fifty dollars; in the span of five years it had risen to over eight hundred. In 2003, the day wage for a laborer was three dollars; now it was six. The village had acquired a good road, a cell phone tower, cable television—it even had garbage to sell. All of this could have represented a success for the Party Secretary, because the village had prospered under her leadership; but the frame of reference mattered more than anything else. Instead of comparing their situation to the past, people in Sancha had started to think about the outside. They saw city people moving in, and they knew that real-estate deals were being struck, and all at once they feared missing out on profits.
For an alternative they naturally turned to the most successful local businessman. In the evenings, after it grew dark, the Shitkicker often visited the Weis’ home. If I was there, the man would greet me with a curt nod, and then he would take a seat away from the table. He never participated in our conversation. He simply waited for me to leave—his arrival was a cue that I should go home. When I asked Wei Ziqi why the Shitkicker had started coming around, he shrugged off the question. “It’s not a big deal,” Wei Ziqi said, and left it at that.
It took me a while to realize that this is how a village political campaign begins. After weeks of visits, Wei Ziqi finally brought up the subject. He told me there would be an election in the beginning of 2007, and some people in Sancha wanted him to run for Party Secretary.
“Are you going to do that?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “It’s too much trouble.” But something about his tone seemed less than absolute. I asked who was encouraging him, and he mentioned the Shitkicker’s name.
“But didn’t he oppose you when you first tried to join the Party?”
“Yes,” Wei Ziqi said. “That’s true.”
“So why does he want you to become Party Secretary now?”
“It’s complicated.”
I asked if he trusted the man, and