Old-Line Communists at Odds With Party in China
By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL
SHENYANG, China -- For more than 40 years, Zhou Wei found success as a Communist Party cadre in government bureaus and state-owned enterprises, the kind of loyal official whose hard work kept the gears of China's socialist industry turning. Colleagues and family say he was a brilliant, if prickly, man who loved -- and still loves -- the party.
But today he is in a labor camp, accused of organizing illegal assemblies and inciting unrest in this depressed industrial city. Since the mid-1990's, Mr. Zhou, 69, had led thousands of Shenyang's revered old Communist cadres in a mounting series of protests and petition campaigns against the local government, loudly denouncing its corruption and its failure to look after the farmers, workers and retirees it had pledged to serve.
Now, a campaign to gain Mr. Zhou's release has brought into public view an extraordinary five-year struggle between the local party and some of its most senior retired officials -- a bizarre conflict in which the police tail old men who are heros of the 1949 revolution that brought the party to power.
But more than that, it reflects widespread popular disillusionment with the Communist Party over corruption and lost ideals, even among its own rank and file. And it demonstrates the erosion of the party's credibility and its monopoly on power in a country where citizens are increasingly inclined to speak their minds.
Here in this city of ailing state enterprises, protests by workers demanding unpaid wages are so common that road blockages are announced on the morning news. But the complaints of the veteran cadres go deeper to the bone.
"We old cadres were outraged by the arrest of Comrade Zhou Wei," said Zhang Jingcai, a youthful-looking 70-year-old perched on the edge of a folding chair.
"I still fervently love the Chinese Communist Party, but I hate its corrupt elements," Mr. Zhang said. "The prestige of the party is not very high among ordinary people these days, and that makes us old cadres very sad."
Mr. Zhou and his band of retired cadres were well known in Shenyang, where hundreds of them would meet every Sunday at the Youth Park to discuss politics. The outspoken Mr. Zhou, with impeccable revolutionary credentials, became a sort of Robin Hood figure, a plain-living party stalwart who stood up for the workers, peasants and old Communists who had been cast aside in China's rush to remake its socialist economy.
Mr. Zhou joined the People's Liberation Army in 1947 at 16 and became a Communist Party member in 1949, six months before Mao Zedong proclaimed the founding of the People's Republic. In the 1980's he was honored as a model worker. He and his family lived simply, in a cement-floored walk-up flat.
"Farmers and factory workers are also concerned about Zhou Wei," said Yuan Chongzhi, 72, another retired official. "They worshipped him -- called him the star of the old cadres -- because he was struggling for justice for everyone."
Mr. Zhou began organizing protests in 1995, for intensely practical reasons: The Shenyang government had stopped providing the city's 20,000 old cadres who had retired from state-owned industries with their legally guaranteed retirement benefits. Longtime party stalwarts found themselves without full pensions or medical coverage at a time when some local party leaders were building villas and driving Audis.
They rebelled. For the next three years, Mr. Zhou, bullhorn in hand, led groups of retired cadres to government offices in Shenyang, the capital of Liaoning Province, and Beijing, where they marched up to deliver written petitions listing their complaints.
Over time, their monthly benefits improved -- from about $25 a month in 1996 to about $115 today, for example -- though they still complain about substandard housing and medical benefits.
Over time, too, the old cadres began to tackle other problems, helping peasants whose land had been illegally seized by the Shenyang city government and championing the cause of Chinese who had lost their savings when a private bank with close ties to top local officials collapsed under the weight of corruption.
The 1998 order from the local party leaders that stripped Mr. Zhou of his party membership states that, from October 1994 to June 1998, he organized 119 trips to petition the government, involving 17,000 people.
Demonstrations in Chinese cities are increasingly common and some are lawless, the old cadres say, but they insist they always followed proper procedures.
"All these old cadres are former factory leaders and party leaders so they have knowledge and standards," said Mr. Zhou's wife, Zhao Yan, a frail-looking woman in a print housedress. "The traffic police even praised the old cadres for petitioning in such an orderly way -- not like a lot of protesters here who block roads and things like that."
Perhaps most threatening to local officials, though, was the fact that the old cadres also decided to investigate local corruption, and did not flinch when the trail led to the top.
"We didn't rush in blindly," said Mr. Zhang. "We were heeding the calls of party leadership to stamp out corruption."
But as their efforts intensified, so did the police harassment.
Mr. Zhou's phones were tapped in the years before he was imprisoned and when the old cadres met on Sundays in the park, scores of police officers listened in.
In May 1998, Mr. Zhou and his group traveled to Beijing to charge that a deputy mayor of Shenyang, Ma Xiangdong, was involved in a land speculation scheme that had illegally seized property that belonged to thousands of peasants. On his return, Mr. Zhou was detained for two weeks by the Shenyang Public Security Bureau and then expelled from the party.
As for Mr. Ma, he is now in prison, awaiting trial on charges of corruption.
Undaunted, in April 1999, Mr. Zhou and his fellow retired cadres made another trip to Beijing, this time to the Ministry of Public Security, to expose the Shenyang bank that had bilked thousands of depositors of almost $1 billion. And in early May 1999, they were preparing to report on a top official in the city's construction materials administration, who they said had siphoned off $40 million. They never got the chance.
At 8 p.m. on May 6, five police cars carrying more than 20 officers pulled up in front of the drab apartment block where Mr. Zhou lived, his family said. They arrested Mr. Zhou, carting off his research files, stamps, stationery and law books.
The next day, he was sent to a labor camp for two years -- a sentence that can be imposed here by police outside of the court system. Mr. Zhou has never been tried or convicted of a crime.
"His whole life he served the revolution and now he's being persecuted," his wife said.
The document that expelled Mr. Zhou from the party and the one that later led to his incarceration essentially accuse him of disloyalty -- of not being a team player.
"Zhou Wei should have set an example of observing the party's political discipline, conscientiously protecting the party's image and protecting a stable and unified political situation," his expulsion notice says.
But in today's China, even devoted cadres who, as they say, "spilled blood for the revolution," recoil at the notion that loyalty to the party means blind acceptance, especially blind acceptance of party wrongdoing and graft.
"I've been in the party for more than 50 years and I've never seen anything like this," said Li Baocai, a grizzled 82-year-old. "I really object to Zhou Wei being arrested and treated like this. I can't accept the idea that we shouldn't try to solve these kinds of problems. We old cadres tried to solve them because we believe in the party and the government."
In the months since his arrest, old cadres who worked with Mr. Zhou have lodged their unhappiness in written petitions and in person, often using the language of civil rights that has entered the Chinese vocabulary in this era of opening and reform.
They complained that when Mr. Zhou was expelled from the party, he was not accorded the hearing that is the right of all party members.
They complained that at the court appeal of his sentencing to the labor camp his lawyers were not even permitted to mount a defense, and that Mr. Zhou has now waited seven months for a decision, a violation of Chinese law. And they complained that Chinese newspapers have not been allowed to report on his case, though reporters have come to interview them.
"When Zhou Wei was in prison the first time, I went twice to see him and they wouldn't let me in," said Li Yushen, another old cadre, with a defiant air. "What kind of human rights is this?"
By now, Mr. Zhou has begun his second year of labor camp, where his wife says her previously healthy husband has developed medical problems, including high blood pressure.
But the old cadres continue his work. Last November, they issued a report accusing Shenyang's mayor of protecting corrupt officials.
And in early June, 43 signed an open letter to their friend, which says: "The darkness in Shenyang will one day pass. Our friend Zhou Wei, you are a true Communist."