Bodies of Evidence

Wang Manji was returning home with freshly dug sweet potatoes from her fields last October when she stepped into the most bitter event of her life. A deranged neighbor had abducted her 15-year-old son and was holding him ransom with a meat cleaver. His demands: $100 and a car. Fifty policemen came to the rescueand then, Wang says, the dithering began. The abductor claimed to be related to a top cop, and, Wang says, “the officers spent all their time trying to figure out what kind of a relative he was.” After a fruitless, 8-hr. standoff, the neighbor sliced Wang’s son through the back of the neck with the machete. He died four days later.

Five months on, Wang’s son has yet to be buried. His elm coffin, carefully sealed with tar to contain the stench, rests inside the family’s house. “We won’t bury him until the police acknowledge their mistakes and compensate us,” says Wang. And that’s a macabre form of defiance that has become something of a movement in Lanshan county, an agricultural backwater in Hunan province that is anything but bucolically peaceful. Locals say there are more than 20 victims of fatally violent crimes who remain unburied as a gesture of protest. Their coffins are displayed in homes, backyards and fields. Families are demanding redress from a police force that, they say, is more interested in taking kickbacks than in cracking cases.

China’s undeveloped legal system has forced peasants to employ some pretty extraordinary means when seeking justice. In January, for example, hundreds of villagers in Henan and Guangdong provinces overturned cars and attacked officials accused of corruption. The anger is strongest in a vast countryside where hundreds of millions have been bypassed by economic development and face increasingly hard lives. (Premier Zhu Rongji acknowledged last week that “incomes for farmers in some major grain producing areas … are decreasing.”)

The citizens of Lanshan county are putting up one of the most remarkable fights. Several families have defied arrest and harassment by organizing a campaign to impeach officials they accuse of gross incompetence and corruption. Their movement comes to a head this week with a motion to impeach the county’s police chiefTang Jiliand the vice county magistrate on charges of corruption. It will probably fail, but it’s one of the most daring attempts to date of Chinese citizens trying to get at local mandarins who still wield immeasurable power. It’s at the county level that taxation and police matters are decided. And although county councils are technically elected, the slates are carefully prepared and “the Communist Party almost always finds a way to assert control over them,” says Ding Xueliang, a professor at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology who researches local governments.

One of the heroes of Lanshan is Liang Bangming, who was elected three years ago to the county’s People’s Congress. Liang served as an infantryman during China’s disastrous 1979 border war with Vietnam and carries two badges from his time there: a medal for valor and puckered scars where a bullet ripped through his abdomen. That war produced a mini-Vietnam complex: soldiers returned from fighting dismayed that their government had sent them unprepared to a conflict they could not win. Liang was a little different: he came back to his native Hunan province more patriotic than ever and took a job as a government tax collector. That’s when disillusionment set in, as Liang discovered from the inside a system riddled with corruption.

Protected by his war record, Liang became a nuisance. He accused one county official of giving building contracts to family members, another of assigning jobs to his friends “like throwing bones to his dogs.” He hung posters denouncing corruption on the town hall gate. Police warned him to stop; co-workers voted him onto Lanshan’s 180-member People’s Congress in early 1998.

Among his first duties was attempting to quell a simmering dispute between clans controlling two villages. A schoolyard brawl that had ended with a student’s ear being hacked off had escalated into a local war. “I told the party secretary to stop this, but he was corrupt and didn’t handle it,” Liang says.

Several months later the clans deployed homemade bombs, fashioned from oxygen canisters and filled with gunpowder and metal shards. Li Lan’s 23-year-old daughter was eight months pregnant and sitting at home when one of the bombs tore through her living room, blowing off her right leg and most of her face. The family dragged her coffin into the middle of the road to protest police inaction. Police forced Li Lan to bury her daughter, and that’s when she became an activist partner of Liang. She repeatedly went to police headquarters to demand greater punishment for her daughter’s killers; for that, she was detained for “refusing to accept ideological education,” according to the warrant. She was arrested again for unfurling a banner in Tiananmen Square denouncing county officials. In the months that followed, she collected signatures and fingerprints from a thousand villagers demanding the police chief’s impeachment. “People kept asking me to represent them,” she says while thumbing the petition in her sparsely furnished living room, decorated with a poster of Chairman Mao. “I never wanted to be a leader. But by then I didn’t fear death.”

Li slowly realized that her neighbors had begun to refuse to bury their dead. She met Lei Yuanpu; he says some of his 29-year-old son’s killers were set free by police after paying a bribe of nearly a thousand dollars. The son’s uninterred coffin rests on a flax-covered hillside overlooking Lanshan’s valley. She met Liang Fuxiu, who says one of her husband’s murderers bribed his way out of jail. The husband’s coffin sits aboveground in a field behind the couple’s home. Anonymous villagers began slipping notes under Li’s door with stories of police corruption. Most common were complaints that police had taken money to release suspects. “Police arrest criminals like they’re running a business,” says Tian Liqing, a 66-year-old who has served as a People’s Congress delegate for nearly 10 years and who recently joined Liang and Li’s campaign to impeach the police chief. “They release them after they pay money.”

Police in Lanshan insist they’ve handled all their cases properly, including those of the victims in unburied coffins. “We’re still looking for some suspects who were released for lack of evidence but they didn’t bribe their way out,” says police chief Tang. He offers a different explanation for Liang’s activism: “He’s angry that his veteran’s benefits ran out, and when the government refused to give more he started making trouble.” He paints Liang as a loudmouth who police have detained three times: first, for swiping police handcuffs and truncheons, then for swearing at officers he accused of corruption and finally for playing poker in a restaurant. (Gambling is illegal in China.) Liang denies only the thefts.

Liang and Li now lead a grassroots movement, a hobby not recommended for the timorous. Li’s son, a guard at a grammar school, fled Lanshan after hooligans beat him with metal bars. (Li suspects they were sent by the police.) According to Li, one local cop has warned that if she continues her activism, “he’ll tear out my eyes. I told him when I’m dead, my family will carry on.” Even as she spoke in her home with TIME, police dropped by her gate to ensure she hadn’t gone to Beijing to protest at last week’s National People’s Congress.

The impeachment vote is this week and it will probably fail. But that doesn’t discourage Li or Liang. “I’ll keep fighting,” says Liang, “because that’s what old soldiers do.” And until a little more justice comes the way of the families of Lanshan, the dead won’t rest.