Local Tourism, Corrupt Officials, and Jiang Zemin's "Black Heart"

A guesthouse owner's story from Jinyun County, Lishui

This is a repost of a thread originally posted to Twitter on May 5, 2024. It has been edited slightly for long-essay format. Per the usual, I have taken some minor narrative liberties to piece the essay together into what looks like a single dialogue from chats that in reality took place in segments, over several hours of conversations across two days. I have tried to avoid injecting any of my own bias into the essay, allowing Mr. Li to tell the story himself. Of course, some bias is unavoidable due to the words I choose in translation, as well as my selective memory bias (I remember best the topics I find interesting myself). The reader’s indulgence is appreciated, as always.

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"They said Jiang Zemin is a thug...Jiang Zemin has a black heart"

In Lishui City’s Jinyun County, a Zhejiang business owner told me how the tourism industry developed, his family's struggles with corrupt local officials, and his perspective on how things are changing now…for better and worse.

The setting is Lishui. Lishui is a small mountainous Zhejiang city, far from the bustle of dynamic Zhejiang economies like Hangzhou or Ningbo. Lishui is the poorest prefecture-level city in the province by both GDP and GDP/capita. Agriculture and tourism play big roles in the economy. That’s not to say it’s REALLY poor; but it is poor by wealthy Zhejiang province standards.

Jinyun County is about an hour northeast of downtown Lishui, covered with rolling, lush green mountains and clear rivers and lakes. It’s suburban/rural, but not the deep countryside.

Boss Li’s homestay guesthouse is in Dinghu Town, which is within the Xiandu Scenic Area. It’s a lovely, peaceful rural environment, typical of the rest of Jinyun County.

Boss Li used to work in Guangdong but returned to Dinghu Town after Xiandu was upgraded to a 5A attraction in 2019. When we checked in, he had to bring us in person to the local branch of the Public Security Bureau to register our arrival, since they don’t provide a web platform for hoteliers to register foreign guests. Li said we were only the third time he's received foreigners at his guesthouse since 2019.

"To tell you the truth, we know Xiandu doesn’t meet the standard for a 5A attraction. Sure, it’s a pleasant place to visit…but a 4A rating is more reasonable. It's not on the same level as places like Zhangjiajie...

[Li is referring to the famous tourist area in western Hunan with the “Avatar mountains”]

“For 5A, you have must have high-quality hotels, nice public facilities, a certain level of foreign tourism. We have some of those now, but we still don’t have the foreign guests. And it’s unusual for a 5A scenic area to have locals living inside it. We are the only 5A tourist site with locals living within it in China.

“We were able to get 5A because…well…we owe a lot of thanks to our Secretary Hu… He personally made a lot of effort. He petitioned the tourism bureau in Beijing and secured 500M CNY to upgrade our facilities. He also got the Yunhe Rice terraces in Yunhe County upgraded to 5A last year.”

Here, I know Li is referring to Mr. Hu Haifeng, Party Secretary of Lishui City from 2018-2023 and now the Vice Minister of Civil Affairs in Beijing. For a relatively young official in a small city to bypass the local funding channels and directly secure cash in Beijing, it surely helps to have some family connections...like a well-connected father…

“I guess most of your guests come from Hangzhou or Shanghai?” I ask.
“Yes, that’s right. We have no reputation elsewhere.”

“How is the tourism industry this year?”
“This year…it’s ok. Not as strong as last year. We had many guests when the pandemic restrictions were lifted.”

“Did you ever have any covid cases here?”
“No, not until the measures were released, then we all got sick at once. At the beginning, some people were panic-buying things like vegetables and salt to hoard at home. But I didn’t see the point. I saw my neighbor hoarded a bunch of salt. I told him: 'I’m not going to fight with you at the supermarket to buy the salt. If we really run out of salt, I’ll come to your house with a knife and directly fight you for the salt you hoarded'. Hah! I was joking of course.”

"Wow…haha. So, I guess people come here for the air and good environment?”
“Yes. I had guests from Shanghai say they hadn’t even heard the sound of frogs in many years, since they were children. They said our vegetables taste fresh…different from the vegetables in the city."

“Are your vegetables organic?”
“Yes. We don’t use pesticides here, so the bugs sometimes eat some of the leaves. Once, an auntie from Shanghai saw our vegetables had holes in them from bugs nibbling and refused to eat them…” He spread his hands and smiled helplessly.

“…but we don’t like to eat the vegetables in the city. I have an uncle working in Qingpu District, in the Shanghai suburbs. He grows green vegetables for the Shanghai residents…but he still has his personal vegetable patch where he grows his own vegetables without pesticides for his own consumption. Around here, no one farms anymore, except the elders. They are worried if we don’t farm, people won’t have enough to eat. However I trust the government will figure it out. I saw videos of mechanized potato fields in the Northeast. They even have drones to deliver fertilizer.”

“Did you come back here in 2019 to build your guesthouse because you knew Xiandu getting upgraded to 5A would bring a lot of tourists?”
”Yes. Also, I missed my parents a lot…and my kids. I couldn’t take them with me to Guangdong. Now I can be with them all the time, so I’m much happier.”

“While you were working in Guangdong, I guess you only saw your family once a year...at Spring Festival?”
“Yes, once a year. It took two days to get home…a bus from Yangjiang to Guangzhou, then a green-skin train from Guangzhou to Jinhua, then another bus from Jinhua to Jinyun. On the train, you sleep standing up…shoulder to shoulder. I didn’t dare to eat or drink before getting on the train, because there is no way to get to the toilet.”

“Wow…that’s so hard”
”It’s not so bad. I just felt I was lucky to get a train home at all.”

“So, the economy in this area must have improved a lot by now. What kind of business do you recommend investing in around here?”

I'm asking half as a joke, but he answers very seriously. “Because you’re not from here, I don’t recommend you invest here.”

“The authorities will give you a lot of trouble…unless you have local partners. Jinyun County is not a good place for outsiders to do business. The officials say nice things to get you to come, but if your business is too successful, they’ll claim you violated some rules and seize it. Did you see the coffee shop on the main street in the village? That’s owned by a woman from Shanghai, but she has relationships at the sub-district level, so her business is ok. The government felt the village needed a coffee shop, so they invited her to set up this business.”

He went on. “To tell you the truth, our local government in China is quite wicked, you know? I believe some top leaders in Beijing are good, but our local officials are crooked…the cadres, the public security bureau, the legal system… Let me tell you how bad they are...”

“In the 2000s, when our tourist street was being developed, my father and other villagers resisted the plans of the government to build restaurants and hotels on that street, because those were our fields. My father went to Hangzhou and then to Beijing to get a declaration that said it was Prime Farmland, and that the developments were in violation of their land rights. He got the documents, but our local officials harassed him and accused him of provoking trouble, because they wanted to make money.

“He tried to go to Beijing to petition the higher authorities (上访) but the local government used thugs to intercept him at the Jinyun train station and threaten him. But my father was too clever…next time he took a bus to Jinhua instead, and then took a train from there to Beijing.

“At that time, our county government would hire thugs to hang around outside the Public Complaints and Proposals Administration in Beijing. They ask you where you're from, and if you say Zhejiang, they won’t even ask any more questions, just grab you and take you to a secret jail area, and then force you to come back to Lishui. They even use a trick where they greet you using our local dialect, and if you respond with the local dialect, they just grab you.

“Well, my dad got inside the building, but two thugs were already following him.... He said to the security guards inside: ‘Hey, the two guys following me are not my friends…I don't know them. They were sent by people from my hometown to stop me from petitioning.’

“The guards told those thugs to leave, but they were very bold and said they were coming to going to accompany my father to petition and refused to leave. But they didn't have any papers to submit, so they obviously were not there to petition. There was a fight, and then the thugs were put in handcuffs and sent back to Lishui.

“That night, my father stayed in an outdoor area with thousands of other people all going to Beijing to report on their local governments. He said there was a good atmosphere among the petitioners. They shared food and sang red [patriotic] songs together.

“On the wall next to where they were staying, there were slogans written on the walls. They said: ‘Jiang Zemin is a thug...Jiang Zemin has a black heart’.”

[black heart is the the literal translation. It means to have no conscience]

Li laughed self-consciously at this part of the story. “Guess I shouldn’t tell foreigners these kinds of negative things.”

“Doesn’t matter what you tell me,” I tell him. “I already know these kinds of things happen. I’m just interested to hear what you think, and if you think things are different now...and how.”

“Ah, ok, sure”. Li continued his story.

“Anyway, my father submitted his petition, but it didn’t help at all. When he returned here, the local officials said he was making too much trouble, and if he didn’t back down, they would send him to jail. He refused to stop, so they charged him with disturbing the public order. They came to our house in the middle of the night to arrest him…police cars surrounding the whole house. I remember my dad kneeling on the ground, in his shorts, because he had been sleeping when they came. In the end, they sent him to jail for 2 years.

"While he was in jail, my mother tried to go to Beijing to petition for him, but the thugs hired by the local police also grabbed her at the train station. One of the local police officers even slapped her.”

“When was all of this?” I asked.

“From 2000 to 2005.”

“What happened after your dad got out of jail?”
“He still wanted to go back to Beijing to make a fuss, but the local officials talked him out of it. These were new officials by then, different from the ones that he had fought with before...they had changed over.

“The new officials called him in and asked him to please not go to Beijing again, because it would make them look bad, and so they negotiated a deal. They agreed to some terms that gave my father reasonable compensation and that resolved the matter.”

Li chuckles. “We also got revenge on the police officer who bullied my mother. Some years later, when he wasn’t an officer anymore, he wanted to build a business, but his road access relied on land that belonged to my father. He came to our house to beg for forgiveness…he said he was young and harsh when he was wearing the police uniform, and he isn’t like that anymore, but my father refused to forgive him, and wouldn’t grant him the access.”

“Er…so is the local government so tyrannical (霸道) like this today?" I asked.
”No…this was before. It’s very different today. Now the punishment for this kind of corrupt behavior is very harsh, and once you are caught, they will catch all your cronies too.

“When it happened here, first we had the police chief, then the sub-district secretary, then the magistrate…then the vice county chief…they all implicated each other and one by one, they all went to jail. To be honest, we are so grateful for Chaiman Xi. Since the anti-corruption campaign, this bad behavior has reduced a lot…it is not so rampant. I have a friend who is an official…he used to never eat at home. Every night, he would be treated to eat at a nice restaurant, then go to bars, KTV…now he just goes home and eats in his own house hahaha.”
“That sounds like a better situation for almost everyone, except your friend…”

“Yes, haha. I dare to say that 100% of local officials dislike Chairman Xi because of this! Of course…we have a joke here…that it’s a miracle that Zhejiang has so few corrupt senior officials versus other provinces. Of course, that’s because Xi’s clique won’t be grabbed. If Bo Xilai or Zhou Yongkang, one of those other guys became president, a different clique of people would be grabbed.”

[Earlier in his career, Xi came up through the Zhejiang political system. Bo and Zhou are both very high-profile politicians who have gone down for corruption during Xi’s tenure]

“Overall, do you think life has gotten better for your family?”
”Yes, much better. Even though we are the poorest city in Zhejiang, our countryside is well developed now. My neighbor’s wife is from Taiwan. Her brother came to visit our village, and he was so impressed with the high-speed rail and the development level in the countryside.

“But I will say there is one negative thing in the past few years…about elections. I think our village elections are less fair now. Previously anyone could run in the election to be village official. But now, this is controlled by the sub-district officials.

“When you go into the voting booth, on your left and right side are some people from the sub-district office, and they’ll tell you who to vote for. They already arranged who the winner should be. So there is really no point to have the election.

“But I don’t care. As long as I can live well and take care of my family, then I don’t care about politics. I can’t control it, so why should I worry so much? If I can eat well and live well it's good enough.” (吃好活好就够了)

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That's it for my conversation with guesthouse owner Mr. Li. While I knew about the petitioning system and the widespread practice of local governments blocking citizens from traveling to Beijing to submit complaints, this was my first time meeting someone with personal experience in the system. Without having directly experienced how chaotic the Chinese countryside appears to have been through the 1990s and 2000s, it was valuable to hear a firsthand perspective of just how big of a deal these anti-corruption campaigns have been in the eyes of a local.

And obviously it still doesn't sound like everything's just perfect now either, but it would be naive and unreasonable to hold that as the only bar of success. The improvements appear to be material enough that the beneficiaries can forgive the stuff that is still broken. If we consider people are likely to evaluate leaders according to the initiatives and policies that directly affect them, it's not hard to understand how Boss Li might be unimpressed with Jiang Zemin (or Hu Jintao), but quite admiring of Hu Haifeng or Xi Jinping. This tracks with what we’ve seen from, e.g., that famous Harvard longitudinal study about “authoritiarian resilience”, where Chinese citizens are consistently more approving of the national government than of the local government

Next time in Lishui, we meet a guesthouse owner in Suichang County with a very different, but also very interesting story of dealing with the local government’s plans to develop tourism.