SHEN Shaoxi often spends the night in the Communist Party office. Mr Shen, the village party secretary, is not putting in overtime. He is moonlighting as the village's main broker for abducted brides. Trafficking in women is illegal, but business is so brisk the local peasants have dubbed the Communist Party office ''the commodity exchange''.
Like a feudal overlord, Mr Shen, in his 40s, has also reserved the ancient right of first night. ''All the kidnapped women must spend the first night with him in his office,'' according to a seven-page complaint signed and thumb-printed by dozens of villagers, including several Communist Party members. ''The next morning, after the deal has been reached [with the purchaser], firecrackers are lit at the office doorway and the new bride is taken home.'' The party, once seen as the liberator of the peasantry in the 1940s, has become an instrument of oppression in the 1990s. Where once landlords tyrannised the peasants, the party secretary is today's despot. As central power wanes, these petty dictators have become entrenched in villages across China.
Anti-government sentiment sparked massive urban protests in 1989, ending in the bloody crackdown at Beijing's Tiananmen Square on June 4. The peasants mostly were silent that year, but next time rural China could erupt. In recent years peasants in provinces as diverse as Sichuan, Yunnan and Shandong have launched short-lived armed rebellions.
''We must pay attention to what peasants want,'' Sichuan governor Kiao Yang said in an interview last month. ''This year there will be small-scale protests but not major chaos.'' As paramount leader Deng Xiaoping grows weaker, the lack of a strong successor adds to the instability. ''If there's a struggle at the top after Deng Xiaoping's death, the government won't have the energy to stamp out protests,'' said Wei Jingsheng, China's most prominent dissident, in an interview before he was arrested this month. ''All it takes is a spark and there'll be an explosion.'' Dynastic change usually has occurred in China after a rebellion of peasants, 80 per cent of China's 1.2 billion people. It was a peasant rebellion that put the Communists in power in 1949, and a peasant rebellion could unseat them half a century later.
Last month, Premier Li Peng warned that corruption is ''a matter of life and death for our nation'' and ordered a campaign to punish guilty officials ''unsparingly''. On April 11, China executed Shen Taifu, a high-profile executive who had embezzled more than $400,000 in a pyramid scheme.
In the eastern province of Anhui, one of China's poorest, corruption is so bad that more than 300,000 cadres - one in five - are on the take, the official Xinhua news agency reported this year. In Yuan village, not far from the banks of the broad Huai river, the peasants shrug when told about Beijing's anti-corruption campaign. No official in Yuan nor any nearby village has been punished, they say.
