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. Mr Shen, their own party secretary, has been in power for the 15 years of Mr Deng's economic reforms. He appears to be untouchable despite their numerous petitions and protest marches. The peasants say that Mr Shen (no relation to Shen Taifu) secures his position by sending gifts to his superiors. They appointed him, after all, and some are his relatives. The peasants said that if they dared to fight him, higher officials would immediately send in police. Two foreign reporters who visited Yuan village without Mr Shen's prior knowledge heard tales of brutality, extortion and greed. Unhindered by any modern system of checks and balances, he wields absolute power, according to interviews with more than 10 villagers. They and others in the area added that Yuan village was not unusual. Like many grassroots-level party secretaries, Mr Shen, who has a third-grade education, is mayor, police chief, judge, welfare dispenser, businessman and father confessor rolled into one. As the top Communist official in the town, he labels his critics ''counter revolutionaries'' and uses the village militia to suppress them. Peasants are so terrified that when two reporters quietly picked up several peasants in a minibus, a rumour flashed through the village that Mr Shen had abducted them, and their tearful wives started searching for them. A day later, Mr Shen's brother led a gang to beat up three who had dared to talk. Two others were seized and interrogated. A third evaded capture by hiding in the fields. Mr Shen's closest associate, the village accountant, threatened to break the visitors' legs if they ever returned, according to a statement signed and thumb-printed by six Communist Party members and five villagers. Zhou Chenglin, Mr Shen's direct superior, denied there had been any retaliatory beatings. Mr Zhou, who is the party secretary at township level, said Mr Shen had been ''thoroughly investigated'' a year ago. ''We found no evidence of corruption or wrong-doing,'' he said. Mr Deng's economic reforms, which sanction conspicuous consumption, have enabled officials such as Mr Shen to use their positions to get rich. The pickings are slim in Yuan village, which lacks running water and is accessible only by a pitted dirt road. Still, Mr Shen has been resourceful. When the Huai river overflowed its banks in 1991, causing the worst flooding in decades, he viewed the disaster as a get-rich opportunity. All aid sent there by Beijing and international groups was channelled through him. He fenced 5,000kg of relief grain to an official in another town at five per cent the market price. He divided up tins of cooking oil, five sacks of sweet dates and 30 jugs of fertiliser among eight village officials. He also gave eight sacks of flour intended for the neediest homes to his closest associate, the village accountant. ''It rotted before he could finish it,'' said Yuan Jiaqiang, a peasant in a faded Mao jacket. ''So he fed it to his pigs.'' Mr Shen's family kept special luxuries such as biscuits and canned peaches for themselves. The villagers only found out when they saw his son with a pack of biscuits stuffed in his pocket, labelled ''disaster relief supplies''. That year, because the entire crop was lost, 60 per cent of the 300 families in Yuan village left to go begging. Mr Shen also embezzled funds earmarked for rebuilding flood-damaged homes, the peasants said. And he picked through clothing donated by urban Chinese for flood victims, taking four wool suits for himself. Li Jingying, who lost her home in the floods, lifted the frayed edge of her sky-blue jacket, a gift from a young woman who once worked in the village. Ms Li, a widow in her 60s, felt humiliated because only unmarried women wear such bright colours in rural China. ''People mock me, because I have nothing else to wear,'' she said, as she began to cry. She lives in a hovel next to the ruins of her former home while her seven grown children look for work in the cities. ''My grandchildren wanted to eat breakfast today, but I had nothing to give them,'' she said, her voice breaking. ''My husband's dead, and I wish he had taken me with him.'' They are so poor, she said, that only one of her six sons had been able to marry. Few women voluntarily marry into Yuan village, where the per capita annual income is less than half the Chinese rural average. So Mr Shen spied another business opportunity in trafficking abducted women. These ventures have enabled him to afford a walled enclosure around his home. The only other villager rich enough to build a similar wall is the village accountant, who is related to Mr Shen. While many villagers live in mud huts, both men live in solid homes of cement and brick with tile roofs. ''Even the party secretary's pigsty is better than our homes,'' Shi Jingfa said. A quick check of the Shen family pigsty proved him right. While no one dared to go much closer to the party secretary's home, the village security chief showed two reporters the home of the village accountant, who was out. Inside the spacious rooms were huge straw bins filled with unhusked rice and wheat. Pointing to the largest bin, he estimated that it held about 5,000 kilos of rice. What most galls the villagers, who yearn to have many grandsons, is the way Mr Shen uses family planning laws to attack his enemies, reward his friends and extort still others. Unlike urban residents who may only have one child, rural Chinese may have two children if they space them five years apart. In fact, Mr Shen's word alone determines who may have another child, whose will be forcibly aborted, who will be sterilised and who must pay him a fine. ''If you're close to him, you can have six children with no problem,'' said Mr Yuan, who is 57. He estimated that 75 per cent of the families in Yuan village had more than two children. The village accountant, for instance, has had five without paying any fines. Mr Shen, who has three, also bought a fake sterilisation certificate. But because the Shi family had once criticised Mr Shen, he forced Shi Jingxuan's daughter-in-law to abort a late-term pregnancy on the grounds that it would be her third child. And to make an example of her, he had her home demolished while she was in hospital. In anger, Mr Shi denounced the party secretary for having three children of his own. The villagers have sent delegates to the county town, the nearby city of Bengbu and the provincial capital of Hefei. Three times in the past year, more than 400 villagers have paraded into town in a convoy of tractors and bicycles, waving red flags and banners demanding justice. Mr Shen recently was dismissed from his post, but only for family planning violations, according to his superior, Mr Zhou. But no public announcement has been made, or successor named, and Mr Shen continues to wield power in the village. Snap elections for a new ruling party committee were held, apparently because officials learned that outsiders had been investigating the situation. But only 18 villagers, all of them Communist Party members, were allowed to vote. The result: two of the three committee members are related to Mr Shen. Now, some peasants are losing patience. ''Other villages are watching us,'' one peasant said. ''If we succeed, they're all going to rise up. And if they chop off our heads, there are more behind us.'' Reprinted with permission from The Globe and Mail, Canada's national newspaper
