NEW YORK—Widely known as the New York Times researcher who was jailed in China for three years for “divulging state secrets,” Zhao Yan, now a refugee living in the United States, is a champion for China’s dispossessed.
Zhao has made it his life’s work to investigate land grabs in China, educating farmers on how to fight back against rapacious officials.
Previously an art critic and then a policeman (he was expelled from the police force in 1987 during the anti-bourgeois liberalization campaign), Zhao became interested in farmers’ rights in 1997.
A good friend and journalist, Sheng Xueyou, had been framed by the party secretary in Northeastern Harbin for exposing land grabs from farmers. He was being put through a show trial, and Zhao came to his aid.
“I had to study the law myself to assist him. I worked on the case for over a year,” he said. Zhao sent a letter to the city party secretary explaining the case, warning that his predecessor had inflicted a grave injustice, and exhorted release of his friend—which promptly came.
Through that experience Zhao Yan learnt what Chinese in the countryside suffered, and switched career paths. “The experience changed my life,” he said. From then on it was journalism and activism.
In 2002 the journalism part was formalized with a position at the magazine China Reform, which is published by the National Development and Reform Commission, a department of the state council.
“They were all doing research, but their journalistic skills weren’t strong. I did serious investigations for them,” including on the question of land grabs from farmers, he said.
It was his gumshoeing on behalf of the marginalized in Chinese society that caught the attention of the New York Times. “There was almost no one in the Chinese media focusing on the plight of minority groups then,” Zhao said.
Joseph Kahn, then Beijing bureau chief, took him on board as a researcher when Zhao Yan stepped down from China Reform in early 2004. Kahn did not respond to an email requesting an interview.
Zhao’s main job was to prepare primary research that Kahn or others would later go over, verify, and write reports from.
He also leveraged his network of contacts for gossip on intra-Party rivalry. A handwritten note he produced on that front landed him in jail for three years, between 2004 and 2007, for “divulging state secrets”—at least according to the official explanation.
The jail time was actually punishment from Hu Jintao for Zhao’s work on behalf of farmers, Zhao said. The state secrets claim was a useful excuse.
Next ... He learned to take advantage of loopholes in the law to help farmers.
For Zhao, journalism always went hand-in-hand with activism to help farmers resist the Party’s land grabs. “As a journalist I can’t do that, but as an intellectual with a conscience, and who knows how to deal with the problem, if I don’t tell them, who will?” he said.
He learned to take advantage of loopholes in the law to help farmers fight back against officials who abused their power, in particular educating them on how to impeach people’s representatives, members of the National People’s Congress.
“That made the Party very nervous,” and furious, he said. Now that he has learnt how to use computers—he didn’t use a computer in China—he’s collating research online and still doing it.
“I can’t fire them directly, but we collect signatures and submit them, and they are impeached. That’s in the law.” Thirty people from the district of the people’s representative can sign a statement calling for their recall.
“I’m using your law to expose and impeach those corrupt officials that take farmers’ land,” he said. “That’s not inciting a rebellion.”
He continues to do that work alongside the writing and editing he does for Chinese publications to earn a meager income, including exposing corruption under pen names that are later discarded.
Zhao Yan believes that land thefts from farmers represent the single most destructive and destabilizing activity currently being carried out by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP.)
It is mostly land grabs that lie behind the hundreds of thousands of “mass incidents,” or street protests, reported in recent years, as farmers have their land taken and receive little or sometimes no compensation. Local officials hire demolition teams and thugs who don’t stint from using violence to speed up the eviction process.
This has led to petitions, protests, despair, and ultimately desperation in parts of China. People have set themselves on fire and more recently rigged bombs to strike back at Party authorities.
“If you are taking their land, you are taking their livelihood, and you are taking away their survival,” Zhao Yan said. “So they will fight you with their lives.”
Farmer uprisings have precipitated the fall of imperial Chinese dynasties for millennia. The Nationalist Party, before the CCP, collapsed after the farmers turned on them (a war with Japan, civil war, and communist agitprop, and land redistribution also helped).
Zhao Yan says the CCP faces a similar fate at the hands of the masses. He invokes the classical Chinese phrase that explains the Party’s strife 60 years after it rode to success on the backs of the peasantry, “Not only can water float a boat, it can sink it also.”
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