Finally, Pu moved on, and asked the witness a different question: "Do you think Zhang Xide was a good party secretary in Linquan County?"
He didn't answer that one either.
Lawyer Pu Zhiqiang, center, and client Chen Guidi, at right, brief peasants outside the courthouse about libel trial's progress.
(Special To The Washington Post)
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The Weapon Changes Hands
On the third day of the trial, Pu began calling witnesses, all of them peasants from Linquan. His cross-examinations had put Zhang on the defensive, but now he seemed like a prosecutor building a case against him. The libel charges were all but forgotten.
One after another, the peasants recalled the events described in the book in damning detail: their suffering at the hands of party officials who demanded illegal taxes; the tough one-child policy campaigns with slogans declaring that it would be better to end seven pregnancies than to allow an extra child to be born; and the appeals for help that took them all the way to Beijing, where 74 of them knelt in protest in Tiananmen Square in 1995.
The most vivid testimony concerned a raid on their village by military police on April 3, 1994. Residents said Zhang ordered the police to punish them for protesting his policies. The officers beat anyone they found and dragged away a dozen people, including some who had nothing to do with the protests, the witnesses said.
"It was worse than when the Japanese ghouls invaded," testified Wang Yongliang, an elderly, white-haired peasant, who said many villagers were so terrified they fled to a neighboring province.
Others, including Wang Xiangdong, 42, a rugged-faced peasant leader, said they were arrested and tortured. "Every officer hit me, and they kept asking, 'Are you tired of living yet?' " he testified.
The last witness was a frail, 69-year-old woman in a flower-print blouse, Zhang Xiuying. Sobbing, she recalled how her husband shouted when police seized him, then suddenly collapsed. The officers left him on the ground, and the villagers were too afraid of the police to help him. He died the next day.
After she finished testifying, the woman suddenly knelt in the well of the courtroom and cried out, "May the honorable judges render justice to my family!" The chief judge shouted for order. But the gallery erupted, and another woman knelt and pleaded for justice, too.
Pu jumped to his feet, wiping away tears, as security officers led the women from the room.
Plaintiff on the Defensive
Zhang Xide sat quietly at the plaintiff's table through much of the trial, sipping tea from a steel thermos. He let his attorneys do most of the talking. But as the trial began spinning out of his control, he smiled less and spoke up more.
"That's a lie!" he blurted out occasionally, drawing rebukes from the chief judge and laughter from the gallery. But for the most part, Zhang stayed cool and casually dismissed the peasants' complaints.
He said party leaders had long ago concluded that the police raid was justified and handled correctly. "Just a few trifles," he said of the corruption allegations. Defending his enforcement of the one-child policy, he said, "Only 20 or so families had their houses torn down."
He also defended his use of county funds to buy a Mercedes-Benz. "I didn't buy it for myself, but for anyone who needed the car for work," he said. Pressed by the lawyers, he added: "This has nothing to do with this case. I have my human rights."
