Acid Test

By Terry McCarthy Xian

The moment the light went off in the small room in Fenghuo village, Wu Fang knew something terrible was going to happen to her. Three women from the village rushed in, knocked Wu Fang to the floor and began stripping her. Then her husband threw sulfuric acid on her face, chest and thighs. She let out a long cry. The women held her down, spreading acid over her face and breasts, disfiguring her horribly for the rest of her life. Twelve years later, she still seeks words for the pain: "It was like being thrown into the sky and hurled around."

Worse than the memory of the pain is the wall of silence that immediately fell around the village chiefs implicated in the attack, which arose from the village's refusal to allow Wu Fang to divorce her husband. Powerful and corrupt, these officials from Fenghuo village in northwestern Shaanxi province have consistently blocked all attempts by Wu Fang to bring them to justice. When a Chinese newspaper wrote a story sympathetic to her case in 1996, the village sued for libel--and won last June in a local court. "Everywhere in China there are outside factors that interfere with legal cases," says Wang Weiguo, professor of political science and law at China University in Beijing, who represented the newspaper in the case.

For centuries China's rulers have struggled with corruption and lawlessness across their empire. Entire dynasties have collapsed after losing control over unruly provincial governors, warlords and self-enriching local officials. Today China's Communist Party is facing the same old nightmare--rampant abuse of power by officials at all levels and a growing level of discontent among ordinary people over the unaccountability of those who rule them. Every month sees protests by farmers or workers against graft and illegal tax gouging by local officials. President Jiang Zemin fears corruption could mobilize angry masses nationwide against the Communist Party and even bring down the government, and he has issued edicts to crack down on graft.

There have been some high-profile busts of crooked officials. Last month 14 people were sentenced to death in connection with a $10 billion oil-, car- and cigarette-smuggling case in the southern port city of Xiamen. The alleged ringleader Lai Changzing is currently fighting extradition in Canada. But despite Jiang's declaration of war on financial scams, cases involving powerful officials often get held up or dismissed because of "lack of evidence." Jiang himself is not above protecting his friends. When the Xiamen case was on the verge of implicating the wife of Beijing party chief Jia Qinglin, a friend of Jiang's, the President effectively blocked the investigation by appearing on television last January with Jia beside him. The corrosive effects of corruption have bitten deeply into China's body politic and will take more than a few decrees to be washed away.

Wu Fang's scars will never be washed away. Her right cheek and right nostril have been eaten into by the acid, and her left eye has no eyelashes. Her right ear was burned off completely--subsequent second-rate surgery has completely covered up the orifice with a skin graft. She hears a constant buzzing and instinctively keeps trying to pick a hole in the skin with her finger. Hair has stopped growing on most of her skull, and she wears a long wig to cover her baldness. Her hands are burned from her attempts to shield her face from the acid, and her breasts, stomach and thighs are covered with ugly scar tissue. She was once one of the prettiest girls in the village. After the acid attack, her family removed all the mirrors from her house so she would not have to see her face reflected back at her. Only one thing keeps her going now: the desire to get even. "I want justice," she says. "I believe heaven's law will prevail."

Wu Fang was born in 1958 close to the village of Fenghuo, which was designated a "model village" by Mao Zedong for supposedly exceeding production quotas. The village's Communist Party secretary, Wang Baojing, had been honored nationwide as a "model worker" in 1957, and as a result, Fenghuo villagers had better houses, higher incomes and more food than China's typical villagers. So Wu Fang's parents were delighted when a Fenghuo family said they wanted to arrange a marriage between Wu Fang and their son Wang Maoxing.

They were married in 1981, but she quickly discovered that her husband--whom she had not met until their wedding--was a layabout and a wife beater. The harder she tried to make their life a success, the more her husband hit her. "The whole village knew he was beating her," says Wang Xingxing, former assistant to party chief Wang Baojing. (Fenghuo has six branches of Wangs, all of them related in some way to one another.) "They weren't suited. In the village we said it was 'like a cabbage spoiled by a pig.'"

Wu Fang asked for a divorce several times, but her husband refused. "He said he would rather see me in a coffin than divorce me," she says. Finally she couldn't take the beatings any longer, and in 1987 she ran away to Hancheng, a town 155 miles away in Shaanxi. Wang Baojing, who ruled the village like a feudal lord, wanted her back. If Wu Fang were allowed to abandon her arranged marriage, she could tarnish the reputation of the model village and even endanger the subsidies it enjoyed from the government. Eventually--Wu Fang does not know how--Wang Baojing discovered she was in Hancheng and sent two policemen to bring her back. In Fenghuo she was put into the official village guesthouse. Her room had a lock on the outside but not on the inside. She was at the mercy of the village.

For two nights her husband visited her, tried to have sex with her and beat her. On the third night, April 26, 1988, three village officials went to Wu Fang's room with her husband to make one final attempt at reconciliation. "That night the atmosphere was quite dangerous," says Wang Xingxing, the former assistant to Wang Baojing, who was standing outside the building with 300 or 400 villagers.

After some time, the son of Wang Baojing, Wang Nongye, entered the room and told the three other officials to leave. When they had gone, Wang Nongye headed for the door too. By now Wu Fang could sense the danger and held on to his legs, begging him not to leave her with her husband. Wang Nongye pulled himself free, and as he went out, he switched off the light in the room. It was at that moment that Wang Xingxing saw the three women rushing in. He remembers it was about 7 p.m. "Then I heard her scream--'Ma [Mother]!' I saw the three women beating her, but didn't know then that they had acid."

After the attack someone turned on the light again. Wu Fang was lying on her right side in a pool of acid--this is apparently why the right side of her face and her right ear were so badly burned. She was temporarily blinded. "Everyone thought it was too cruel," says Wang Xingxing, "but nobody would denounce Wang Nongye, because since the '50s they had been trained by Wang Baojing not to speak badly of the village."

Wu Fang spent seven months in the Xian hospital. When she was released in December 1988, she had had multiple skin grafts, but the military surgeons had still not been able to improve her appearance above the level of the grotesque.

Three years later, her husband was convicted by a court and executed for the attack. His brother was jailed for providing the acid. "But they were just scapegoats--the real guilty person is Wang Nongye," she says. "When he turned off the light, that was the signal. They had planned it all in advance."

All Wu Fang's attempts to have the investigation widened came up against an immovable obstacle: the power of Wang Baojing and Wang Nongye. "Wang Baojing has a huge network of patronage--everyone is scared of him and his son," says Wu Fang.

As party chief of a model village, Wang Baojing has become very rich. "In Fenghuo's history, whoever got money, they got it from Wang Baojing," says Wang Xingxing, who was Wang Baojing's assistant for 38 years before a falling-out in 1997. When the government set up a cement factory and a paper-box factory in Fenghuo, "they became Wang Baojing's family's factories. The financial statements of the factories were never released. For example, I know the cement factory was making about $200,000 profit a year, but the village never saw any of it."

Wu Fang had almost given up hope of getting justice when Lu Yuegang, a Beijing-based journalist for the China Youth Daily, heard about her case in 1996. On Aug. 8, 1996, he published a story headlined THE STRANGE AFFAIR OF THE DESTROYED FACE. The article questioned why Wang Nongye had not been investigated, despite being implicated in the attack by witnesses. Lu's article also cast doubts on Wang Baojing's entire record as a model worker and his supposed "miracle harvests" dating back to the '50s.

The article was a flash point. Soon after it appeared, the China Youth Daily found itself the target of a libel suit brought by three defendants: Wang Baojing, Wang Nongye and the village of Fenghuo. They claimed that Wang Nongye had been unfairly linked to the acid attack and that Wang Baojing's reputation as a model worker had been seriously damaged. Last June the judge found against the China Youth Daily and ordered it to pay $11,250 in damages to the plaintiffs. The paper appealed the case but doesn't expect to win. Wang Baojing refused to comment on Wu Fang's case. Through a spokesman, he said he had "no time to answer TIME's questions." Wang Nongye did not respond to TIME's attempts to contact him.

It has been 12 years since the acid attack on Wu Fang. Even now she cannot tell her story without breaking into tears. Her eyesight has never fully recovered, and she needs surgery on her corneas as well as corrective surgery to open an aperture for her right ear.

Wu Fang has yet to find justice for what happened to her. But for the newspaper's lawyer, Wang Weiguo, the case extends far beyond Fenghuo. "If a nation has no feeling of justice, that nation will be dead," he says. Many reformers in China would like to see their country free of corruption and abuse of power by officials who answer to no one. Graft reaches up to the highest levels of the state. In September, Cheng Kejie, the vice chairman of the National People's Congress--China's parliament--was executed. Cheng, the most senior official to fall victim to the anticorruption purge, had been using his mistress to solicit bribes in exchange for selling state land cheaply and awarding government contracts. (The mistress, Li Ping, was sentenced to life in prison.)

But for every large scandal, there are a thousand small cases of officials' pilfering, diverting funds and stealing from the people. Graft has become endemic in China. It is an acid that has corroded the system at all levels. China needs more than cosmetic surgery to recover.