LUXI COUNTY, China - They were the best of friends, a restaurant owner and a clothes seller, two women who were models of an enterprising capitalist ethic that has taken root throughout China, even in this remote community in the rural southwest.
But beneath this bright veneer, Wang Mengling and Tang Yunzhi were sinking into a financial underworld of lending societies, high-interest loans, hired thugs and illegal casinos. As in much of rural China, where banks are rarely willing to make substantial loans to workers, it was an informal economy built on friendships and blood ties that gave Wang and Tang a first taste of prosperity, but in the end it would poison their friendship, wreck their families and end their lives.
Wang fell more than $45,000 in debt to Tang, who became so intent on collecting from her former best friend that she had Wang tied to a tree and tortured while she watched, Wang's parents allege. Soon after, Tang and her husband were killed, and Wang and her husband were arrested, convicted of ordering the killings and executed. The illegal economy of Luxi County had claimed four more victims.
"It broke our family," said Wang Tianfu, Wang's father, sitting in the cramped walk-up apartment where he and his wife raise their orphaned granddaughter. "And it brought people's deaths."
In the fleeting rise and violent fall of Wang and Tang lies the story of an underground economy that bred aspirations for prosperity and then savagely consumed them. In Luxi County, a traditional lending culture that has long been the invisible spine of rural Chinese life mutated into a ruthless, destructive criminal culture. Wang's and Tang's families, and many others here, blame local officials for abetting this transformation, profiting from it until, in 2001, they finally cracked down. It illustrates the failings of the government and banking system in China's remote countryside, where power, wealth and misery are often creatures more of local fiat than of rules from Beijing.
During the crackdown, a dozen or more loan sharks - the "most serious" cases, one bank official said - were imprisoned with sentences ranging from a few years to life for bilking people out of millions of dollars. Others emerged wealthy, including casino owners and lending society bosses who left town or escaped serious punishment, and local party officials who allowed or participated in the illegal activity for years.
