The first Chinese peasant I ever met sported gelled hair and a cell phone clipped to a nice leather belt.

I had only been studying China for four months, and I had only been in the country for eight days, but I was pretty skeptical of this “typical” peasant. Introduced to my three-person American research team by officials in the Xiayi County, Henan Province government, this greenhouse farmer felt totally at ease in front of cameras from the local Bureau of Propaganda.

“How do you know how much pesticide to apply?” we asked him.

“The government gives us a book explaining it all to us. Everyone in the village gets one,” he told us.

“Can everyone in the village read? Even the women?”

“Oh, yes. Everyone in this village has at least a junior high school education.”

Fifty feet down the dirt path, another peasant — this one wearing thread-bare clothes and lacking that shower-fresh look — told my colleague differently.
“How do you know how much pesticide to apply?”

“From experience,” the man replied. “We decide how much to apply this year based on what happened last year and the year before that.”

My colleague, Bob Callahan, pressed further: “Does the government help you with those kinds of decisions at all?”

An incredulous look. “No.”

“There’s no kind of booklet they give you?” Callahan tried again.

The peasant smiled, seeming to pity his naivete. “We can’t read.”

I witnessed this conversation from a distance, where I saw our unhappy tour guide — a local official from the Chinese Communist Party — eye it suspiciously. It didn’t take long for him to bring our conversations to a close.

Along with Professor Abigail Jahiel and fellow classmate Callahan from Illinois Wesleyan University, Bloomington, Ill., I traveled to the Chinese countryside to research environmental conditions as part of an AsiaNetwork grant. We had hoped to talk with average Chinese peasants about agricultural practices and policies, pesticide use, energy resources and general quality of life. But because we traveled under the auspices of Peking University — where we picked up two translators and a PU doctoral student — we were forced into supervised and pre-arranged interviews, in which it was fairly clear we weren’t getting an unbiased response from an average Chinese peasant.

This desire to control the messages we received wasn’t unusual. According to a study by Michigan State University journalism professor Eric Freedman, it may have been motivated by political ego. “[I]n Central Asia, … environmental and environmental health issues are politically sensitive and … authorities at the national, regional and local levels believe ‘negative’ reporting — even if accurate — makes them or their regimes look incompetent, corrupt, ignorant or otherwise deficient in policies, leadership and governing skills,” the report said.

In modern China, agriculture is one of those politically sensitive issues. March 2004 witnessed the banning of “A Survey of Chinese Peasants,” an internationally renowned investigative report that gives first-hand accounts of how peasants in one province endured massive corruption, violence and illegal taxes at the hands of local officials.

When we visited rural China just two months after the book’s publication — and subsequent banishment — we could hardly expect to be inconspicuous. Still, we tried to balance these government-intervention experiences with unscheduled stops along the roadside between official visits. The six of us would split into three pairs of American-Chinese counterparts and set off to find villagers willing to talk.

But we soon discovered our small group was not without political entanglement. My translator, Xiaonan, made no secret of the fact that she was the daughter of a high-level provincial official with whom she spoke on a more-than-daily basis.

In many instances, she often spent more time debating the merits of my questions with me — despite the fact that I asked similar things of all our respondents — than she did actually asking them. Why do you want to ask that? You shouldn’t ask that.

We are taking up too much of his time. She won’t know what you’re talking about.
Other times, she would answer the question herself instead of translating it to the peasant. But why should we ask him if I already know the answer?

For many days, I shrugged off these encounters as cultural misunderstandings. After all, I was inexperienced as to the ways of the Chinese, about agriculture and about conducting bilingual interviews. In the fields of China, Xiaonan was my crutch, my only way of communicating. My only way to survive as a foreigner was the comfort her presence provided her fellow countrymen.

But as the trip wore on, my interviewing experiences with Xiaonan became more and more frustrating, building up to the final straw — when my professor, who spoke Mandarin fluently, caught her out-and-out lying to me about a translation.

Though shocking to me at the time, many say a dependable translator is a “must” on such research trips, implying that Xiaonan’s behavior is not all together atypical.
“When you go abroad to deal with an area that’s sensitive and you’re dealing with a language you don’t speak, it becomes extremely important to develop good rapport with somebody from the country who’s going to be able to aid you — Not like Xiaonan,” Jahiel said.

In sensitive political situations, according to Jahiel, “That’s where it becomes really critical who your interpreter is because of how they choose to ask the question and how they choose to translate the answer back to you.”

AsiaNetwork, the grant provider for this research excursion, sends undergraduate students to Asia for short-term research projects every summer. Teodora Amaloza, the organization’s executive director, said, “The basic challenge is language, the ability to communicate with local people. Another challenge is knowing the culture. No matter what the students study, it’s hard to learn the nuances until you’re there. Students should be prepared for the unexpected.

“If you’re dependent on a translator with a certain political agenda, it’s going to be more difficult,” she continued. “It’s hard to get them off the script.”

But even without overt government intervention and translators gone bad, environmental journalism and research in China and countries like it would still be difficult.

“China, of course, is a tightly controlled society where it can be hazardous for people to talk to the media, especially foreign media,” said Rob Taylor from the science and environmental program at the International Center for Journalists in Washington, D.C.

When my research team stumbled upon a small community on the outskirts of Anhui Province — the province of focus in the recently banned book — villagers were clearly less willing to speak with us than in any other place we had visited.

One woman told us she was deaf, and therefore unable to help us. Jahiel, who had a more difficult time understanding the dialect in this southeastern area of the country, asked, “Did she say she was deaf?”

Before either translator could answer, I heard the woman say clearly, “Dui” — “Yes,” in Chinese, from a deaf woman a good 10 feet away.

According to Freedman’s study, “ordinary people” like this woman are hesitant to speak openly with media.

Three-quarters of the unnamed sources studied in his research were from Central Asian government officials and “ordinary” people: “That suggests they were more fearful of retribution or sanctions if they were quoted by name than were academics, NGO representatives or foreign government officials,” the report said.

Mark Hertsgaard, an independent journalist and author who has conducted environmental research and journalism throughout the world, says our experience in China was not surprising.

“It’s true that China has opened up somewhat in recent years as far as individual rights, but when it comes to any statement that could be construed as criticism of the Party or government, the average Chinese person is still reticent and for very good reason,” Hertsgaard said. “For all its friendly neighbor PR rhetoric to the outside world, China remains a one-party police state whose security apparatus and local cadre think nothing of smashing any individual who threatens them.”

But all is not without hope. Hertsgaard offers suggestions for journalists — who usually do not have the resources needed for ethnographic research common in the social sciences — traveling in short stints to countries with tight political apparatuses and foreign languages.

“I found it is possible to get around this obstacle, with a little ingenuity, secrecy and an intrepid interpreter as partner,” Hertsgaard said. (see sidebar)