EXCESSIVE taxes and fees combined with brutal collection methods have led to protest and violence. Forms of resistance fall into two categories, more or less legal efforts to seek redress of grievances, which are examined in Chapter 6, and those clearly illegal, the topic of this chapter. Legal and illegal protest overlapped if only because the rules were ambiguous. Illegal resistance occurred at both the individual and the more serious collective levels. Peasant strategies ranged from evasion of taxes or fees and attempts to delay and postpone payment, to demonstrations, sit-ins, and blockades of roads and railroads, to sacking Party-government compounds, and beating and killing cadres.

Acts of illegal protest and violence, both at the individual and collective levels, have occurred on numerous occasions. By all accounts, they rose in frequency as the 1990s progressed and into the twenty-first century. An author-itative analysis of both urban and rural protest published in 2001 by the Central Committee's Organization Department stated that “frequently hundreds and thousands and even up to ten thousand” have participated, adding: