DONGTAN VILLAGE, China When Yao Lifa and Yan Qingjin journey down the dirt road to this riverside village, they are greeted as conquering heroes. The village committee crowds around, and the village chief hustles in from harvesting his crops. There is even talk that some babies will be named after the pair.

"Victory is inevitable!" Yan shouted to the assembled leaders during a recent trip, sounding like an underground Communist agitator during China's revolution in the 1940s. "Victory belongs to the people!"

Yan, 68, and Yao, 45, have brought a revolution to Dongtan village, in Hubei Province 800 kilometers (500 miles) west of Shanghai. But it is a revolution that has profoundly disturbed China's authorities. Over the last two years, Yao and Yan have helped the hamlet of 1,500 boot out village leaders installed by the township government, hold a new election for village chief, prod the police into investigating shady dealings of former village bosses and start a tax strike that continues to this day. Yan and Yao are foot soldiers in a revolt in the heart of rural China, home to more than 70 percent of China's 1.3 billion people. They are an unlikely pair: Yao, a local legislator, is famed for his fiery temper and barnyard tongue, and Yan is a retired teacher who repeatedly suffered during China's political campaigns. The twosome is part of a new breed of Chinese known as "peasant heroes" who are challenging China's rural authorities to live up to Chinese law, allow farmers to elect village leaders and fight the imposition of rapacious taxes. The village revolts offer important insights about power in today's China. Despite 15 years of allowing China's poorest people to vote for village leaders, the attempt to introduce a measure of democracy remains elusive - blocked by authorities afraid of ceding power to the very people upon whom the Communists relied to carry out their revolution. The conflicts also reveal deep fissures of discontent in China's countryside and the beginnings of activist networks dedicated to challenging the party's eroding authority.

The leaders of China's Communist Party will huddle in Beijing on Nov. 8 for the party's 16th Congress. The event may result in a passing of leadership to a new generation, the most important political transition since the crackdown on pro-democracy protests around Tiananmen Square in 1989. But a month of travel in five Chinese provinces underscored the increasingly strong support - among the most common of China's common people - for broader and more systemic political change than the party is contemplating.

For the farmers and their peasant heroes, the stakes in this battle are high. Yao and Yan are routinely threatened with prosecution. Villagers who dare to challenge local authorities are regularly beaten or jailed, occasionally killed, and most often simply isolated by local authorities.

To be interviewed, Li Yunzhi, a village leader in northern Henan Province, whose election in May as a local legislator in Nanshe village was annulled by a county government, was bundled into a car and driven overnight to Beijing, where he was just a faceless farmer and found it safer to talk. At home, local authorities could prevent him from speaking out. His election was the second the county government had invalidated in less than a year since village leaders protested excessive taxes and years of government corruption. In the earlier case, Kong Bubao, elected chief of Nanshe last year, was not only thrown out of office by the county government; he was thrown in jail with a one-year sentence for "obstructing official business," triggered when more than 1,000 police officers invaded the village in November to put down a tax protest.

China began allowing farmers to vote for village chiefs in the late 1980s. The Ministry of Civil Affairs, which oversees voting, says that 60 to 70 percent of the elections in China's 800,000 villages are successful, "free and fair."

But Yao contends that the reality is different. In a report in August on the 354 villages that belong to Qianjiang city in Hubei, Yao concluded that less than 5 percent of the elections were democratic. He found that the authorities had illegally removed 187 elected village chiefs from their posts and installed handpicked leaders since the previous elections, in September 1999. One village leader, He Xiangui, a 49-year-old former soldier, was booted out of his post several times and won it back several times.

But control has been difficult for the government to achieve. Since the elections were instituted, rural unrest has skyrocketed. Central China has been shaken by a series of farmer rebellions, some of them bloody. The origins of the village revolts are contested. China's old guard has blamed democracy, saying that farmers are too backward to handle the responsibilities of an election. China's Western-leaning reformers have blamed township governments that have squeezed the farmers for more and more taxes.

In the early 1990s, on average, each township government had 30 employees. Now the average is more than 100, according to Chinese researchers. In rural China today, 70 percent of government expenditures are absorbed by personnel costs. For peasants, the explosion in the number of bureaucrats has meant higher taxes. Farmers' incomes have suffered their worst decline since 1978, when China launched economic reforms. That decline is expected to continue. Township factories, an engine for rural growth in the early 1990s, are collapsing across China. The local plants contributed a significant share of township revenue and farmers' income. In addition, crop prices are expected to fall further as China opens its markets to foreign competition under the terms of its accession to the World Trade Organization.

Farmers have been further burdened by the central government's efforts - backed by a 1994 tax reform program - to claim a greater share of the country's tax revenues. That has left townships and counties with less money to pay for schools and health care.

A report in April by the World Bank concluded that China's local fiscal system was "malfunctioning."

Towns and villages have squeezed the peasantry with extra fees and borrowed from banks. Chinese researchers say that 44,000 townships owe a total of $24 billion, or about $500,000 each. The total debt of China's 800,000 villages is believed to be twice as high.

Taxes are at the heart of Dongtan's struggle. The conflict sets the village against the township of Zhugentan, to which the village belongs. In the spring of 2000, township officials started a tax collection campaign. They dispatched teams of officials backed by local toughs - given $4 in cash, a carton of cigarettes, a toothbrush and a towel - to force villagers to pay.

In all, 19 villagers were beaten and locked up in what is known throughout rural China as a "study class."

One of the victims was Zeng Xiangjun. He was incarcerated not because he was a tax deadbeat, local officials admit, but because he was a malcontent. Most recently he had called attention to the village leaders' practice of demanding fees from students, when schooling should be free.

Upon his release, Zeng sought out Yan, the retired teacher.

Yan and Yao wrote a report in October 2000 to the city government, documenting the abuses in the "study class." Zhang Weidong, Qianjiang's party secretary, recommended that officials involved should be "criticized" but not prosecuted. Yao and Yan kept pushing. They discovered flaws in the village's previous election, held Sept. 28, 1999. One man voted 100 times, and candidates were first vetted by the party - violations of central government rules.

For the next year, the village and the township battled. In January 2001, the township agreed to hold a new election but then reversed course and unilaterally appointed a new village committee. Villagers signed petitions and dispatched Yao to Beijing to complain to the National People's Congress.

Yao and Yan continued to agitate among the villagers, holding ad hoc classes on law, citizens' rights and taxes. Undercover police officers recorded their speeches, searching for anti-party statements. "This was a face-to-face struggle," Yan recalled. "It was a hell of a fight. They had cars and mobile phones. We had the law."

The pressure paid off. On April 6, 2001, Dongtan held its first free vote. And the winner was Zeng Xiangjun, the farmer who had been incarcerated for complaining about the school fees.