China Digital Times

China news tagged with: petitioners (77)

• In China, a New Breed of Dissidents

  

  Loretta Chao of the Wall Street Journal reports on today’s petitioners in China:

  The 53-year-old mother of two from China’s eastern Jiangsu province appears no different from other park visitors, dressed in a loose shirt for summer and with short hair graying at the temples. But she has an unusual calling in life: She’s a full-time protester.

  [...] Ms. Shen illustrates the changing dynamics of the Chinese protest movement since the military crackdown on protesters in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square 20 years ago, on June 3 and 4, 1989. China’s government, which has defended its response to those protests, has never given a full accounting of the casualties from that crackdown, but hundreds of people are believed to have been killed. Back then, protesters were demanding democracy and denouncing corruption and economic mismanagement. The leaders were student intellectuals — the elite of Chinese society.

  A number of prominent intellectuals are still pushing for broad political reform. But street protests these days are organized mainly by activists like Ms. Shen, who act as champions for workers, farmers and small business owners who have run out of legal options.

  Many activists today aren’t college-educated. Ms. Shen says her education was cut short by the 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution, which closed schools and colleges. Some of the most high-profile demonstrations in recent years were organized by laid-off factory workers, residents of China’s poor countryside, and taxi drivers.

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  • May 29, 2009 8:37 PM

• Speaker Pelosi in China, Emboldens Protesters

  

  AP has the latest on Nancy Pelosi’s visit to China, and petitioners who rallied to greet her in Beijing:

  U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, long a fierce critic of Beijing, toured China’s financial capital on Monday on a visit focused on environmental issues rather than human rights, though her presence emboldened protesters.

  Pelosi took a low-key approach as she prepared for meetings in Beijing just days ahead of the 20th anniversary of the 1989 crackdown on the Tiananmen Square democracy protests.

  [...] Still, the leading Democratic lawmaker’s reputation as a strong human rights defender galvanized petitioners in Beijing, where several hundreds gathered Monday morning near the capital’s South Railway Station to air their grievances. Dozens of police stood guard and most protesters were kept behind police lines.

  While many complaints were about individual cases, photos posted on the Chinese-language Web site Boxun.com, a U.S.-hosted Web site banned in China, showed one group of demonstrators holding up a black-and-white cloth banner that said: “Welcome Pelosi. Pay close attention to human rights. SOS.”

  Speaking to U.S. business figures Monday in Shanghai, Pelosi noted her commitment to human rights issues over the years.

  The following video of the petitioners’ protest is from AP:
  

  » Read more
  • May 25, 2009 10:03 PM

• Dark Documentary on China Underbelly Chills Cannes

  

  A Chinese documentary film, Petition, by Zhao Liang, is premiering at Cannes Film Festival. From France24:

  At a festival chock-full of cinematic violence, a documentary by a young Chinese film-maker brought more darkness to Cannes with a harrowing portrayal of life in Beijing’s underbelly.

  “I’m relating reality as it is in China today,” director Zhao Liang told AFP in an interview.

  His “Petition” documents the plight of China’s judicial “petitioners” — people from across the land who gather in Beijing in the hope of righting legal wrongs suffered back home.

  “These people are sacrificing themselves for China,” said Zhao, whose work is one of 15 feature-length films selected for screening by the festival but showing out-of-competition for the Palme d’Or award.

  “There is a lot of corruption. China’s problem today is that justice is not independent,” he said.

  » Read more
  • May 24, 2009 9:35 PM

• Xu Zhiyong (许志永) : A Petitioner’s Tale

  

  Xu Zhiyong, noted legal scholar and activist, has written a post on the plight of a female petitioner. In his blog entry, he details the hospital’s reception of her after discovering her status as a petitioner, and describes the setbacks and emotional struggles that were later faced. The story is still on-going, and can be followed at his blog. The following comes from his entry dated April 30th, translated by CDT. The post was censored on May 2nd. [Photo of Xu Zhiyong via Un oeil sur la Chine]

  Sometime after 7 PM, I received a call on my cell phone from Mr. Qifang Cheng: “Professor Xu, I kept on calling you but there was no response. Around 8, the medicine was stopped for the person who was beaten in the city of Linyi in Shandong Province. She has no money for treatment, and is currently at Tongren Hospital.”

  “How did this happen?”

  “She petitioned, and then was seriously beaten by Linyi officers stationed in Beijing. Though she had lost consciousness, the hospital couldn’t treat her. What can be done about this?”

  I was silent for a moment, and then told him: “Wait for me at the Tongren Hospital entrance between 9 and 9:30.”

  I really didn’t want to cut off my train of thought. These past few days I’d been continuously at work on the series “Beautiful and Good Politics.” My cell phone had originally been off. In half an hour, I hastily made plans to finish an article, and then rushed to KFC to buy a hamburger and get on the subway.

  Mr. Qifang Cheng was already waiting at the hospital entrance, along with the injured’s older sister and mother. At the second floor ER inspection ward was the unconscious woman, lying on her bed. Her neck was supported by a plastic brace. To her side, there was no IV drip.

  晚上七点多刚打开手机就接到盛其芳老人的电话：“许教授，一直打不通你的电话，山东临沂被打的那个人八点多就被停药了，没钱治病，在同仁医院。”

  “怎么回事？”

  “她上访，被临沂驻京办的打成重伤。昏迷，可医院不给治了，怎么办啊。”

  我沉默了一会，告诉他：“九点到九点半之间，同仁医院门口等我。”

  我真的不想被打断思路，这些天一直在写《美好政治》系列。我的手机本来是一直关着的。半个小时草草整理完一篇计划要完成的文章，冲到肯德基买一个汉堡，上地铁。

  盛其芳老人已经在医院门口等了，还有受伤者的姐姐和母亲。急诊室二层观察病房，一位女士昏迷在病床上，脖子被塑料架子固定，旁边没有吊瓶。

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  • May 2, 2009 11:45 AM

• Video: China’s ‘Black Jails’ Uncovered

  

  Melissa Chan of Al Jazeera reports on black jails, or secret jails, in Beijing:

  Wang Songlian, the research director of China Human Rights Defenders, told Al Jazeera that some facilities in Beijing functioned as centralised black jails and were used to house petitioners caught by Beijing police.

  “Officials or staff in these centralised black jails would register the petitioners and then send them to the appropriate black jails organised by local authorities,” she said.

  “So this is actually quite an organised and systematic system in which petitioners are sent from one black jail to another in order to punish them for bringing their complaints.”

  Read more on ‘black jails’ here.

  » Read more
  • April 27, 2009 8:01 PM

• “Crazy” Petitioners and a Broken System

  

  China Elections and Governance website has two articles about the petitioning system, in response to the prtests over Professor Sun Dongdong’s controversial comments. From the first, titled “‘Crazy’ Petitioners and a Broken System“:

  It is not hard to see then why the comment made by Professor Sun Dongdong resulted in such a backlash. While China has been moving towards better accountability in its government and promoting its petitioning system, the lack of control over local officials has been a hindrance to the process. Their use of “black prisons” for petitioners is illegal and stifles the process to a great degree. Lack of investigation or recognition into these institutions has plagued the petitioning system.

  The comments by Sun are just another reason for unrest over the issue. While he has issued a formal apology, stating that he meant 99% of protesters he had actually met, and that mental illness is a lot broader than most people realize, the protesters are still not pleased. He also stated that he hoped the petitioners would be able to go through legal channels to solve their issues. Some students at Peking University have called for his resignation, and a group of petitioners in Shanghai are filing a defamation suit. It is sure that the unrest may be directed at Sun because he is an easier target than the officials who are targeting them. Although the petition system may not be done away with as it has been a part of Chinese society for so long, the continual unrest and attention to the problems of the corruption that go along with it may lead to modifications for a more efficient and just system.

  See also an article by Yu Jianrong, a professor and director of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences’ Rural Development Research Institute’s Social Issues Research Center, called “The ‘petitioners’ dilemma’ and the way out,” translated by China Elections and Governance.

  » Read more
  • April 23, 2009 12:47 PM

• Professor Sun Dongdong’s (孙东东) Comments on Mental Illness Draw Ire in China (Updated with Videos)

  

  Peking University Professor Sun Dongdong’s (孙东东) comments that 99% of China’s petitioners are mentally ill have drawn criticism. From Sky Canaves of the Wall Street Journal’s China Journal:

  Sun Dongdong, head of the university’s forensics department, told China Newsweek magazine (no relation to the American publication) that he thinks at least 99% of China’s petitioners are mentally ill, even if the vast majority of them do not show symptoms. He also expressed support for the forced hospitalizations of mentally ill petitioners.

  “When [a petitioner] insists on his particular point of view, that point of view is a symptom of paranoia,” he said, according to the report (in Chinese).

  “Hospitalization of [a mentally ill person] is the greatest safeguard,” he said. “He’s a danger to society and also a danger to himself. We must bring such a person in for treatment and speed up his mental recovery. In this way his human rights will be protected.”

  Sun’s comments have found little popular support in China, instead sparking another outcry.

  Update 4/6/2009:
  Since making those comments, Sun has submitted an apology. Part of the written apology, as posted on Sina:

  Some of the content [of what I said in the magazine] was inappropriate, and brought forth controversy and misunderstandings. I deeply regret this. If some of the content hurt some people’s feelings, then I wish to extend my deepest apologies. I also truly hope that they [petitioners] would be able to go through legal channels to solve their issues.
  其中一些内容因我语言表述不当，引起一些争议和误解，对此深表遗憾。如果因这些内容伤害了一些人的感情，在此我诚恳地向他们致以深深的歉意。也衷心的希望他们能够通过法定程序解决自己的问题。

  [This was originally posted on April 4, 2009.]

  Update 2: 4/7/2009 From SCMP (pay site), “Petitioners Decry ‘99pc Mentally Ill’ Remark”:

  Hundreds of mainland petitioners have condemned public claims by a prominent Beijing psychiatrist that “99 per cent of professional petitioners are mentally ill” and demanded he apologise for the remarks.

  By late yesterday, 332 people nationwide, mostly petitioners and some former “patients” of the mainland mental-hospital system, had signed an open letter prepared by mainland-based Civil Rights and Livelihood Watch.

  The letter described the comments by Peking University professor Sun Dongdong as shocking and irresponsible coming from a mental-health professional.

  Protesters met at Peking University’s west gate today to protest Sun’s remarks. Below are photos and YouTube clips of protesters and police from Boxun:

  

  

  

  » Read more
  • April 8, 2009 9:11 AM

• Upset China Petitioners Stage Risky Protests

  

  As discontentment and disillusionment grows, petitioners are taking to dangerous direct protest. From AP, via MSNBC:

  “We are the government’s sacrificial lambs,” said Li, sitting on a bed in a cheap, dorm-style hotel popular with petitioners. “There is a part of society that has gotten rich, but it’s been at our expense. You could say their way to prosperity was paved with people like us.”

  Li Chunxia is six months pregnant but has no job, health care or pension. In the afternoon, she and other petitioners sorted through restaurant garbage looking for salvageable vegetables to cook for dinner.

  For the past three years, she has made repeated trips to Beijing from her home in China’s central Henan province and, like many petitioners, has appealed to dozens of agencies with no result.

  For more on China’s petitioners, see this past CDT post.

  » Read more
  • March 11, 2009 7:48 PM

• Seeking Justice, Chinese Land in Secret Jails

  

  The New York Times reports on the “black jails” where petitioners are held in Beijing:

  This month, Wang Shixiang, a 48-year-old businessman from Heilongjong Province, came to Beijing to agitate for the prosecution of corrupt policemen. Instead, he was seized and confined to a dank room underneath the Juyuan Hotel with 40 other abducted petitioners.

  During his two days in captivity, Mr. Wang said, he was beaten and deprived of food, and then bundled onto an overnight train. Guards who were paid with government money, he said, made sure he arrived at his front door.

  As Beijing hosts 10 days of political pageantry known as the National People’s Congress, tens of thousands of desperate citizens are trying to seek redress by lodging formal complaints at petition offices. A few, when hope is lost, go to extremes, as a couple from the Xinjiang region did last week: they set their car afire on the city’s best-known shopping street, injuring themselves critically.

  » Read more
  • March 8, 2009 11:32 PM

• Three Set Fire to Themselves Over Lost Home

  

  The family of 3 that set themselves on fire in Beijing’s Wangfujing apparently did so after losing their home. From AP, via MSNBC:

  Three people who set themselves on fire in downtown Beijing came from China’s western region of Xinjiang after their “unreasonable” demands for compensation for a lost home were not met, a governor of the region said.

  Xinjiang Governor Nur Bekri told reporters at a news conference on the sidelines of the annual legislative session in Beijing on Friday the family’s home was destroyed to make way for a school.

  The couple and their son set fire to themselves while inside their car on Feb. 25 at the southern end of the Wangfujing shopping street in central Beijing. The fire sparked alarm because it happened just several blocks from Tiananmen Square.

  For more on petitioners, see this CDT post.

  » Read more
  • March 7, 2009 2:25 PM

• China’s Silenced Citizens

  

  Many Chinese with grievances often have nowhere to turn aside from the Offices of Letters and Visits, which are found at every government level. Their experiences are at the center of this piece from the Financial Times:

  Many petitioners bring relatively minor business disputes that local officials are unable or unwilling to resolve. At the other end of the spectrum are accusations of murder, torture and rape inflicted at the hands of government and police officials. Many profess their devotion to the leaders of the Communist party and say that if only they can get their story heard, the benevolent modern-day emperor will punish their oppressors.

  “I trust in the party and the central government to bring justice to us ordinary people, otherwise I wouldn’t be here,” says Zhao Guang­jun, 43, a villager from Hebei province who is there to complain about local officials whom he claims took peasant farmers’ land and divided it among themselves, then hired gangsters to beat up the farmers when they complained.

  But very few will find any kind of resolution at the petition offices and most will have their lives made much worse. As many as 12.7m petitions were filed in 2005, according to latest government figures, but “some official surveys show that less than 1 per cent of petitioners achieve satisfaction”, says Jerome Cohen, a professor at New York University and expert in Chinese law. “It increases the grievance and frustration because people go from pillar to post without a remedy; everybody tries to transfer responsibility, if they are a government official, from their agency to another.”

  A supplement to this article includes three videos: “The Desperate Discover a System in Crisis,” “Parents Struggle for Justice in Beijing,” and “Personal Stories from Across China.”

  This 2007 France24 video briefly covers the role of the Internet in Chinese petitioning:
  

  » Read more
  • March 7, 2009 1:45 PM

• China Fire Protesters Were Uighurs

  

  Reuters reports that the three people who apparently set themselves on fire on Wangfujing in Beijing were a Uighur family who had come to Beijing to petition lawmakers during next week’s National People’s Congress meetings:

  The family had come to Beijing to petition, apparently related to a dispute over housing, the Beijing-based source with knowledge of the situation said Thursday.

  The husband and wife, aged 59 and 58, were hospitalised with burn injuries, the man’s serious, the Xinhua news agency said late Wednesday without specifying their identities.

  Their son, aged 28, was not injured and is in police custody, the source said.

  See also a China Daily report.

  » Read more
  • February 26, 2009 11:20 AM

• Uighur Petitioner Turned Away in Beijing (with Video)

  

  Hakim Siyit, a Uighur farmer from Kashgar prefecture in China’s far western Xinjiang Autonomous Region, has been petitioning the Chinese government to compensate Kashgar farmers for heavy losses over compulsory production of long beans.  After appealing to various lower levels of government, Siyit traveled to Beijing to file his complaint, where he was briefly detained and then sent home.  Radio Free Asia has details:

  Hakim Siyit, a farmer from Yengisar county, in Xinjiang’s western Kashgar prefecture, blamed the secretary of the communist party’s county branch for the plan’s failure, which called for all farmers in the county to grow the same crop and did not anticipate oversupply.

  According to China’s law on the Popularization of Agricultural Technology, any entity causing loss to farmers through the forced adoption of technology is required to repay total damages.

  [...]“There are few places left that I haven’t been to for this. I went to the Xinjiang regional government in Urumqi five times. I went to Beijing once. To Kashgar, I made 13 or 14 trips in total,” Siyit said.

  

  Hakim Siyit (Photo: RFA)

  The full article includes a film shot by Siyit in his petition efforts, recording Kashgar farmers’ reactions to news that they would be forced to follow the long bean crop plan for a second time.

  » Read more
  • February 1, 2009 4:44 PM

• ‘Locked Up For Complaining In China’

  

  “In China, if you have a complaint about a corrupt official, or if you have been badly treated by the police, it is hard to get your voice heard.” Chris Hogg reports for BBC from Xingtai, Shangdong:

  In Shandong province, a small group of people claim they were locked up in a mental institution against their will after they dared to complain about the way the authorities treated them.
  They now have the satisfaction of knowing their claims are being discussed on internet bulletin boards throughout the country.

  And, unusually, their complaints have surfaced in the state media.

  They were featured in an investigation by a Beijing newspaper into the treatment of “petitioners” - those who travel to the capital to air their grievances and petition the central authorities for their support.

  

  The group, both men and women in their 40s or older, had different motives when they began petitioning, but all now have the same complaint: that they were detained illegally by the local officials they sought to expose.

  They gather in a small insurance office next to a dusty road to tell their stories. Each is taking considerable risk in talking to a foreign journalist. All have been told in the past to “stop making trouble”.

  » Read more
  • December 10, 2008 9:08 AM

• China 2008: Human Rights

  

  This next installment in the CDT series on important issues facing China in 2008 concerns the state of human rights in China.  See also these previous China 2008 articles: China and the Developing World, Nationalism, Internet Culture, and Identity, Environmental Crisis, and The Global Financial Crisis and the Revaluation of the Yuan.
  

  The issue of human rights may be the oldest sore point between the People’s Republic of China and the developed democracies of the world - particularly the United States - as the former aspires to a place of prestige in the international system.  The Chinese government first garnered international outrage for its human rights record with the brutal suppression of the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989.  Since then, scrutiny has been focused on, among other issues, China’s treatment of its ethnic and religious minorities.  However, human rights as a category casts a broad net which also includes freedom of expression, due process, reproductive freedom, and labor rights.

  The hosting of the Olympic Games in Beijing made 2008 a very special year for human rights in China.  One of the hottest questions buzzing around the run-up to the Games was whether Chinese leaders would improve human rights, as per their promise when bidding to host the Olympics in 2001.  Since the closing ceremony, however, several events have surfaced in the media to indicate that old human rights violations are still plaguing the People’s Republic of China.  Below are several cases which have appeared on CDT, from the crackdown in Tibet to lesser-known episodes of religious and political oppression.

  Activism

  In 2008, the Chinese government set for China ambitious goals of social progress, such as democracy by 2020 and battling discrimination against sufferers of AIDS.  Activists continue to be excluded from efforts to meet those goals, as evidenced by the spate of confinements, arrests, and disappearances of democracy, AIDS, and other activists.  An activist campaigning for people with HIV and AIDS was detained and sent out of Beijing as the capital observed World AIDS Day.  The trial and sentencing of democracy activist Hu Jia and the house arrest of his activist wife Zeng Jinyan were perhaps the biggest stories in this vein in 2008.

  The Olympics

  To showcase China’s commitment to free speech, the Chinese government created special ‘protest zones‘ in parks around Beijing where people could apply to protest.  However, of the 77 protest applications filed - most involving property, health care, and labor disputes  74 were voluntarily withdrawn after being “properly addressed by the relevant authorities”, and none were approved.  Petitioners were often followed to Beijing by police from their hometown and forced to go back, or arrested and sentenced to hard labor.

  Black Jails

  Some Chinese citizens who traveled to Beijing for redress of grievances were not so lucky to be escorted back home.  Many petitioners were imprisoned in ‘black jails’ instead, illegal but state-run detention centers for petitioners scattered throughout the capital city.  Human rights groups have suspected the existence of these underground prisoners for some time, but hard evidence came to light in September when Beijing activists mounted rescue operations for petitioners being held in a black jail.  Charged with no crime and held indefinitely in poor conditions, those held in black jails have also been badly beaten.

  Labor

  The global credit crisis has exacerbated the plight of China’s laborers.  The recent wave of labor unrest stems from the chronic injustices of unpaid wages and unemployment benefits, and stolen pensions.  Many Chinese laborers are migrant workers whose legal inability to obtain a hukou, or local registration, consigns them to substandard living conditions and denies them social services such as education for their children.

  Legal Rights

  The right to sue continues to be denied to parents who lost children to melamine-tainted infant formula and to unsafe schools which collapsed in the Sichuan earthquake.  Chinese courts have thus far declined to hear all such cases, lawyers offering legal advice to bereaved families have been intimidated by the state, and parents are both threatened and bribed into silence.

  Police Brutality

  In November, police suppressed a violent riot in the city of Longnan, Gansu province over plans to demolish and move the city center.  Soon after, Chinese netizens reported that the violence had been triggered when police began to beat protesters.  They estimated that over a hundred had been arrested in connection with the riots, many injured and some fatally so.   One netizen also claimed that tens of protesters had been beaten to death.  These posts were soon censored.

  Tibet

  Thousands in Tibet were arrested in a security crackdown after violent riots against government policies broke out in the Tibetan capital of Lhasa on March 14.  Among them was Jigme, a Tibetan monk who while in hiding spoke to foreign media about his two months of abuse in government custody.  Jigme was re-arrested in November at his monastery in Labrang, where he had returned after police assured his family that he would be safe.

  Torture

  Accusations of torture in Chinese prisons have been leveled for years against the PRC.  In early November, Chinese officials appeared before U.N. Committee Against Torture to answer questions about the country’s alleged record of prisoner abuse.  However, while flatly denying allegations of torture, members of the China delegation side-stepped the Committee’s questions about whether or not the government disappeared and abused political dissidents.  After the review, the U.N. Torture Committee released a report which recommended that China “take immediate steps to prevent acts of torture”.  The Chinese government called the committee’s findings ’slanderous’ and ‘prejudiced’.

  Xinjiang

  Religious oppression continues against the largely Muslim Uighur ethnic minority in China’s far northwest province of Xinjiang. After attackers killed over 20 police officers and security guards in Xinjiang during the Olympic Games, Chinese authorities implemented a security crackdown which included religious restrictions on the region’s Muslims, such as preventing mass prayers and the ciriculation of religious material.  During the Muslim holy month of Ramadan in September, women were forced to unveil their faces in public, Uighur restaurants were forced to stay open during the day, and Muslims were discouraged from fasting.  Ethnic Uighur government officials were tested with offers of free lunches at work.

  Later in November, in a more draconian instance of China’s population control policy (also known as the one-child policy), a Uighur woman was held at a hospital in Xinjiang to undergo an abortion against her will, six months into her third pregnancy.  After an unsuccessful escape attempt, she was later released without the abortion due to international pressure on Chinese authorities.

  » Read more
  • December 10, 2008 12:42 AM

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