The details of the almost two-decade-old case are sordid and murky. In 1995, Zhu Ling was a promising undergraduate at Beijing’s elite Tsinghua University when she came down with a mysterious illness that was thought to be poisoning via thallium, a toxic element once used asrat poison. This finding soon led to a suspect: Sun Wei, a roommate of Zhu’s who happened to be one of the few undergraduates at Tsinghua to have access to thallium in a laboratory.

Most important for the politically minded Chinese netizen, Sun Wei was the granddaughter of a high-ranking official who was thought to be close to then-President Jiang Zemin. In 1997, Sun was detained by police for questioning for eight hours but not arrested. Soon after, the case was closed, and Sun reportedly fled to the U.S., where it’s rumored she’s married with kids (enterprising microbloggers have tried to keep tabs).

[...] Among the earliest actions was a highly unusual censorship decision directed at People’s Daily, the official mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party. On April 26, the paper’s official Sina Weibo microblogging account tweeted, as translated by the blog Offbeat China: “Zhu Ling is 40 years old now, completely paralyzed, almost blind and with the intelligence of a 6-year- old. What exactly happened 19 years ago? Who was behind the poisoning?”

[...] Then the tweet was deleted by Sina’s censors, along with tweets that quoted it, posted screen grabs or reposted it outright. About the same time, People’s Daily deleted its special online page devoted to Zhu Ling coverage. So, either People’s Daily or somebody above it decided that the paper didn’t need to devote any additional coverage to an issue that was becoming increasingly critical of the party.

Some netizens even set up an online petition on the White House’s official ‘We the People’ platform, asking Obama to deport Sun Wei. From David Bandurski at China Media Project:

The petition for the deportation of Sun Wei received more than 107,000 signatures by 8:30pm today. According to the terms and conditions of the service, the petition has now reached the required “signature threshold” (100,000 signatures within 30 days) and should receive a response from the White House.

[...] Users have predictably made light of the fact that Chinese have turned to an American petition site seeking justice that, some say, is impossible at home.

[...] Zhang Xian (张弦), a media professional in Hefei with more than 153,000 followers, wrote on Sina Weibo: “Hello, Comrade Obama, chairman of the National Office of Letters and Calls! Requests on the Zhu Ling case have already reached 100,000. We hope Chairman Obama answers the Chinese people for the sake of the autonomy of the Chinese people!”

CN ppl set up a new Weibo account for Obama: the officer of Central petitions office. Trending. twitter.com/MissXQ/status/…

— XQ (@MissXQ) May 8, 2013

The petitioning caught on. Besides the Zhu Ling case, netizens have also asked Obama to encourage the suspension of a PX Project near Kunming, Yunnan Province, which was the target of local protests last Saturday. More radical petitioners called for the US to “send troops to liberate Hong Kong“, while others hoped that it “will tofu curd official taste is sweet,namely the use of granulated sugar,brown sugar and other sweet condiments.”

The more serious White House petitions are just the latest efforts to turn to foreign authorities and news media as a last resort. From Yang Yingjie at Global Times:

Yuan Yulai, a Ningbo-based lawyer and active microblogger on Sina Weibo, told the Global Times Tuesday that the petitions to the White House were regarded the last straw when seeking justice after frustrations over official probes and assessments.

[…] Meanwhile, some petitioners unsatisfied with the way the authorities have dealt with their grievances also turn to UN missions and foreign embassies as well as overseas media.

[…] Yuan noted the move was aimed at pressuring the authorities at home in the hope the government could direct attention to their grievances and devote itself to providing remedies to their problems.

However, Zhang Yiwu, a professor of Chinese literature with Peking University, disagreed, calling it “irrational and more of a way to vent people’s frustrations than offering any practical help.”

[…] Last year, a petitioner surnamed Peng from Sichuan Province was sentenced to 18 months of re-education through labor punishment for appealing directly to a foreign embassy in China.

At Tea Leaf Nation, David Wertime recalled the trend’s online predecessors:

In early February of 2012, when China’s so-called Great Firewall of censorship temporarily lifted its block on Google Plus, Chinese Web users took advantage of the brief reprieve to flood President Obama’s re-election page with comments. More recently, in mid-March of this year, a well-known provocateur tweeted the results of an imaginary election on Sina Weibo, a micro-blogging service. Hundreds of users replied in surprisingly serious tones, with one estimating that true elections would not be held until 2033, another saying it would be “a thousand years” hence. That provocateur’s tweet, and the comments to it, were deleted in less than 24 hours.

One cannot interpret these instantiated movements as representing China writ large. Given the massive size of China’s social Web, even a tiny but determined minority can quickly make its presence felt on the American Internet. Even within these comparatively small groups, motivations vary; some White House petitioners wrote in rage, others in jest.

Nonetheless, it’s a valuable reminder of American soft power in the digital age. In China, the Letters and Visits Office is charged with accepting petitions from aggrieved citizens. But often, thugs known as “jiefang” intercept would-be petitioners from outside of Beijing, sometimes before they can even board a train headed for the capital. The contrast with the White House’s approach is jarring. As one Weibo user commented, “Going to the gates of the White House to petition may or may not be useful, but I know that going there to petition won’t get you in trouble.” Another wrote, “Too funny; but after I laughed, I felt like I’d never be able to slake my thirst.”

See also Ministry of Truth: White House Petition Goes Viral at CDT. Samuel Wade contributed to this post.

© Mengyu Dong for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Barack Obama, corruption, judicial corruption, online petition, online public opinion, petitioners, weibo, White House, Zhu Ling
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“The law is the first in China that defines the concept, the standard and the procedure of ‘involuntary medical treatment’ in an effort to prevent healthy and innocent people from being wrongly diagnosed as ‘insane’ and placed against their will in a mental hospital,” Zhou Zijun, a professor with Peking University’s School of Public Health, told the Global Times.

The law has attracted a lot of attention since its draft was submitted for discussion last year. Although there are no official records on the number of people wrongly institutionalized, Xinhua has reported that such cases have increased over the past few years.

[…] According to the law, the decision whether to admit a patient in a mental hospital should be based on a diagnosis made by licensed psychiatrists rather than law enforcement departments. The diagnosis must be verified by two independent professionals should the family of the patient demand a re-evaluation.

[…] But some feel it does not go far enough. “This newly released law is only a general guideline and does not answer detailed questions such as how to determine the consent of a potentially mentally ill person,” said Zhang Xinkai, a senior psychiatrist from the Shanghai Mental Health Center.

BBC Monitoring rounded up more Chinese media commentary on the new law:

Southern Metropolis Daily questions the impact of the law, saying it gives the guardian too much power. As a result, it will not protect people from being sent for treatment forcibly.

It is yet to be seen whether the law will terminate the practice of “being mentally ill-ed”, the paper says.

“Being mentally ill-ed”, a buzzword in today’s papers, is a situation where a mentally sound person is pronounced ill by others, quite often by family members over personal grudges, and forced to stay in hospital.

[…] The website of China National Radio carries an article titled “Expert elaborates on how to avoid being mentally ill-ed”.

(Perry Link and CDT founder Xiao Qiang explained this “involuntary passive” idiom in a Wall Street Journal op-ed in January.)

At China Law & Policy in December (via CDT), Elizabeth M. Lynch pointed out other shortcomings in the new law besides the remaining potential for abuse:

In reality, the Mental Health Law does little to foster an environment where those with mental illness can lead an independent life and be accepted by society. Furthermore, although the law discusses the very real (and dire) need to increase the number of mental health professionals in China, that has remained aspirational. As of yet, the Chinese government has remained silent on how much money and what incentives it will provide to achieve that goal. Providing adequate and sufficient medical assistance for those suffering from mental illness is just as important to making sure that those individuals will be able to lead a full life.

Estimates of the rate of genuine mental illness in China range from 8% to 17.5% of the population.

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Post tags: healthcare, illegal detentions, laws, mental health, mental hospitals, mental illness, petitioners, public health
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Tang said she went to search for her daughter herself after police efforts failed. Nearly three months later, she spotted the underground brothel where her daughter was held. But when she called one district police officer, he declined to help. Tang eventually called the emergency number 110 several times, and police responders helped her save her daughter. When she asked that the kidnappers be arrested, the local police office did not immediately file the case or conduct further investigations.

That is how Tang began a long process of petitioning for justice, first at the provincial level, then in Beijing. Slowly, local authorities started to act. In June last year, her daughter’s two main kidnappers were sentenced to death, four accomplices received life sentences and one was jailed for 15 years.

But Tang wants more.

[…] The determined Tang continues to campaign for death sentences for the other five kidnappers despite her spell in a labour camp. Tang was sentenced to 18 months of re-education at the Zhuzhou Baimalong labour camp, about two hours by bus north of her hometown. The reason given was that her protests “seriously disturbed the social order and exerted a negative impact on society”, Xinhua reported.

Tang’s case has become a symbol of growing opposition to reeducation through labor, but law professor Wang Lin argued at Oriental Morning News earlier this month that abolishing the system would not dig out the underlying problem. From a translation at Dui Hua Foundation’s Human Rights Journal:

With the Tang Hui and Zhao Meifu [another "petitioning mother"] cases as points of departure, attention to the reform or even abolition of the RTL system is a natural public reaction. But hidden in the background of these two cases is not simply a debate over the legality of the RTL system, but [a need to] rethink the relationship between petitioning and the judicial system. Why were the “petitioning mothers” sent to RTL? Because of their “petitioning.” Why did they “trust the petitioning system rather than the judicial system”? Because they believed that they had already exhausted all channels for a judicial remedy and felt that they were unable to defend their rights effectively. So, they tied their hopes to the petitioner’s path.

[…] Resolving this difficult situation rests on rebuilding the relationship between the judiciary and petitioning and making it ordinary for parties’ lawful rights and interests to be protected within legal channels. It is essential to let judicial independence pave the way for judicial fairness. Only by protecting citizens’ lawful rights and interests can we ensure the stability of localities and rights; this is an undisputable truth.

The Dui Hua Foundation also highlights a near mirror-image of Tang Hui’s case, in which parents’ petitioning seems to have secured a death sentence for the man accused of their daughter’s rape and murder. This too reveals a serious dysfunction in the judicial process, according to Geng Shuang at Southern Metropolis Daily, translated at Dui Hua:

[…] No matter what explanation is given by the court involved, the answer is all too clear: this is a guarantee against petitioning demanded by the court of the victim’s relatives. What sort of mindset did the court have in demanding that the victim’s relatives make this kind of guarantee? Actually, the court is truly helpless, because if it doesn’t prevent victims’ families from petitioning, court officials will have a hard time keeping their jobs.

In this case, the court has been kidnapped—and, at a deeper level, that means the judicial system has been kidnapped—by the petitioning system. And once the judicial system has been kidnapped, the natural balance of the law inevitably becomes imbalanced. In this case, specifically, this sort of kidnapping resulted in two clear errors by the Pingdingshan intermediate court [….]

[…] In fact, more than two months after the relative signed the letter of guarantee, the Pingdingshan Intermediate People’s Court did, in fact, sentence the suspect to death. Considering that a higher court subsequently annulled the death sentence based on insufficient evidence, it is clear that the death sentence in this case was imposed without enough evidence and that the primary factor of consideration at the time of sentencing was not only “taking facts as the basis and the law as criterion” but, rather, preventing the victim’s relatives from further petitioning.

Geng notes that the accused has now been imprisoned for nearly 11 years despite the flimsiness of the case against him, and that “the moment he is acquitted, huge amounts of state compensation will be involved, and this case could become the ‘sequel to the Zhao Zuohai case.’” Zhao served 11 years in prison for the murder of a man later found alive, and said that he had been tortured into making a false confession. He received compensation of 650,000 yuan in 2010 (almost US$100,000).

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Post tags: justice, legal system, petitioners, rape, re-education through labor, Tang Hui
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Petitioner Hu Cheng from Chongqing has bought the phone numbers of several Beijing-based foreign news organizations, at 100 yuan each. He calls them repeatedly.

He tells them how he was locked up by the police while petitioning and they broke his legs. He cries on the phone while telling the story. Chinese news assistants answer the phone. They listen, and show sympathy, but seem to have no interest in publishing his story.

[…] “When those petitioners feel that they can’t have their voices heard by the authorities and the chance of solving problems is small, foreign media seems to be their last hope,” Jin Yong, deputy professor of China Communication University, told the Global Times.

[…] Zhang Chi, producer of VRT, the Belgian Dutch language public broadcaster, […] said blind barefoot lawyer Chen Guangcheng and artist Ai Weiwei are among the few people who have their voices heard through intense international news coverage and benefited from it.

See more on petitioners via CDT, including the sympathetic perspective of a former interceptor who was employed to stop them.

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Post tags: Ai Weiwei, Chen Guangcheng, foreign correspondents, news media, petitioners
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In the beginning, Wang was satisfied with his work. “It was relaxed and I had some freedom,” he said. […] Often he felt honored for “being of service to the government.”

“Leaders,” the local governments’ Beijing staffers, explained to him that it was only proper that these Beijing-bound petitioners, who were either bypassing the official system or making illegal petitions, be sent home.

But as he had more contact with the petitioners, Wang’s views changed. “Over 70 percent of them just had grievances to make,” Wang said.

[…] On March 8, Wang left Beijing with the last of his pay in hand. That was a busy day for Wang’s colleagues because it was the start of the annual National People’s Congress. Thousands of black guards were sitting on folding chairs along a street, patiently watching for petitioners. On the streets of the capital, the cat-and-mouse game between petitioners and black guards continued to play out.

See also an Economic Observer profile of two other Beijing-based interceptors; a recent Economist report on the capital’s detention centers and black jails; an overview of China’s stability maintenance machinery from the Dui Hua Foundation; and scholar Yu Jianrong’s critique of the government’s fixation on ‘rigid stability’, via CDT. In February, a Beijing court sentenced ten people to prison sentences for illegally detaining petitioners, but whether this was a sign of broader change remains unclear.

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Post tags: Beijing, local government, National People's Congress, petitioners, stability maintenance, stability preservation
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The recent Spring Festival holiday was the gloomiest ever for 70-year-old Yuzhou villager Wang Yuzhu. At a time when most Chinese return home for family reunions, his son, Wang Gaowei, was sent to jail by the Chaoyang district court on February 5, just five days before the start of Spring Festival.

Song Xuefang said she appeared at Wang’s trial last November, and “remembers clearly Wang admitted to the judge that a man named Bai Zhongxing hired him.”

This matches Wang’s father’s words, who recalled his son was hired by a man surnamed Bai. Bai Zhongxing, the official from Yuzhou Bureau of Letters and Calls who hired Wang Gaowei, is a well-known figure to Yuzhou petitioners as many of them know of Bai’s connections to the black jail.

That liaison officials and local letters and calls bureaus are profiting through illegal detention centers has become an open secret now. According to Yu Jianrong, a professor at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, there are two major modes of cooperation between letters and calls bureaus and black jails.

Read more about black jails, via CDT.

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Post tags: black jails, illegal dententions, petitioners
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Wang Gaowei and his other nine accomplices, natives of Yuzhou City in central China’s Henan Province, imprisoned the 10 petitioners, also from Henan, in April 2012.

They were falsely imprisoned at two courtyards in Wangsiying Township in Beijing’s Chaoyang District for several days, according to the Beijing Chaoyang District People’s Court.

The court ruled that Wang and the other nine respondents had infringed the personal rights of the 10 petitioners, which constituted the crime of false imprisonment.

The case had previously surfaced in December, when premature reports of the sentences appeared in state media but were quickly dismissed as “fake news” by the court. Its resolution revives hopes that change may be afoot for the petitioners who flock to Beijing to air their grievances, but promising signs in the past have not brought an end to the illegal detentions, and uncertainty remains. From Josh Chin at China Real Time Report:

“If it’s the start of a sincere effort to curb the use of black jails and punish those involved, it’s quite significant,” said Joshua Rosenzweig, a human rights researcher at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. “But I’d be reluctant to draw too many conclusions from just one case when it’s a problem that’s been so widespread for so many years.”

Nicholas Bequelin, senior Asia researcher for Human Rights Watch, described the court’s decision as one of a several signals the city has recently sent to local governments on the petitioner question. “Beijing’s message to the local officials has been: one, we don’t want your petitioners in Beijing, but two, we don’t want to know how you do that, and three, if something goes awry we won’t necessarily cover up for you,” said Mr. Bequelin.

See also a sympathetic Economic Observer profile of two Beijing-based interceptors and Yu Jianrong’s recent critique of the “rigid stability” machinery of which they are a part, via CDT.

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Post tags: Beijing, black jails, Henan, human rights watch, illegal detentions, petitioners
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Why does it seem like censorship is getting worse?

You are correct. Over the past decade, the rapid development of the Internet has led people to believe there will be more space for speech. But the constraints [on the press] have actually gotten tighter. Fortunately, journalists are resisting. Otherwise, it would be worse. Now, the government’s domestic strategy is to maintain stability. Hu Jintao once said China should learn from North Korea, and sent people to investigate the Eastern European system. Although this trend began in the Jiang Zemin era, the Hu and Wen administration furthered it, regardless of the cost. For example, they bought the most advanced Internet surveillance technology, say, from CISCO. Internet companies like Sina and Tencent have struck a deal with the authorities—or you might call it collusion. In order to secure their business interests, they spend huge amounts monitoring social media. The […] space society has carved out for free expression is being constricted. Moreover, the “stability maintenance” system is making social management crueler. For example, the way law enforcement handles petitioners and property demolition is becoming ever more gangster-like. Although the media tries to fight, it can’t be a counterweight to the giant “stability maintenance” machine.

[…] Do you think new media, such as social media, can further China’s freedom of speech?

New media by itself is a tool. What is more important is how it is used. The government definitely wants to use it to control and steer public opinion. And, indeed, they are spending hugely on it. People in society hope social media will expand the space for expression. It’s not clear how things will turn out. New media might become society’s tool if society uses it more aggressively. For instance, in the current Southern Weekend and Yanhuang Chunqiu cases, new media played an important role. Without new media, it would have been unimaginable for the propaganda department’s work to have been exposed.

See also Yu Jianrong’s recent critique of China’s rigid “stability maintenance” system via CDT.

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Post tags: Chang Ping, cisco, freedom of information, freedom of speech, Hu Jintao, Internet surveillance, journalists, media censorship, news media, petitioners, reform, sina, social media, Southern Weekly, southern weekly protest 2013, stability maintenance, tencent, Xi Jinping, Yanhuang Chunqiu
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The use of the controversial laojiao system will be tightly restricted, with lawmakers expected to approve its abolition this year, a top government legal adviser has confirmed.

Chen Jiping, deputy director of the China Law Society, said the changes to laojiao, or re-education through labor, announced at the national political and legal work conference on Jan 7, are imminent.

As part of discussions with legal experts from law societies nationwide about the major tasks, he said the closed-door conference had committed to reducing the use of the controversial punishment this year until the National People’s Congress, the top legislature, can entirely scrap the system.

AFP has more background on the system and recent public anger over its implementation:

It is another signal that the widely criticised system – where people can be sentenced to up to four years’ re-education by a police panel, without an open trial – is coming to an end.

The comments come after the Communist Party’s newly installed leader Xi Jinping said the organisation recognised as a “pressing problem” that it was “out of touch with the people”.

Opponents say the camps are used to silence government critics and would-be petitioners who seek to bring their complaints against officials to higher authorities.

Earlier this month reports emerged briefly that the system – known as laojiao – would be abolished, but they were swiftly deleted and replaced with predictions of reforms, with few details and no timetable.

Because of its use against dissidents and petitioners, human rights activists have expressed concern that the government has not yet explained if another form of “administrative detention” will replace laojiao. From a statement from Human Rights Watch:

Public outrage over RTL cases has grown in recent months, particularly about RTL punishments given to individuals who complain about the government and who express their opinions online, including Tang Hui, a mother sent to RTL in 2012 for complaining to the government about the rape of her young daughter. In 2012, a senior official responsible for judicial system reforms acknowledged that there was “consensus” for “reforming the RTL system.” Other recent government decisions, such as removing the head of the Ministry of Public Security as a permanent member of the Standing Committee of the Politburo in 2012, may also reflect central government awareness of public anger over the impunity enjoyed by the domestic security apparatus.

Over the summer of 2012, authorities announced a pilot scheme in four cities to test out reforms to the system. Little is known about these “reforms” except that the name of the system has been changed to “Education and Correction.” It is therefore unclear, after the government “stops using” the system, whether it will be reformed, abolished, or replaced by another administrative detention system with a different name.

Read more background about the re-education through labor system and recent cases that have generated public outrage, via CDT.

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Post tags: criminal rights, detention, dissidents, legal reform, petitioners, re-education through labor
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“Intercepting petitioners” refers to local officials using various measures to intercept people attempting to petition at the [provincial] or central offices and forcibly taking them back to their hometowns. In China’s current political climate, the intercepting of petitioners has long been an open secret, an “unwritten rule” of petition office stability management work, an uncivilized but tacitly accepted rule for government work, and an important part of the job of those who “greet petitioners.” Whenever the two congresses or National Day or some other “sensitive” time rolls around, many additional ‘petitioner interception’ workers come to Beijing to intercept petitioners from their local area to prevent petitioners from staying in Beijing and increasing the number of complaints about their locale on the record.

[…] Meeting petitioners’ and ‘intercepting petitioners’ are both important reflections of the variation in today’s national petitioning system. Petition officers and officials, local governments, and the central government all participate, using the system as a platform for a kind of game in which they attempt to maximize their own interests. But because of this they have fallen into problems [like the three Yu just listed and those below], this can be called the ‘petitioning paradox.’

[…] The result is that as local governments use even more severe methods to deal with petitioners, the complaints of petitioners become more extreme, creating a vicious cycle.Because of this, the petitioning system has gone from useless to harmful; from reducing pressure to actively increasing it.

Yu was ranked 54th in Foreign Policy magazine’s 100 Top Global Thinkers of 2012 for his ten-year plan for political reform in China.

Ten interceptors were said to have been jailed by a Beijing court early this month for illegally detaining petitioners. The court dismissed this as “fake news”, however, and demanded an apology from Beijing Youth Daily, which first published the story. Petitioners were a key target of the security operation surrounding the recent 18th Party Congress, with some 10,000 detained. Read more about petitioners via CDT, including John Garnaut and Sanghee Liu’s recent account of a former “stability preservation” official’s experience as a petitioner, and Economic Observer’s sympathetic profile of two Beijing-based interceptors.

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Post tags: Beijing, black jails, Charlie Custer, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, local government, National Day, petitioners, petitions, stability maintenance, stability preservation, Yu Jianrong
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Those convicted were hired by authorities from Changge city in central Henan province to stop petitioners airing their grievances in Beijing, the People’s Daily said on its website, citing a Beijing newspaper.

They held them in rented houses in a Beijing suburb where the petitioners said they were beaten, the report said.

The men wore badges identifying them as employees of the Beijing representative office of the Changge government, it added.

Petitioning officials has deep roots in China, where courts are seen as beyond the reach of ordinary people, who often try to take local disputes ranging from land grabs to corruption to higher levels in the country’s capital Beijing.

Although this sentencing would be a rare judiciary handling of interceptors, the report could not be confirmed, from AP:

Beijing’s Chaoyang District Court sentenced one defendant to a year and a half in prison on Nov. 28 and gave months-long sentences to nine others, according to state media reports. The plaintiffs were not identified and calls to the court rang unanswered.

The report could not immediately be confirmed and it wasn’t clear when the sentences were handed down. The official China Daily newspaper briefly ran a story on its website saying the sentences had not yet been handed down, but later removed the report.

The official Guangmingwang website said the men had detained a number of people from central Henan province who had traveled to the capital hoping to have their complaints settled by the central government. Such petitioners are frequently intercepted by local government agents and detained illegally in shabby hostels commonly known as “black jails.”

The government has recently begun acknowledging the existence of black jails as part of modest attempts to stamp out the most glaring abuses of power, but has met with only middling success. A central government order to close representative offices maintained in Beijing by local governments for the purpose of blocking complaints and lobbying for projects and funding has been mostly ignored.

According to the Global Times, the report circulated about the sentencing was fake:

A Beijing court Sunday denied a report that 10 people who had intercepted and detained petitioners coming to Beijing were sentenced for illegal detention on November 28.

“The court did not pass sentence on a case like that on that day and we are investigating to what extent the story was untrue,” said Huang Shuo, spokesman for Beijing’s Chaoyang District People’s Court, telling the Global Times that the widely circulated report was fake.

A report by Beijing Youth Daily said that 10 suspects, including three minors, from Changge, Central China’s Henan Province, had detained a number of petitioners travelling from Henan to Beijing to petition higher authorities.

Huang admitted the existence of the case but said a sentence has not yet been passed.

Moreover, the court is asking for an apology from the Beijing Youth Daily, AFP adds:

 A Chinese court has asked for an apology from a newspaper which said it jailed 10 “interceptors” who illegally held petitioners attempting to lodge complaints with the government, state media reported on Sunday.

But a court spokeswoman branded the report, which was carried by most major Chinese news websites and widely spread on Chinese social networking websites, as “fake news”, another state-run newspaper, the China Daily, reported.

The spokeswoman, who was not named, “confirmed a case involving city officials from Henan had been heard”, but “denied judges had handed down any verdict”, the paper said.

Beijing’s Chaoyang District Court, which reportedly handed down the verdict, is “in negotiations with Beijing Youth Daily over the printing of an apology and explanation”, the paper said.

See also Inside China’s ‘Black Jails,’ via CDT.

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Post tags: Beijing youth daily, black jails, illegal detentions, petitioners
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In the past two years, Bai, Xu Weidong and other local farmers have clashed with local officials and refused to pay some fees after they found documents that appear to show the farm has broken both state and local rules in grossly overcharging farmers since 2006. Bai paid the penalty for such defiance last January when her crops were confiscated.

As prices rise, the nearly 1 million farmers within Heilongjiang’s state-run “reclamation region” should be earning healthy profits, but many are exploited by an unfair system, and scrape by on loans, says Li Baihuang, a human rights lawyer. “It’s like a modern form of slavery.”

If they complain, the farm administrative bureau relies on its state-approved control of local police, prosecutors and judges to confiscate crops and property and sentence farmers to “re-education through labor” camps, he says. “China’s laws and regulations are of no use here,” says Li, who has taken the case of 10 farmers, trying to recover their land-use certificates from local authorities, to the State Council, China’s “Cabinet.”

Officials deny farmers’ accusations of corruption. “This farm is all state-owned land, so only we have the right to use it, not individual farmers,” says Zhu He’an, the Qianjin farm director. “Most farmers are happy. Only a handful of people cause chaos, as they don’t pay the administrative fees,” which he says follow national standards.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 18th party congress, illegal fees, land rights, local power, petitioners, rural reform
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A story Monday by the Xinhua news wire reported that a senior security official had recently been “inspecting a security ‘moat’ project created in areas encircling Beijing for the congress’ smooth holding.” There was apparently no water involved, just a lot of police.

The story quoted Zhou Yongkang, a standing committee member who oversees domestic security, as urging authorities in Beijing and surrounding regions to form a “solid defense . . . thus creating a safe, orderly, auspicious and peaceful environment for the successful holding of the 18th National Congress.”

Amnesty International released a statement last week that gave an idea of what that might mean: More than 100 activists have been rounded up so far.

“The police have placed dozens of activists under house arrest, forcibly removed individuals from Beijing and have closed down the offices of community groups in attempts to suppress peaceful dissent,” the group said. “Scores of activists are believed to be held in ‘black jails’ across the country. . . . Hotels, hostels, basements of buildings and farm centers have all been reportedly used as black jails.”

A major thrust of the campaign has been to block petitioners from reaching the capital. The Telegraph’s Tom Phillips visited Lü Number 3 Team Village on the outskirts of Beijing:

Lu is home to around 700 permanent residents, many of whom supplement their incomes by renting shoddily built shacks to aggrieved men and women bound for Beijing to seek assistance from the central government.

“I don’t care who the tenants are, as long as they pay,” said the owner of one of dozens of cramped guesthouses, who rents rooms for 10 yuan (£1) a night or 200 yuan (£20) a month.

But the village’s once-crowded guesthouses stand largely empty this week after police and security forces moved in to weed out potential troublemakers ahead of the highly sensitive leadership transition.

The state media has dubbed the crackdown the “zero petitions” policy. A report in the Global Times newspaper last month claimed”petitioning cases” in Beijing had fallen 12% since August, after 10,000 detentions.

Activists already in Beijing have faced house arrest or strong pressure to leave the city. From Gillian Wong at The Associated Press:

The crackdown has extended to lawyers such as Xu Zhiyong. He said Beijing authorities have held him under informal house arrest since mid-October, stationing four or five guards outside his apartment in Beijing around the clock.

[…] Even dissidents’ relatives have come under pressure. Beijing activist Hu Jia said he was warned by police to leave town, and that even his parents told him that police had told them to escort him to his hometown.

“My parents said to me: ‘Hu Jia, you don’t know what kind of danger you are in, but we know,’” he recounted in a phone interview from his parents’ home in eastern Anhui province. “They said: ‘Beijing is a cruel battlefield. If you stay here, you will be the first to be sacrificed. Don’t do this.’”

Also pressured to leave Beijing was writer Wang Lixiong, whose Tibetan wife Woeser had already left for Lhasa. Wang wrote in a New York Times op-ed, translated by Perry Link:

The Communist Party has, for the sake of its own meeting, asked that my wife leave me and that I leave my elderly mother, who is too old to live without someone to care for her. Incidentally, she joined the Communist Party in 1947 (two years before the founding of the People’s Republic, and a time when joining was still dangerous) and did so in order to oppose the reigning Nationalist government, which she saw as “lacking humanity.”

Now, I want to ask her, “What do you think of the humanity of the Communist Party today?” but cannot bring myself to inflict on her the pain that the question would bring.

I have replied to State Security that a party conclave is no reason to disperse a family. They, in turn, threatened that if I refused to leave, things would become “uncomfortable” for me. They did not say how. I have decided to wait at home and see. What does a party that vows before the entire world that it follows the rule of law have in mind for my discomfort?

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: 18th party congress, activists, Amnesty International, CCP, dissidents, Global Times, house arrest, Hu Jia, perry link, petitioners, security crackdown, stability preservation, Wang Lixiong, Woeser, Xu Zhiyong, Zhou Yongkang
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In July 2011, a Hong Kong newsmagazine published the story of a Chinese vice mayor desperate enough to petition the Chinese central government for justice after his daughter said she was raped by a mining magnate in January 2009. The daughter had initially pursued redress through official channels, responding to the alleged assault with the confidence that came from being raised in a family of senior officials in a country where political power and connections frequently trump all else. But when her rape complaint vanished into the vortex of the city’s opaque and highly politicized legal system, the family found that they had been outplayed.

Unsurprisingly, the story caused a sensation — but it did nothing to change the outcome. And so in September of last year, I received a call from a woman who introduced herself as “Long Meiyi, the daughter of the ‘petitioning mayor.’” In a sign of increasing helplessness, she had decided to reach out to a foreign journalist to publicize her case. Over a series of conversations across many months, the now 22-year-old Long told me the story of how the system stopped working to her advantage.

[…] Long’s ordeal is extraordinary and deeply ironic, in large part because her stepfather was responsible for Liupanshui’s “stability preservation” apparatus. Tian was one of the top officials overseeing the city’s police and courts — as well as the notorious “Letters and Complaints” system, which ostensibly provides an outlet for disgruntled citizens by allowing them to petition the central government but also collects intelligence against them. In China, where there is no independent judicial system, citizens appeal to Beijing in the hope that even if local officials are corrupt, the central government might deliver justice. It’s a slim hope. Most petitioners are physically prevented from reaching the designated offices and have to settle for displaying their documents at prominent locations, in symbolic acts of protest and desperation. Tian’s role was to quiet complaints against the powerful and the state — until the person complaining was his daughter, and he found that the stability-preservation machine that he helped run was more powerful than he was.

The case was previously the subject of a 2011 Caixin op-ed by lawyer Ding Jinkun (via CDT—original now deleted), who concluded:

Local business tycoons are in cahoots with the local authorities to a stupefying degree. The moneyed class is in fact so ingratiated with local government that the wealthy have become the de factor political rulers. What has emerged is a despotism where citizens are sacrificed on the altar of the powerful, where legal rulings are constantly harming the people they are meant to help. Citizens looking to protect their rights will simply never win versus officials or versus the rich. Their only choice is to perish together, pitiable and powerless.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Guizhou, judiciary, legal system, local officials, petitioners, rape, stability preservation
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Mr. Zhou, 47 years old, lives under the Sandong Bridge in Chongqing. He does not think there is much worth complaining under such living conditions. “We suffered from wage arrears before, but this is no longer a problem now,” He smiled,“We get 20 kuai (yuan) every day for meals and there’s always meat.” He is pretty content with things as they are now ….

There’re 3 arches of 100 square meters and they hold sometimes more than 40 people. They’ve installed lights, water, and the public toilettes and bath houses pitched with canvas. Crude and simple, people respect each other. Men have a drink together after work while women chitchat about the day.

Some workers live on the site because they have to keep an eye on the heavy equipment, while other workers live usually under the bridges. “It’s not cold during the winter, but it’s really hash when it’s summer”, explained Li Mei, “Yes, it’s not as good as being at home, but since we are all from the rural areas, we’ve been through tougher days. Some dwellings back at home are even worse than this. Anyway, we didn’t hear much complaint around.”

A set of pictures taken by Sim Chi Yin in Beijing last year shows the bleak situation of another group of city outsiders: petitioners living on the streets or in shacks, sometimes for years, while trying to present their grievances to the central government. From VII Photo, via Kathleen McLaughlin (@kemc):

At one end of the chilly underpass, a young girl wailed. Her father, Liu Guojun, limped over as quickly as he could with a bowl of sweet potatoes he had picked up at a wholesale market’s rubbish heap and roasted over a street-side stove. He hoped it would get her warm.

With his mentally ill wife and three young children in tow, the 47-year-old electrician spent weeks under a bridge near Beijing’s Southern Railway Station at the start of this year (2011), trying to ward off winter with a few blankets, canvas sheets and cardboard.

They have a home in China’s central Henan province — over ten hours’ train ride from Beijing — but were forced to sleep rough in the capital in order to right what they see as a terrible wrong.

See more via CDT on the hardships facing migrants, the violence facing petitioners, and the hukou registration system excluding both groups from urban society.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: homeless, hukou, migrant housing, migrant workers, petitioners, photos
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