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.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Beijing, local government, National People's Congress, petitioners, stability maintenance, stability preservation
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Abstract: China’s particular form of social stability is one of ‘rigid stability’ that is intimately connected with its authoritarian regime. This form of ‘rigid stability’ is maintained via a mechanism of ‘stability preservation through pressure’. In practice, ‘stability preservation through pressure’ is confronted by many challenges, including intensified conflicts of interest, various policy flaws related stability preservation, the development of information technology and increasing rights consciousness among citizens. A new line of thinking is currently needed in regard to stability preservation, with rights protection as its precursor and foundation. ‘Rigid stability’ must give way to ‘resilient stability’, ‘static stability’ must yield to ‘dynamic stability’, and ‘stability preservation’ must become ‘stability creation’.

In an increasingly open and democratic nation, true stability is unattainable through reliance upon the coercive and heavy-handed measures of the Mao era. Stability preservation during sensitive times of social conflict demands more than wise governance; it also requires that stability be rethought to fit the present stage of social development.

Yu’s vision for reform earned him a place on Foreign Policy magazine’s 2012 list of “Great Global Thinkers”, behind Chen Guangcheng and Ai Weiwei. At the South China Morning Post, The University of Nottingham’s Andreas Fulda described the marked contrast between Yu and Ai, concluding that “establishment intellectuals like Yu are the people the West must learn to work with if it wishes to encourage political reform in China.”

Yu, an establishment intellectual, is an unlikely poster boy for the Chinese democracy movement. He is a patriot first, a democrat second. His position on the East China Sea islands territorial dispute between China and Japan is emphatically nationalistic, much to the frustration of his liberal supporters within China, and in his 10-year plan he does not advocate civilian control of the Chinese military, as most other liberals in China do.

In contrast, outspoken libertarian activists like Liu Xiaobo and artist Ai Weiwei are clear-cut reformers, railing at government control from outside the system. Their cause offers a compelling narrative to the West. But the strong focus on activists outside the system comes at the expense of people like Yu, who are prepared to straddle both sides. Establishment intellectuals need to walk a fine line between their reformist aspirations and the existing political realities in China.

[…] Due to the repression of reformers outside the system, policymakers dealing with China should recognise that more people like Yu will grow in influence in the years to come. This may be challenging. These patriots will first and foremost stand up for China’s interests, yet the reality is that this is fairly representative of popular thinking in modern China.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Ai Weiwei, diaoyu islands, information technology, Liu Xiaobo, reform, rights protection, social stability, stability maintenance, stability preservation, territorial disputes, Yu Jianrong
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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.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
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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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?

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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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The slowdown in the Chinese economy is producing an unexpected reduction in violence and social conflict, a senior Chinese security official says.

Falling land prices and fewer transactions have reduced the number of forced land appropriations, which had accounted for an estimated two-thirds of the 187,000 “mass incidents” reported for 2010.

[…] He pointed to a reduction in land disputes, which he credited in part to a shift in official focus away from economic growth and also a less confrontational approach to resolving social disputes.

[…] The head of the China program at the Carter Centre, Liu Yawei, said a possible downgrading of the security portfolio at the upcoming 18th Party Congress could help reduce the role of force in dealing with social conflict.

Garnaut cites a recent report by Amnesty International, covered last week on CDT, which gives the central government some credit for combatting land seizures. Also last week, however, Caixin reported that the land sales that fuel forcible evictions have strongly rebounded recently, following a slow first half of 2012.

See more on land disputes in China via CDT.

© Mengyu Dong for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: forced demolitions, forced evictions, land disputes, land grab protests, stability, stability maintenance, stability preservation
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