From The China Blog – TIME:
Our office received a visit today from ÊùúÊñå/ Du Pin a Chinese photographer who has spent much of his time in recent years recording the lives and suffering of China’s millions of petitioners. These are individuals who have exhausted their formal legal avenues of redress and are obliged to resort to an ancient system of appeal that is almost as old as China itself. (We’ve written here and here and elsewhere about the subject before) Most often these cases have to do with local authorities behaving badly, seizing land illegally, falsely accusing people of various crimes, forcing women to be sterilized or have abortions etc etc. (ÂÆòÈĺÊ∞ëÂèç. guanbiminfan, the equally ancient Chinese expression goes, “Officials oppress, the people rebel”) In theory, the petitioning system allows those with such grievances to appeal all the way to Beijing. But out of the roughly 12 million who lodge cases every year only a few succeed and even then the instruction from the central government (usually merely asking the local officials to reconsider the case) is often ignored. [Full Text]
Photo source: Peter Parks / AFP / Getty.
