Southern Weekend looks back at ten major lawsuits in 2010, as chosen by the China Legal Case Study Research Committee (中国法学会案例研究专业委员会). Their online poll ranked the “My Father is Li Gang” incident as number one.

According to the article’s introduction, the conference’s scholars found that to a large extent, civil rights evidently stopped at the level of the constitution and laws, and failed to find actual effective protection. A portion of the rest of the article, excerpted and translated by CDT:

Another abuse of public rights is directed against helpless petitioners. When the Anyuanding Company [a company that intercepts petitioners] created an agreement with local police to establish “black jails” to detain petitioners, this became one of the ugliest incidents among the top ten list of influential court cases.

Tsinghua University Law Professor He Haibo belives that many of these official disputes should be resolved at the administrative review level, with approximately only ten percent becoming administrative lawsuits, and a very small number using the petitioning system. This is an inverted pyramid. According to his known figures, each year, China sees about 70,000 to 80,000 administrative review cases, and about 100,000 administrative lawsuits. Petitioners are countless. “The Anyuanding incident clarified that the petitioning situation might look pacified from the outside, but it has in fact accumulated much in terms of instability,” He Haibo said.