[Joint House and Senate Hearing, 111 Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
CHINA'S CITIZEN COMPLAINT SYSTEM:
PROSPECTS FOR ACCOUNTABILITY
=======================================================================
ROUNDTABLE
before the
CONGRESSIONAL-EXECUTIVE COMMISSION ON CHINA
ONE HUNDRED ELEVENTH CONGRESS
FIRST SESSION
__________
DECEMBER 4, 2009
__________
Printed for the use of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China
Available via the World Wide Web: http://www.cecc.gov
U.S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE
55-540 PDF WASHINGTON : 2010
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
For sale by the Superintendent of Documents, U.S. Government Printing
Office Internet: bookstore.gpo.gov Phone: toll free (866) 512-1800; DC
area (202) 512-1800 Fax: (202) 512-2104 Mail: Stop IDCC, Washington, DC
20402-0001
CO N T E N T S
----------
Page
Opening statement of Douglas Grob, Cochairman's Senior Staff
Member, Congressional-Executive Commission on China............ 1
Brettell, Anna, Senior Advisor, Congressional-Executive
Commission on China............................................ 2
Minzner, Carl, Assistant Professor of Law, Washington University
in St. Louis, School of Law.................................... 3
Li, Xiaorong, Research Scholar, the Institute for Philosophy and
Public Policy, University of Maryland, College Park............ 7
Davis, Sara (Meg), Founder and Executive Director, Asia Catalyst. 10
APPENDIX
Prepared Statements
Minzner, Carl.................................................... 26
Li, Xiaorong..................................................... 31
Davis, Sara (Meg)................................................ 38
CHINA'S CITIZEN COMPLAINT SYSTEM: PROSPECTS FOR ACCOUNTABILITY
----------
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 4, 2009
Congressional-Executive
Commission on China,
Washington, DC.
The roundtable was convened, pursuant to notice, at 2:02
p.m., in room 628, Dirksen Senate Office Building, Douglas
Grob, Cochairman's Senior Staff Member, presiding.
Also present: Charlotte Oldham-Moore, Staff Director; Anna
Brettell, Senior Advisor; and Andrea Worden, Senior Advisor.
OPENING STATEMENT OF DOUGLAS GROB, COCHAIRMAN'S SENIOR STAFF
MEMBER, CONGRESSIONAL-EXECUTIVE COMMISSION ON CHINA
Mr. Grob. Well, good afternoon, everybody. Thank you very
much for attending our CECC roundtable on ``China's Citizen
Complaint System: Prospects for Accountability.''
My name is Douglas Grob. I am Cochairman Sandy Levin's
Senior Staff Member on the Commission staff, and on behalf of
Congressman Levin, I would like to welcome you here and thank
you very much for your attendance.
I am very pleased to appear here with this very
distinguished panel. We will be discussing today China's
citizen complaint system, sometimes called the petitioning
system, or in Chinese, the xinfang system--xinfang meaning
letters and visits. This system has imperial roots. It has long
been an avenue outside the judicial system for citizens in
China to present their grievances to authorities.
China has an extensive system of xinfang offices and
personnel at all levels of government. Citizens petition on a
wide range of issues--everything from minor disputes to the
most egregious alleged abuses of power.
The xinfang system is one of the most widely misunderstood
systems in China. Even a casual reading of Western reporting
will reveal a wide range of portrayals of exactly what this
system is. It is very easy to come away with a range of
perceptions--or misperceptions--including that it's part of the
formal legal system, that it exists side-by-side with the legal
system, that it is independent of the legal system, that it is
highly relevant to the legal system, or, that it is irrelevant
to the legal system.
So today we hope to lend some clarity to these issues and
to increase our understanding of whether xinfang is, in fact,
an avenue for appeal, whether it is a mechanism for resolving
disputes, whether xinfang offices function with any formal
investigatory power, or whether they are simply an agency
referring disputes along the appropriate institutional path,
performing some sort of a sorting function. To that end, we are
extremely fortunate today to have one of the foremost scholars
who has contributed perhaps more than anybody else in recent
years to the enhancement of the clarity with which we
understand the xinfang system in China, and we will be
introducing Professor Minzner in just a moment.
Petitioners in China report widespread official disregard
of complaints. They report human rights abuses. Authorities
reportedly have harassed petitioners. There have been cases
where petitioners have been sentenced to reeducation through
labor and detention in ``black jails''--extralegal detention
centers--or detained in psychiatric institutions. And so we are
also very fortunate to have another foremost expert, Meg Davis,
on the panel to help us put a human face on some of these
petitioner cases.
Finally, the reason why it is so critically important that
we hold this roundtable today is that the xinfang system has
come to the fore in recent years in part because authorities
have reported increasing numbers of citizen complaints related
to a wave of local department-level rules issued by authorities
in many locales in China regarding so-called ``abnormal
petitioning.'' It is believed that the new rules may be part of
an effort to curb the number of petitioners generally, or part
of an effort to curb the number of petitioners traveling to
Beijing to seek redress that they may not have been able to
find at the local level. We are very fortunate then to have
also with us Professor Li Xiaorong, who can help us understand
the contours of the petitioning population in China, why
citizens continue to petition in the face of a very challenging
environment for bringing grievances before the government, and
who will outline the forms of official retaliation that have
been documented against petitioners, including forms of
extralegal detention.
So now, in order to get started, it is my very high
privilege to introduce to you Dr. Anna Brettell, sitting to my
right, Senior Advisor on the Commission staff and our staff
specialist in this area, to present our witnesses to you.
STATEMENT OF ANNA BRETTELL, SENIOR ADVISOR, CONGRESSIONAL-
EXECUTIVE COMMISSION ON CHINA
Ms. Brettell. Thank you very much, Doug.
First, I'll introduce Carl Minzner, who is an Associate
Professor of Law at Washington University in St. Louis in the
School of Law. He specializes in Chinese law and politics.
Before joining the law faculty, he served as Senior Counsel for
the Congressional-Executive Commission on China and was an
International Affairs Fellow at the Council on Foreign
Relations.
He also served as a Euro-China Legal Education Fellow at
Xibei Institute of Politics and Law in Xi'an. He previously
practiced intellectual property law in the San Francisco Bay
area, and clerked for Judge Raymond Clevenger, U.S. Court of
Appeals for the Federal Circuit. He received a joint J.D./MIA
degree from Columbia Law and the School of International and
Public Affairs, and a BA in International Relations from
Stanford University.
His published works include ``Riots and Cover-Ups:
Counterproductive Control of Local Agents in China,'' and
``Xinfang: An Alternative to Formal Chinese Legal
Institutions.''
Next, we have Li Xiaorong. Professor Li has been a research
scholar at the Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy of
the University of Maryland since 1993, where she specializes in
political and moral philosophy, ethics with a focus on human
rights, cultural diversity, pluralism, and ethics of
globalization. She has taught a graduate seminar on Philosophy,
Politics, and Public Policy at the university.
She has published materials on numerous subjects, including
human rights and cultural relativism, international justice,
reproductive rights, and gender issues in developing countries.
She's the author of ``Ethics, Human Rights and Culture,'' a
book published by PalGrave Macmillan, and many other academic
articles.
Her research projects have won support from the National
Endowment for Humanities, the McArthur Foundation, the U.S.
Institute of Peace, and the Institute for Advanced Studies at
Princeton.
Dr. Sara (Meg) Davis is the founder and executive director
of Asia Catalyst, a nonprofit organization with an office in
New York that partners with activists in Asia to launch
innovative and self-sustaining programs and organizations that
advance human rights, social justice, and environmental
protection.
Dr. Davis is a writer and a human rights advocate who has
conducted research and advocacy on HIV/AIDS and human rights,
police abuse, housing rights, environmental rights, and the
rule of law in China, Thailand, Burma, Cambodia, and Indonesia.
She earned her Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania and
held post-doctoral fellowships at Yale and UCLA. As a China
researcher for Human Rights Watch, she published reports and
conducted global advocacy. Her book, ``Song and Silence: Ethic
Revival on China's Southwest Borders,'' which was published by
Columbia University Press in 2006, draws on research in both
China and Burma.
Her articles have appeared in the Wall Street Journal-Asia,
the National Herald Tribune, the South China Morning Post, and
Modern China.
So without further ado, I will turn the floor over to
Professor Minzner.
STATEMENT OF CARL MINZNER, ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF LAW,
WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY IN ST. LOUIS SCHOOL OF LAW
Mr. Minzner. Thanks to Anna for organizing, and thanks to
the CECC for holding, today's roundtable on citizen petitioning
in China and the state institutions that respond to these
petitions, particularly the xinfang, or letters and visits,
system.
As Anna mentioned, my written and oral statements today are
highly abbreviated versions of two articles that I wrote in
2006 and 2009.
I'm going to try to accomplish four things in the brief
time allotted to me today.
First, I'm going to describe the nature of xinfang
institutions and citizen petitioning in China. Second, I'm
going to argue that Chinese citizens resort to these
institutions and practices because the existing political and
legal systems leave them no better option, and because
incentives within the system make it a rational choice for some
petitioners. Third, I'm going to point out that the interplay
between existing xinfang institutions and citizen petitioning
practices generates a wide range of negative consequences for
Chinese citizens and society at large. These include disuse or
atrophy of formal legal institutions, an escalating cycle of
social destabilization, and a wide range of abuses against
petitioners. Fourth, I'm going to argue that political
liberalization may be necessary to resolve the underlying
problems I just mentioned and to support the development of the
rule of law in China.
So let's start with the first issue. What are xinfang
institutions, and what is citizen petitioning? Well, since the
1950s, letters and visits offices, or xinfang offices, have
served as a channel for citizens in the People's Republic of
China [PRC] to seek assistance in resolving specific
grievances, to appeal government decisions, and to engage in a
limited form of political participation. Xinfang institutions
are found throughout the Chinese bureaucracy, including the
Communist Party, local people's congresses, courts, government,
police, and so on.
However, the focus of xinfang institutions is not on
resolving all grievances equally, according to law. Rather, its
primary focus is on triggering the intervention of higher level
Party and government officials in handling and resolving
precisely those disputes that pose an imminent threat to social
order--say, 200 laid-off workers showing up in front of the
local township government offices and staging a sit-down
protest.
The actual institutional authority of xinfang institutions
themselves to resolve specific grievances is actually quite
weak. Most commonly, xinfang bureaus simply refer individual
petitions to other government agencies for action. Occasionally
they may send out some of their own personnel to conduct
additional investigations of particular problems. In a very few
rare cases, xinfang offices may be successful in prompting
intervention of a core Party or government official in
resolving a particular dispute.
Now, what is citizen petitioning? Well, petitioning
consists of efforts by citizens to try to prompt the
discretionary intervention of these higher level Party
authorities in resolving their disputes. Chinese citizens
employ a wide range of strategies to do this. Individual
petitioning can be as simple as one disgruntled individual
going from bureau door to bureau door, day after day, week
after week, month after month, decade after decade, in an
effort to locate a Party or government official who might be
able to weigh in on their particular dispute.
These types of individual petitioning efforts are rarely
successful. In one study, Yu Jianrong, a scholar in the Chinese
Academy of Social Sciences found that less than 0.2 percent of
such individual petitions are actually addressed. Many such
petitioners spend years or decades in a futile search for
justice.
In contrast, collective or mass petitions have a much
stronger political cast to them. These can involve organized
demonstrations, speeches, and marches of hundreds or thousands
of individuals seeking to present their grievances to
officials.
Xinfang institutions remain a popular channel for injured
citizens to try to prompt elite involvement in the resolution
of their particular grievances.
In 2003 alone, petitions to Party and government xinfang
bureaus at the county level and higher totaled about 11.5
million, about twice the number of cases handled by the Chinese
courts. You see a similar situation within Chinese legal
institutions themselves--huge numbers of petitions within
courts and procurato-
rates.
Now, that is a brief introduction to the xinfang system and
to
citizen petitioning. Let's move to the second question: why
might citizens resort to petitioning rather than formal legal
channels or alternative political channels for the resolution
of their grievances?
One answer: it is not clear that other alternatives are any
better. Particularly at the local level in China, political
power is highly concentrated in the hands of a few officials,
namely the township and county Party secretary. If you are a
petitioner seeking redress for a local government action, such
as the seizure of your land, it's not necessarily clear that
going through the regular machinery of government, including
the local courts that are subject to their networks of
influence, necessarily generates a better outcome for you as
opposed to, say, trying to show up on the doorstep of the
individual township or county Party secretary, or perhaps
better yet, somebody who outranks him or her in the Party chain
of command.
But in addition to a lack of other alternatives, there are
actually incentives within the system that effectively
encourage, sometimes perversely, citizens to resort to the
petitioning of higher level officials as a means to resolve
their grievances.
Local Chinese officials don't face a range of meaningful
bottom-up electoral or independent judicial checks on their
behavior. They do face a range of top-down checks.
Specifically, they face a round of top-down targets that govern
their career performance. These are called cadre responsibility
systems (mubiao guanli zeren zhuijiu zhi), and other names in
Chinese.
Higher level Party authorities use cadre responsibility
systems to set specific targets for local officials. These
include targets in fields such as birth control, economic
development, and social order. Success in meeting these targets
results in a range of positive career awards: bonuses, your
career being fast-tracked, et cetera. Failure results in a
range of negative outcomes: fines, adverse notations in your
personnel file, et cetera. Naturally, this means that local
Party officials are highly motivated to meet these targets.
Social order targets are commonly phrased in terms of
petitions, particularly mass petitions.
For example, in Anhui Province, local officials receive a
warning for mass petitions of 50 or more petitioners who go to
the provincial capital, or 20 or more who go to Beijing. They
receive a suspension for mass petitions over 100 or more
petitioners who go to the provincial capital, or 30 or more who
go to Beijing. Other responsibility systems resemble these:
applying increasingly severe punishments for larger or more
frequent petitions directed at higher
levels of government.
Naturally, one effect of this is that it encourages local
Party officials to be extremely attentive to controlling
expressions of social discontent. As Meg will discuss, local
Party officials use thugs and kidnapping to intimidate or
forestall petitioners who seek to make their way to higher
levels of government, precisely because they fear the adverse
consequences of such petitioning for their own careers.
However, the existence of responsibility systems also gives
citizens a tool to try to pressure the intervention of local
Party secretaries in resolving their disputes. If you're a
disgruntled petitioner, the threat of organizing or actually
carrying out a mass petition can be a direct tool to try to
apply pressure on local Party officials to take, or not take,
some kind of action. After all, unlike, say, a court decision,
this touches on something that's directly linked to his
official performance and career.
Okay. So that's what petitioning is, and that's why Chinese
citizens might resort to it.
Now let's move to the third question, which is: what are
the effects of the incentives created by the xinfang system?
Well, one thing it does is to incentivize individuals, in some
cases, to recast legally cognizable grievances in larger, more
politically mobilized terms. Let me give one example.
In 2006, 70 migrant workers in Yingzhou City in Anhui
Province were upset, dissatisfied with a provincial High
People's Court decision that had denied them back wages. What
did they do? They went to the local provincial Party
headquarters and surrounded it. The next day, the very next
day, provincial Party leaders met and arranged compensation on
terms that technically violated the decision of the provincial
High People's Court decision, rendering an outcome, favorable
to the petitioners.
That, of course, only happens in sort of a very small
number of cases. But that is exactly the kind of dynamic that
fuels the growth in mass incidents, precisely because you've
got a lack of other legal and political avenues for redress,
and you've got this avenue--the threat of a mass petition or
protest, that has a large potential payoff--it might get some
group of petitioners what they're seeking.
This drives the growth of mass incidents. In fact,
statistics suggest that that's exactly what you're seeing. Many
of the mass
incidents that are growing in China are linked toward this
dynamic--citizens trying to find some way to apply pressure to
local officials because they don't have any other institutional
options.
Of course, at the same time, this same dynamic also gives
local officials a vested interest in suppressing petitioning
activity, sometimes through violence, rather than in addressing
underlying causes of the problems. What is the result of this?
First, this is breeding extremism and desperation on the part
of most petitioners. Second, it also appears to be leading to
the disuse or atrophy of formal legal institutions. You're
seeing a declining use in
administrative legal channels as petitioners are choosing
alternative routes, such as street protests, to resolve their
grievances.
Last, you're seeing a loss of authority in courts and legal
institutions. Frank He, out of Hong Kong, has a great article
noting cases in which courts in southern China are simply
paying off petitioners out of their own budgets, trying to get
petitioners off the streets through any means necessary rather
than deciding their cases, precisely because they face such
direct pressure to do absolutely anything to resolve petitions
in the short term.
Now, the question is: where does this lead you? To me, it
doesn't appear to be laying groundwork for gradual
institutional change in China. Rather, it seems to me to be
creating a breeding ground for increased social instability.
So, let's move on to the last question: how to address
these problems. At base, the xinfang problem is an
institutional problem--a problem of legal and political
institutions. It reflects a lacks of alternative, functional
outlets for the political demands of Chinese citizens to
participate in the decisions that affect their lives. And it
reflects a lack of alternative, independent channels for
Chinese citizens efforts to get redress for their grievances.
This is exactly the conclusion of Chinese experts
themselves--including institutions as varied as the Chinese
Academy of Social Sciences [CASS]--China's top academic think
tank, and Gongmeng--an independent-minded, non-governmental
organization that was just shut down by the Chinese authorities
last summer. As Chinese organizations such as these have
pointed out,
responding to these problems requires effective and meaningful
legislative and judicial reform. This is not just my personal
opinion--this is what Chinese organizations such as Gongmeng
and CASS are themselves saying.
Local Chinese legislatures--that is to say, local People's
Congresses [LPCs]--need to be given a greater role in
supervising government action. LPCs need to be made more
representative--via meaningful electoral reforms. And the
Chinese judiciary needs to be given greater independence and
authority in checking government action.
Only then can the demands of Chinese citizens for increased
participation in the official decisions that affect their lives
and citizen efforts to obtain redress for their grievances be
channeled out of the xinfang system and into the gradual
creation of other, better institutions.
Ms. Oldham-Moore. Thank you, Mr. Minzner.
So now we'll move to Professor Li Xiaorong.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Minzner appears in the
appendix.]
STATEMENT OF LI XIAORONG, RESEARCH SCHOLAR, THE INSTITUTE FOR
PHILOSOPHY AND PUBLIC POLICY, UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND-COLLEGE
PARK
Ms. Li. Thank you, CECC directors and staff, particularly
Anna, for arranging this talk.
This day, December 4, is a Chinese observation day for pufa
[popularize laws] and propaganda for the law day. Petitioners
have turned this day into a day for redressing grievances.
Today in Beijing, large groups of petitioners from Shanghai and
all other places are being rounded up and sent to Majialou, the
processing station for petitioners. So, it is all fitting.
In 2007, I devised the group China Human Rights Defenders
[CHRD] to do an investigation for petitioning and black jails,
so my talk today is largely based on this report, which is
documented in ``Silencing Complaints.'' Copies are available.
Also, I put some copies of the CHRD book outside. Some of the
questions I want to talk about have been covered by Professor
Minzner, so that makes it easy. I just want to go in the
fashion of questions and answers to make it more digestible for
you.
So, how big a population are we talking about here? It is
difficult to estimate the number of petitioners in China due to
a shortage of accurate official statistics. A 2004 article in
the Southern Weekend reported that, ``According to official
statistics, there were over 10 million petitioning cases in
China last year.'' So, that is six years ago, and the number
has grown, precisely due to the fact that there are more
grievances. But the number is likely to be bigger, also because
there are many petitioners who are not registered. For example,
those who were intercepted before they reached the letters and
visits offices.
Why do petitioners petition? Professor Minzner has covered
that, so I will skip.
What are petitioners? Petitioners are mostly women and some
children, and a lot of elderly people, and disabled. In recent
years, because more rights violations are related to official
corruption and the negative impact of economic development,
more young and educated people have joined.
Petitioners who reach Beijing are often veteran petitioners
who have been petitioning for many years. They first reached
the local-level governments where their grievances were not
redressed and they were persecuted, so they go further to
Beijing.
Why do petitioners persist? Professor Minzner also covered
this. I just want to make a small correction. It is a slow-
building phenomenon, because when the petitioners first go to
the local office, they're persecuted. They go to Beijing, and
they are persecuted further. They become organized. When they
get organized, this scares the government. Then the organizers
get very harsh punishments.
When did interceptions become so intensified and perverse?
Large-scale and systematic interception of petitioners is
relatively new, partly because of abolishing of repatriation
centers, custody and repatriation centers. Interception also
does not exist legally and publicly in China, but evidence
points to a rapidly expanding operation, extensive in scope.
Since 2004-2005, because the number of petitioners has kept
growing, interception has become a major area of responsibility
for various local governments and many departments at different
levels are involved. Local CCP organs and the government
agencies mobilize substantial resources to intercept
petitioners.
What are frequently used means of interception? There are
many, but here are the main ones: harassment of petitioners'
families who stayed home, civilians; kidnapping, assault,
murder, and arbitrary detention. I want to say a few words
about murder, because it's a serious charge and I'd better be
able to back myself up.
At the start of 2005, six bodies were found when the moat
near the state council and National People's Congress was
cleaned. Petitioning materials, well-preserved in plastic bags,
were found on the bodies. There were documented cases of
petitioners who died as a result of torture. Shanghai
petitioners Duan Huimin and Chen Xiaoming were allegedly
tortured to death at a detention center after they'd been
caught for petitioning in 2007.
Three months ago, Hebei petitioner Liu Fengqin died in a
local reeducation through labor camp after she was sent there
for repeatedly petitioning in Beijing. Then in October,
Shandong petitioner Li Shulian died in a local black jail after
she was intercepted in Beijing and sent back to detention.
Police claimed that she committed suicide, but so far both
families have been silenced and threatened after the
investigations.
There are various forms of detention. I'll just go very
quickly through the list: reeducation through labor camps,
psychiatric facilities, black jails, and law education classes,
xuefaban or xuexiban, and finally, imprisonment.
Why do authorities abuse petitioners to such an extent?
Professor Minzner has covered that ground. I just want to
quickly mention a few: evading accountability. Local
governments don't want their scandals to be exposed at the
national level.
Second, priority of maintaining a measure of harmony by the
central government. They do not have the ability to handle the
growing number of petitioners, so they issue ordinances,
including the recent one calling petitioning illegal.
Third, profit-driven motives. As Professor Minzner has
explained, there's a point deduction system. When the
petitioner is caught in Beijing, the local government has to
pay by reducing their budgets or by a fine. Then they also use
petitioners to do an exchange of bribes. At the national level,
xinfang zhan, when they register a
petitioner, they will call the local government's offices in
Beijing, saying, come to pay and get your petitioner and I will
erase the registration. So this creates a lot of incentives for
local governments to get the petitioners back and put them in
black jails to punish them so they don't petition again.
Number four, there's a political phobia against any
organized mass mobilization. When the petitioners become
organized and they form associations, this really scares the
government.
Finally, the vagueness of language in the regulation, the
xinfang tiaoli, creates a lot of space for police and officials
to abuse petitioners. I just want to mention one. It's called
the self-review system. Under this system, when the petitioner
who is complaining about local officials' misconduct is caught
in Beijing, they are sent back to exactly the same officials to
be handled, and you can imagine the consequences.
What to do? I have two minutes. I'll just run down the
list: reform the incentive systems that encourage interception;
abolish the reform through labor camp system and all other
extra-judicial
detention facilities, including black jails; hold officials
criminally accountable; make complaint procedures partial,
amending discriminatory regulations in the xinfang tiaoli;
strengthen judicial independence and other alternative channels
to lodge complaints.
For the international community, the United Nations, the
E.U., the U.S. Government, and the bank systems that support
rule of law programs in China, they should continue to raise
their concerns about the petitioners and the persecution of
petitioners, and the press should continue to cover stories.
The French Channel 24, BBC did documentaries about the black
jails. They should all demand the closing of black jails.
Thank you.
Ms. Oldham-Moore. Thank you very much, Ms. Li.
Dr. Davis?
[The prepared statement of Ms. Li appears in the appendix.]
STATEMENT OF SARA (MEG) DAVIS, FOUNDER AND EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR,
ASIA CATALYST
Ms. Davis. Thank you very much.
So, following on Professor Minzner and Professor Li's very
eloquent explanations of the petitioning system, I'd like to
share some case studies to give you a sense of the human face
behind what you've heard, as well as some of the challenges
that impede reform.
My organization, Asia Catalyst, works with civil society in
China and Southeast Asia, especially with AIDS activists. But
before founding Asia Catalyst a few years ago, I worked for
three years as the China researcher for Human Rights Watch,
where I conducted field research and wrote book-length reports,
including one on petitioners titled, ``We Could Disappear At
Any Time.''
I no longer represent Human Rights Watch, which recently
published a new report on petitioners and the black jails,
which Xiaorong has just mentioned. For reasons I'll get into,
though, I expect that many of the people I interviewed in 2005
are still in Beijing or in their hometowns petitioning.
On a personal level, I remain haunted by the voices that I
heard back then and by the vision they shared of a vicious
cycle with no easy way out, and I'm grateful to Anna and the
CECC for the opportunity to reflect on what they said, once
again.
So we've heard a little about the petitioning laws and the
system that they manage, but who are the petitioners? One of
the things that makes them so compelling to talk to is that, as
a rule, they're not political activists. They're not
dissidents. They are, for the most part, ordinary people, many
of them staunch believers in Socialist ideals and in the
achievements of the Chinese Communist Party, but who have
suffered terrible injustices.
Many of them have little idea of what the term ``human
rights'' might even mean, except that it might mean, in the
words of one Beijing man I spoke to, that ``an official's son
should be given the same treatment as my son.'' Though they
don't have a clear sense of what human rights might mean, I
would still consider them to be the cutting edge of the human
rights movement in China, these rural and urban poor who are
lining the streets in front of petitioning offices around the
country.
So in 2005, I went to Beijing for a month with two interns
to gather testimony from petitioners about police abuse for
this report from Human Rights Watch. As I know that my
visibility as a representative of that organization made me a
risky person to talk to in China, we took a number of
precautions in the field and in the end we were able to
interview 34 people.
Most of the petitioners we met were living on the streets
of Beijing or in very rudimentary boarding houses. They were
selling newspapers, gathering cans for recycling to survive.
Quite a few were living off of scraps that they dug out of the
garbage. We would order a few dishes of food as compensation
for their time and talk to them in the back room of a
restaurant. Mostly--that encouragement would wave off our
warnings about the risks of talking to us and they'd pull out
sheaves of paper, piles of forms and judgments, and stamped
receipts as evidence of their cases.
The range of individuals was quite great, from a middle-
class shopowner with a stiff perm and an embroidered sweater
who represented 1,500 investors who'd been bilked by a
fraudulent investment scam, to an unwashed farmer woman who
arrived at the
restaurant toting a cloth backpack that had all her worldly
belongings in it.
The petitioners who spoke to us had often begun their epic
journeys with a harrowing incident in their hometowns. Several
people had lost sons or brothers to police abuse; a few
describe challenging local officials on corruption and being
nearly killed in retaliation.
One mild-mannered man I met with his young son described an
attack by thugs who he believed were hired by a local official.
He said, ``At 7 p.m. on January 31, 2002, five or six people
went to my house. They brought an iron hammer. They came in and
said nothing. They weren't from our village; I'd never seen
them before. They were thugs. First, they hit my wife and my
younger brother's wife in the head with an iron hammer. They
were coming for me, but they didn't know what they were dealing
with. My brother hit one attacker over the head with a chair,
and then when the chair broke, he beat him to death with the
chair leg. The kids were crying; they were terrified.''
There were several of these allegations about attempted
assassinations by officials. Ma, a Henan man, was actually a
second-generation petitioner. His father began petitioning in
the Mao era over a land claim and persisted with his case for
19 years. Ma said that officials had assassinated his father in
retaliation. ``They killed him with a hoe. They hit him in the
back of the head. They also hit my mother and my sister. My
sister fought back and killed the attacker, so she was
sentenced to five years in prison. This was all arranged by the
village deputy Party secretary. I thought this was not fair
treatment for my sister, so I've been petitioning for many
years.''
Other people I spoke with about forced evictions from their
homes and cities, or forced land expropriation in the
countryside. At Asia Catalyst, we also monitor cases in which
petitioners from Henan and Hebei are demanding compensation for
their infection with HIV through unsafe blood transfusions in
hospitals. There have been quite a few of those.
In many cases, people who began petitioning about one local
abuse then became a victim to retaliation for their
petitioning. As they moved up the system, appealing from the
township, to the county, to the provincial level, and then on
to Beijing, becoming the veterans that Xiaorong referred to,
abuse would pile on abuse. So a petite and shy woman of 39 told
us, ``I was married by force to a man I had known for one week
in 2000. I tried to leave my husband and he wouldn't let me.
The day after, two people came home with him. They ripped my
clothes off and raped me. It was my husband and two of our
neighbors. I complained and the police detained him for a few
days, then they let him go. I think he paid a bribe.''
The gang rape, in her case, was the original abuse. As she
petitioned higher up the system, the retaliation began. ``For
making false accusations against my husband, I was sentenced to
one year in prison,'' she said. The court concluded that the
rape in the context of marriage, even gang rape, was
consensual. In the local prison, conditions were brutal; 10
women shared a cell. The authorities shackled her hands and
feet for days at a time for minor infractions, and at one point
she was shackled day and night for seven days.
But as soon as she was released, she came back to Beijing
to petition. Like many petitioners, she clung to her faith in
senior leaders and that they would intercede in her case. One
of the persistent fears of petitioners like this woman was of
being detained by retrievers, some of whom were out-of-uniform
police, others just thugs hired by provincial authorities.
The job of retrievers is to find any petitioners from their
province, kidnap the petitioners, and bring them back to the
petitioners' hometown. In some cases, the petitioner is then
imprisoned in a local detention facility, in other cases
they're released, in which case they often just come right back
to Beijing on the next bus.
One petitioner gave us a photograph he had taken of the
retrievers lined up across the street from one of the petitions
offices in Beijing, perched on small folding stools or leaning
on trees like hawks ready to pounce. Abuses by these retrievers
are common. One elderly couple I interviewed described being
ambushed by retrievers who heard her and her husband's accent
on the street, guessed which province they were from, and
attacked them.
She said, ``Thirty to forty people surrounded us and asked
us where we were from. Before we even opened our mouths, they
started to hit us. Over 20 people began hitting my husband.
They stomped his body here,'' indicating the left ribs, ``they
knocked me down too. Every time I tried to get up, they kicked
me back down. This happened three or four times. It was raining
and my poncho was soaked with water.''
When we did these interviews in 2005, petitioners spoke
with fear about the building known as the Majialou, where they
are interrogated, threatened, and sometimes beaten by
retrievers. I noted, in preparing for this roundtable, that the
recent report by Human Rights Watch also refers to the
Majialou, except that it's shifted. In 2005, the Majialou was a
detention facility, according to people I interviewed.
In 2009, it has now become a kind of sorting facility in
which people are sent off to black jails. The black jails are
often rooms that are appended to hotels that represent the
provincial governments in Beijing. So this shift in the
function of the Majialou facility may be one indicator of the
rise in the number of petitioners in Beijing, that they had to
expand their detention system.
While China Human Rights Defenders and Human Rights Watch
both report that some petitioners are kept in these black jails
for extended periods, for the most part the facilities seem to
be way stations that are used to collect and threaten
petitioners before sending them back to their home province.
Out of the 34 people we interviewed, I only met 1 man who
had successfully obtained a letter from the Supreme Court in
response to his petition, the holy grail sought by all
petitioners. When we expressed amazement of this, he shouted at
us in frustration: ``I have over 20 of these letters. They all
say the same thing. I asked the head of the court Petitions
Office, `What use are your letters? ' And he said to me
directly, `They're no use.' ''
Under the circumstances, it's remarkable that most of the
petitioners I interviewed in 2005 continue to petition and most
likely are still petitioning today even as we speak. All the
petitioners we interviewed had come to Beijing numerous times,
despite surviving beatings, torture, and detention. ``I can't
not petition,'' said one woman who had suffered weeks of
torture in a detention center that left her permanently on
crutches. ``I don't fear anything,'' said others. ``What else
can they do to me that they haven't done already? ''
It's this reckless disregard for personal safety, this
obsessive desperation in pushing their long, handwritten
letters on anyone who seems remotely able to help, and the fact
that they live in filth and poverty on the streets, that leads
many mainstream Chinese people, including many in the
government who have to listen to their complaints, to conclude
that the majority of petitioners are mentally unbalanced.
Having spent some time with them, I can't completely disagree.
Many are unbalanced. Whether they began that way, though, is
another question.
If we examine the choices that are available to them, the
choice to seek redress is a turning point in their lives that
gradually shuts down over life paths. Over time, petitioners
are driven deeper and deeper into a maze from which there is no
exit. If an official steals your land, or worse, actually
attempts to kill you and you decide to fight back, how do you
go home? Retaliation would be a constant threat.
In another country, having tried and failed to find
redress, a victim could give up, choose to move to a new town,
start a new life. But China's restrictive household
registration, or hukou system, makes that close to impossible.
Without a local household registration card, a new resident
cannot get a job, go to a hospital, or send their children to
school.
So once having started to petition, petitioners
increasingly become focused on this receding goal that some
senior official is going to take pity on them and intercede in
their case. They become locked in a tragic cycle of
petitioning, suffering more abuses and petitioning about those
as well, that ultimately destroys the individuals, and often
their families, and almost never results in justice.
But the petitioners may not be the only ones locked in a
maze with no exit. As Carl's work on the incentive system, this
cadre responsibility system, shows, the Communist Party is also
now in a parallel and potentially equally dangerous cycle that
pivots on the absence of accountability at every level of the
system. A system that governs through absolute allegiance must
be able to protect its own or risk disloyalty and
disintegration in the ranks.
This logic leads to a system that requires local officials
not to investigate abuses against colleagues, but to cover them
up with new abuses. The end result has become an ever-widening
pool of dislocated victims with nothing to lose, who in turn
require ever more brutal measures to suppress.
There is only one way out of this maze: China needs senior
officials with the courage to institute sweeping reform of the
legal and petitioning systems, reforms that result in equal
access to justice for all Chinese citizens. Without it, the
current system and its supplicants will continue on their
parallel cycles and the state that appears so strong from the
outside will face increasingly destabilizing pressure from
within.
Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Ms. Davis appears in the
appendix.]
Mr. Grob. Well, thank you very much to all three of you for
your very clear and informative presentations.
We're going to turn in a minute to the Q&A portion of our
program, where we'll turn to members of the audience to ask
questions of our panelists and engage in a discussion of the
questions raised.
Before we do that, however, I just wanted to recognize in
the audience Ms. Shen Ting, who is the director of the Chinese
League of Victims, which is an NGO of some 80,000 mainland
petitioners that registered in Hong Kong in December 2008. A
former petitioner herself, Ms. Shen is a Shanghai native,
living in Hong Kong, and she is not permitted to return to
mainland China because of her petitioning and organizing
activities.
She and the League of Victims have been publicizing
petitioner grievances related to land confiscation and other
issues in Shanghai in relation to the upcoming Shanghai World
Expo that will take place from May to October 2010 in Shanghai.
I wonder if you would like to take a minute or two to explain
to the audience some of your activities. I don't think we have
a roving microphone, so please just come up here.
Ms. Shen [through translator, Mr. Hongfuan Li]. Thank you
to the commission for giving me this chance to speak a few
words. I speak here to represent the Chinese victims,
especially the Shanghai Expo refugees, to speak to the world.
The authorities in the Shanghai government have relocated
thousands of citizens from their homes for the construction of
the expo buildings, with the claim that a new civilized China
is on the rise again. However, behind this cover, there are the
cries and the tragedies. My organization has compiled and
published a new book. It's called ``The Shanghai Expo World
Shame: The Victims of Shanghai World Expo Cry for SOS.'' I
tried to expose the monumental scandals behind the Shanghai
Expo. I am asking the U.S. Congress and human rights
organizations to please, pay some attention to the stories of
the Shanghai Expo refugees. Please pay special attention to
these refugees and help them.
Thank you.
Mr. Grob. Thank you very much for your remarks. We're
honored to have you here.
We'd like to begin now with the question and answer part of
our program. I'd like to open up the floor to questions from
the audience. If you have a question, please raise your hand
and speak loudly and clearly. I'd like to begin, first, with
Andrea Worden, who is Senior Advisor on the staff of the
Congressional-Executive Commission on China, to pose the first
question.
Ms. Worden. Thank you all. I would love to hear your
thoughts about the extent to which individual petitioners and
groups of petitioners are organizing across localities and
across issue areas to share strategies, to support each other,
and also the extent to which petitioners as a group are perhaps
starting to recognize the rights that they have as petitioners?
Are they starting to form a kind of collective identity?
Mr. Grob. So the question is asking the panelists to please
comment on the extent to which individual petitioners and
groups of petitioners in China are organizing, either across
locales or across issues, or both, and whether or not, as a
group, they are recognizing the rights that they have as
petitioners in forming some sort of collective identity.
Would any of our panelists like to kick off that answer?
Xiaorong?
Ms. Li. Well, Shanghai is a good example. That's another
good example for cross-locales. They're very organized. That
explains why the persecution of the first eviction victims--
they petitioned, they turned into petitioners--is so harsh in
Shanghai. Several deaths occurred, and also recently there were
quite a few detentions and imprisonments. Duan Chinfau was
recently imprisoned in an RTL center. Jerjing Di was briefly
detained and then the lawyer who helped them, Zheng Enchong,
has been under house arrest after he served prison time. And
Feng Zhenghu now is at the Tokyo Airport, not allowed to
return, and he's a legal advisor and organizer of the Shanghai
petitioners. Then we have Shen Ting here.
But the cross-locale organizations occur mostly in Beijing.
The best-known organizer is Liu Jie, who is a woman in her mid-
50s. She just came out of a reform through labor [RTL] camp,
where she was sent for a year and a half, seriously tortured.
There are a few others, like Wang Guilan, Liu Xueli, and Zheng
Dajing, all people who are from different provinces. Wang
Guilan from Hubei, Zheng Dajing from Hebei, and I believe, Liu
Xueli, is from Henan. So they were organizing in Beijing to
help themselves to support, to find legal devices to file their
cases, and to get the news on the Internet, to talk to
reporters.
Before the 2007 People's Congress session in Beijing--
collected more than 10,000 signatures to support overall
political reform, with law reform and a call for human rights
protections of the petitioners. It was a very strong statement
for that. She went to the RTL prison, and a few people who
helped her were also sent back to their provinces and put in
black jails or RTL.
That effort was crushed. Since then, it has been very
difficult for organizing. This is what I meant when I said that
the regulations are so discriminatory. They discriminate
against organizers and discriminate against the people who are
vocal, outspoken, charismatic, and who have turned from
petitioners petitioning and defending their own personal rights
into human rights defenders,
defending the rights of others, and came to recognize the
universality of human rights and started to work beyond the
narrow interests of their own. This is what I meant.
There are several articles in the regulations, some visits
and letters, that discriminate against such people. For
example, Article 18, binding people from petitioning in groups.
Any one single case can only be filed by one person. It cannot
be two people. Any case that involves more than two people has
to find a representative. In cases that involve hundreds and
thousands of people, you cannot have more than five
representatives. So, this is all very well planned against any
kind of organizing.
In Article 20, we have all these crimes that are designed
to punish people who try to exercise their right to expression,
free expression and association and assembly. For example, the
crime of illegally assembling in front of government offices.
When you petition, you have to line up in front of the visits
and letters office. How else can you do it? So when you line
up, you're assembling and that can be a crime and gives the
police authority to arrest you.
So there are things like that that really should be taken
out of that regulation. Did I answer all your questions? The
bottom line is, right now, any kind of organizing efforts among
the petitioners are harshly punished.
Mr. Grob. Thank you very much.
Meg, did you have something to add?
Ms. Davis. Briefly, on HIV/AIDS, I've seen mobilizing by
petitioners across localities, but within one issue. Those are
cases of people who are infected with HIV through hospital
blood transfusions. In Henan Province, and sometimes in other
localities, they're not able, or are not allowed, to file suit
in the courts and have no other form of recourse except to
petition. So in some cases they have worked together to
mobilize in order to get compensation and that's been effective
for some people.
Mr. Grob. Thank you very much.
Mr. Minzner. And I'd just reiterate what Xiaorong said.
First, Chinese authorities come down like a ton of bricks on
anybody who's actually organizing petitioners. Second,
particularly in rural areas, Chinese petitioners are pretty
smart. In response to Chinese authorities' efforts to
decapitate petitioning movements by targeting clear leaders,
petitioners go underground. That's to say, if people are trying
to put together some sort of petitioning movement, people will
sometimes organize and try keep their identities vague--make it
less clear who the real organizer is. So it's just sort of an
arms race, between government repression on the one hand, and
petitioners who are trying to find alternative strategies to
mobilize.
Mr. Grob. Thank you very much.
Questions?
Audience Participant. [Off microphone.]
Mr. Grob. Thank you. So the question is, is there, at the
end of the day, a way to reform the xinfang system so that it
operates in accordance with international human rights
standards?
Mr. Minzner. That's the $10 million question. The reason
why this is so hard is that it is tied to the core of the
entire Chinese system, which is to say, it is wrapped up with
all of the authoritarian controls over the political system and
the problems that exist in the legal system. I would like to
think that there's some easy way to go about reform, but I just
don't see it.
You have to have somebody in China at the top who is
willing to take the step of moving down the road of opening up
alternative legal and political institutions to give ordinary
people more voice in the system, giving people more opportunity
to participate in the decisions that affect their lives. If you
don't take these reforms, I don't know how you'd change the
problematic dynamics at work. But this requires real
fundamental pressure for institutional change--somebody at the
top in China willing to go in that direction. And at the moment
I don't see anyone who's got the ability or the will to push
for that kind of sweeping reform.
Then the second question is: what can people on the outside
do? One, I agree with one thing Xiaorong pointed out--the value
of people on the outside highlighting the problems. Two, I also
think there's a different tone that I sometimes find helpful
when I try to talk to Chinese interlocutors on this issue. I
find, particularly in the United States, when we address
Chinese human rights or domestic political issues in China, we
veer between either ignoring them entirely or moralizing and
saying, China bad, China bad, China bad.
Perhaps adopting a slightly different tone and trying to
concretely lay out the extent to which Chinese authorities' own
authoritarian political controls are undermining their own
efforts to
obtain social stability--that might be productive. That might
be the right tone for foreign governments to adopt--trying to
reason with Chinese authorities about why reforms in these
areas are in their own interests. Because, at the end of the
day, it has to be somebody in China who is willing to undertake
the necessary reform, and outsiders need to find a way to
emphasize that it is actually in China's own interests to do
so.
Three, there are a range of opportunities for Sino-U.S.
collaboration on these issues. Even if there is resistance
among some Chinese officials to institutional reform, there are
others who are
interested in working on these issues. Many of the key issues
that many foreign NGOs and some Chinese authorities are
interested in--legal reform, civil society--are all wrapped up
in addressing the problems that are associated with the xinfang
system. So, there should be a lot of range for collaborative
work, even if there's still a lot of resistance in China on the
issue of fundamental reform.
Mr. Grob. Thank you.
Did you want to add something?
Ms. Li. Well, I just wanted to say, the fundamental
solution is to reform China's judicial system. But before that
happens, the xinfang zhidu may not be a totally bad thing to
have. The thing is, when they have the xinfang system, why do
they have to torture people and arbitrarily detain people and
do all these things in violation of basic human rights? So
there is room for improvement in the international institutions
to step in.
This year, in February, the U.N. Universal Periodic Review
recommendations asked questions about arbitrary detention of
petitioners and torture questioning, and also black jails.
Also, last
November the U.N. Committee Against Torture reviewed China's
report and also raised the question of the black jails and the
persecution of petitioners. In a way, the international human
rights organizations put a spotlight on it. So unfortunately
there is no one solution to the petition problem.
The problem--the same old problem--is China's political
system, repression against the freedom of expression, freedom
of association, and torture. They're the same old issues that
the International Human Rights Committee has been working on.
So, the pressure just has to be kept on.
Ms. Davis. I really agree with everything that Carl and
Xiaorong have said, so I would only add one other thing that I
think could help a little bit, which is building up civil
society and building up the capacity of local NGOs, which can
provide another avenue and another venue for people to resolve
or seek redress at a local level. But I think, like all of us,
when you look at this question it kind of creates a sense of
despair, because the only way forward is for very senior
officials to decide that they're going to cede some control,
and why would they do that?
Mr. Grob. Thank you very much.
A question in the back here. I should just also add, this
session--I should have mentioned this earlier--we're creating a
transcript from this session, so if you would like to identify
yourself when you ask your question, please do. If you prefer
not to identify yourself, that's fine as well.
Please.
Ms. Simon. My name is Karla Simon and I teach law at
Catholic University of America. I wanted to ask a question and
I wanted to make a comment about what they just said.
What is the significance of the--actually--publishing this
new work? I mean, to me, that's very striking. I just wondered
what our panelists think about that.
With regard to what Meg said--what she said about local
NGOs being organized and actually expressing themselves a
little bit more--two things on that point. Just so you all
know, I'm a scholar of civil society in China and I have
testified before this commission before. But the point is,
local NGOs are, in fact, now facing a registration system
that's a little bit different. It's called the ``documentation
system,'' which is a new way NGOs will register. The new system
may be a very good and--for local NGOs to get more involved in
this and provide avenues for citizen participation.
Ms. Brettell. Just to explain a little bit about the
question. Chinese Foreign Affairs Ministry spokespeople have
denied the existence of black jails during the Universal
Periodic Review, when they spoke in front of the United
Nations. Also, I think even recently, in April 2009, a
spokesman from the Ministry denied that there were black jails
in China.
But a couple of weeks ago there was an article in a
magazine called Outlook, which is a magazine that's associated
with the government. This article was actually quite
astonishing in describing the phenomena of black jails, and
giving quite a few details about them. This was the first time
that a government-associated newspaper--maybe even any mainland
newspaper--had acknowledged the existence of black jails. So,
that's what your question is addressing, right?
Ms. Simon. Correct.
Mr. Minzner. I can take a stab at that. Yes, it's
definitely a positive development when you see Chinese domestic
media and domestic interest groups interested in these issues.
These are the folks who should be talking about what the future
of China should be and how these issues should be addressed.
So, it's definitely positive.
China itself is not a monolith--there are different groups
and people within and outside the government who are aware of
these issues and bring them to light from time to time. Think
back, for example, to the Sun Zhigang incident in 2003, where a
crusading media outlet exposed problems associated with the
custody and repatriation system. You definitely see the
spotlight brought on particular problems, such as petitioning,
by different groups in China.
However, the important question is: does it translate into
sustained pressure within the system for serious institutional
change to address the underlying problem? I hope that that will
be the case. But this is a very tough problem, tied up with
deep institutional problems in the Chinese political system. So
while it's a positive development, I'll wait to see what the
actual results are.
Ms. Li. What's interesting, is the article never mentioned
hei jianyu, the black jail. It only says ``heise chanye lian''
[grey enterprise chain]. It is the same, this phenomenon, for
interception of petitioners. It's turned into a profit-driven
chain of enterprising officials. It is significant in that
Liaowang is tightly controlled by Xinhua, so why do they allow
it to go forward? Maybe, like Carl said, it's one of those
spotlights where there's a small opening, so it's hopeful.
Mr. Grob. Great. Other questions? Yes. Charlotte?
Ms. Oldham-Moore. This is for Professor Minzner--millions
of people continue to petition. Do you have any examples where,
recently, the petitioning system worked as we all agree it
should?
Mr. Minzner. If your definition of what ``works'' is
petitioners getting something that they want, here are two
concrete examples. The first is the one I described from
Yingzhou, where you actually have citizens staging a mass
petition that forces a concession from local officials. It's a
dangerous gamble. The petitioners are potentially subject to
repression, but in some situations the threat of
social disruptive behavior might end up getting the officials
to concede and back off. That may not necessarily be a good
outcome from the standpoint of institution building or judicial
authority, but at least for the petitioners, they're getting
some of what they want.
Let me give you another example of where the petition
system works for one particular individual. In 2003, Premier
Wen Jiabao was visiting Sichuan on an inspection tour. Xiong
Deming, a rural woman, managed to complain personally to him
about her husband's unpaid back wages.
The very next day, the husband received his wages and the
event was plastered all over the state media outlets. Now that
gives Xiong Deming what she wants, but the particular effect
that it creates, the impression that it gives among citizens at
large, is that if I just manage to make it to Beijing and if I
can meet with Wen Jiabao personally, I'm going to get what I
want. Again, I'm not sure this is really a positive thing from
the standpoint of building stable institutions in China.
So those are the two types of examples that I can give
where the petitioning process generates positive results for
particular people. But I'm very hesistant to say that these
indicate that the system is working institutionally, in terms
of the big picture.
Ms. Oldham-Moore. Please give me examples.
Mr. Minzner. The low utility of the xinfang system from the
perspective of petitioners may make more sense if you step back
and think of the roles that the system is playing for Chinese
officials. From the standpoint of Chinese authorities, they do
not regard this as a system where we think that we should be
resolving every single petition that's coming through.
Rather, from the standpoint of Chinese authorities, the
xinfang system serves as a general information source about
what's going on in their own country. They use it as a way to
generally note that, for example, there have been 400
petitioners coming from Sichuan Province over the last six
months, maybe the local officials there are less competent than
those in Gansu Province.
This means that the xinfang system serves as a channel for
information to higher level authorities. But that's totally
divorced from the idea that they need to take action on any
individual citizen grievance, much less resolve all grievances
equally according to law. The xinfang system is primarily a
tool for higher level leaders to understand better what's going
on, and to help them generally monitor their subordinates. It
is not primarily a system to prompt higher level officials to
take action in all cases that come into the system.
Sure, there are cases out there where one official, such as
Wen Jiabao, takes a personal interest in a particular problem
and resolves it through his personal political power. But I'm
hesitant to suggest that is a positive example of the system
working the way it should.
Ms. Davis. I think also we should distinguish between
different kinds of cases and what we define as working. So, for
instance, with the people who are petitioning for compensation
from hospitals for HIV transfusion and blood supply, it can
work for people in that, if you get a bunch of people together,
you go to the hospital, you have your evidence, you stand there
and you don't get beaten up or taken away, you might get some
compensation and it might be more than you would have gotten as
an individual going and talking to the hospital.
But in cases--which are some of the worst cases that we
were looking at in 2005--where you have someone who has lost a
family member to police abuse, or some local official tried to
kill them
because they were complaining about corruption, ultimately the
person doesn't really have any other avenues and so they wind
up petitioning, and petitioning, and petitioning in the hope
that someone will see how horrible their case is and will do
something about the local official, and no one ever does.
I mean, the most they ever get that I've heard of is a
letter from the Supreme Court saying, ``Please look into this
case,'' which the official laughs at and tosses out the window.
So in those kinds of cases I think there's very rarely an
instance of something working in the sense of the case being
resolved to the petitioner's satisfaction. So, it depends on
the topic, I think.
Mr. Grob. Any other questions? Yes?
Audience Participant. I have a question for the experts.
What are the attitudes or positions of the general public in
China toward petitioners?
It seems to me that people in China cannot organize to
express their grievances, so what are the positions of the
public toward petitioners?
Mr. Grob. So the question was, what is the attitude of the
general public toward both petitioners and the petitioning
system, given the suggestion that, unless a particular
petitioner's grievance is echoed to some extent by the general
population, there will be less likelihood of effective redress
of grievances. So what is the attitude of the general public
toward petitioners and the petitioning system? Xiaorong, would
you like to----
Ms. Li. Hard questions come to me. I wish there were some
studies of the popular attitudes. I haven't seen any good
studies. My feeling is, there is a measure of support of the
government repression against petitioners from the city
residents, because before the Olympics, before other important
national events, the residents in the cities regarded these
people who came from far away, they're poorly fed, shabbily
dressed, look all tired and dusty and sleep in street corners
as homeless people and beggars, so they wanted to kick these
people out. They also contributed to increasing crimes through
the gatherings of such groups of people.
But then increasingly in China, as the middle class,
educated people come into contact with real social miseries,
people can be moved to try to help them. For example, right now
there are several drives in Beijing, when the winter comes, to
collect warm blankets and coats, and to send it to the
petitioners. There are at least three that I know of. So it's a
mixed picture, but I would like to see such a study.
Mr. Grob. Thank you.
Any additional questions? I think there is one way in the
back there. Yes, please go ahead.
Mr. Shen. My name is Shen Wei and I will talk a little
about Shanghai and how many people are affected and what it
means, because it's very serious, especially the actions by
police. It means that these people are being kicked out of
their houses by the government without receiving any
compensation. Their houses are confiscated so we'd like to
thank you for your attention. Can you maybe briefly speak in
Chinese so that I don't have to translate for her? [Translation
in Chinese].
Ms. Shen [through translator, Mr. Hongfuan Li]. Sometimes
there wasn't compensation. Other times there was compensation,
but I believe it to be extremely unfair, so there's no
agreement that had been reached. To my knowledge, there are
thousands of households and people who have been affected. They
have nowhere to live. They have already been kicked out of
their homes. They're living in rentals, but the landlords are
constantly under harassment for renting to petitioners. Since
this occurred, that is--one of the particular reasons to try to
bring these events in China to your attention before the World
Expo happens.
Thank you.
Mr. Grob. Thank you very much.
Additional questions? We have a few minutes left. Yes.
Please go ahead.
Mr. Hongfuan Li. Can I ask a question about historical
perspectives. I'll share my own observations. About 20 years
ago actually, I was a young teacher in Beijing. Twenty years
ago, it was the students and young people like myself who went
on the street, and some people took extreme measures trying to
bring people's attention to the demands. The students were not
happy with the political system. Specifically, that's why we
gathered in Tiananmen Square.
That's a very small signal--but over the past 20 years,
those kinds of struggles have faded away. Personally, myself, I
graduated from a famous university in China. If I had stayed in
China, I would be a professor. I would make $10,000 and live a
very good life. The majority of people like myself in China are
not really willing to risk anything that will call for a
political change. So that's what I observed. Gradually, the
workers are being kicked out.
All the factories are being merged and these people are
living a very hard life. They are all by themselves, so there
is little unity in trying to change things so these people are
just living, that's it. Then in the second step beyond that
is--the houses they live in, this is like Beijing and Shanghai,
they're 10 times bigger. But the land, in Chinese law, the
state holds ownership. No individual is--very few people--very
few, less than 1 percent, so the majority of people--family all
stay living in Shanghai. Somehow a big project is going on, so
they----
Mr. Grob. Let me ask our panelists to comment on the
historical perspective. Thank you very much for sharing.
Mr. Hongfuan Li. Thank you.
Mr. Grob. Thank you.
Do you have anything to add on the historical perspective?
No. Okay. Well, perhaps we can come back to that.
Any other questions right now? Please.
Audience Participant. I just had a quick question. If you
could clarify, in your written remarks it talks about the
xinfang which needs to be reviewed--of xinfang, and maybe you
could touch on the relationship between the xinfang and legal
systems; is there a difference between the two systems and how
this gets resolved, and what would be the outcomes?
Mr. Minzner. That's a really good question. Yes. Xinfang is
a broad umbrella term that refers to all of these offices. Let
me try to break it down. Almost every single government agency
is going to actually have its own xinfang bureau.
In addition, at every level within the Chinese bureaucracy,
such as county-level governments or provincial-level
governments, you'll find that there's a xinfang bureau attached
to the particular government and Party committee at that level.
It's a shared bureau. That is to say, if you're trying to go to
the Hebei provincial government or the Hebei Party committee,
you'll actually find it's the same xinfang institution that's
receiving your grievances.
These xinfang offices are channels by which you can attempt
to submit a wide range of political suggestions, appeals for
redress of grievances, allegations of corruption on the part of
local officials, and so on. Within the judiciary itself, you'll
also find that there are also a range of--and it's going to
vary based on the time period--institutions which are set up to
receive less-than-formal submission of complaints. So you'll
have channels within individual courts where you can submit
complaints that don't rise to the level of formally filing a
case.
There's a parallel between these systems in the sense that,
at the end of the day, what's really pushing higher level
officials to decide whether or not to take a particular issue
seriously is less the legal merit of the underlying dispute and
the extent to which it's perceived by higher level officials
that this could blow up into a mass petition or protest.
Within courts, that can end up in yanking or pulling of a
court opinion that has already been issued. True, if you're
looking at the paper requirements, you will find statements
that say, no, petitions should not be brought for cases which
have already been decided--but in practice you'll find that the
social stability concerns can trump whatever the technical
requirements are.
Mr. Grob. Go ahead.
Ms. Brettell. I have a question for the panelists. Recently
there have been several local level rules passed in Shenzhen,
in Inner Mongolia, in Jiangsu Province, and other places that
prohibit certain behaviors of petitioners. I think there are a
total of 14 behaviors that they prohibit petitioners from
engaging in. This exceeds the number that are prohibited by the
national xinfang regulation.
So I'm wondering, do you think that these rules will be
implemented? Are these rules actually justifying activities
that authorities are already doing? What's behind some of these
rules, and will they be implemented? What has been the reaction
from petitioners, academics, or legal scholars regarding the
new rules?
Ms. Li. It's a reaction to the fact that the crackdown
hasn't worked, so they need other legal tools. Remember,
jiefang [intercepting petitioners] has no legal basis because
xinfang is allowed. So now they have to come up with a legal
foundation for doing so. So a way is to respond, they need
stronger legal tools, and a way is to sort of get ready for
harsher crackdown when the petitioners go to higher levels.
It's a reflection of the desperation felt at the local levels
by the authorities that they cannot stop the petitioners from
going.
So it is to justify what they're about to do. It's also a
way of getting public support by saying, ``Look, here are the
legal regulations, we're doing it according to the books.'' So
they first have the books ready, and then they can justify what
they are about to do, or they have been doing. The reactions--I
think it's too short of a time to have scholarly reactions. I
know the local human rights groups, the civil society groups
have reacted very negatively and angrily to the regulations.
Mr. Grob. Okay. And with that, we have reached 3:30.
Unfortunately, I have to conclude the proceedings. We would
like to thank you all for your participation, and thanks
especially to our panelists, Carl Minzner, Li Xiaorong, and Meg
Davis. We would also like to thank Dr. Anna Brettell, Senior
Advisor on the Commission staff, for organizing this panel.
Please look for the transcript, which will be posted on our
Web site, and keep your eyes on www.cecc.gov for our Annual
Report, our periodic reporting, and other events and special
topic reports that we post there.
With that, we'll conclude our proceedings. Thank you very
much.
[Whereupon, at 3:30 p.m., the roundtable was concluded.]
A P P E N D I X
=======================================================================
Prepared Statements
----------