China’s petitioners demand answers
Posted: Tuesday, January 06, 2009 1:38 PM
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Beijing, China
By Adrienne Mong, NBC News Producer
SHIJIAZHUANG, Hebei Province, China – At first we thought we had hit the jackpot.
It was a brisk winter morning when my colleague, Gu Bo, and I arrived at the Shijiazhuang Intermediate People’s Court in Hebei’s capital last week. Inside, the former head of Sanlu Group, a leading Chinese dairy company, was standing trial for her role in the melamine-tainted milk scandal that has sickened hundreds of thousands of infants and caused the deaths of a handful of others. Outside, we hoped, would be families of victims.
As we stepped out of the car with a small camera, groups of Chinese approached us, waving sheaves of documents. Excellent, I thought, parents who are willing to talk to the press and they have medical records of their sick children.
But it turned out I was wrong
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| Adrienne Mong/NBC News |
| Petitioners like these people approached the NBC News team outside a courthouse in Hebei's capital. |
Tu Min, a 50-something-year-old woman carrying a tote bag brimming with papers, was one of the first to park herself in front of us as we fiddled with our camera. She pressed several papers into Bo’s hands. "You are media. You can help me, please," she said.
Bo looked through the documents and realized that the woman was not the parent or even grandparent of a child sick from drinking powdered milk containing melamine. Tu was just a petitioner.
And so were the others who trailed us around the edge of the courthouse, eager to enlist the help of journalists to publicize their grievances.
A system from imperial days
Petitioning – also known as the system of letters and visits – is a legal tradition apparently unique to China and dating back hundreds of years to imperial times.
Common citizens would travel to the capital, as a last resort, to submit petitions before the emperor or the Minister of Justice after failing to resolve their case through local channels, whether it be local government officials or the local court system.
The practice was resurrected during the Mao era. And today, petitioners "reflect some of the very, very serious problems…which people cannot get redress for at the local level due to various reasons – whether it’s corrupt officials, whether it’s due to a thuggish security service, or the fact that their problems stray into issues of entrenched interests," explained a human rights researcher and specialist on China who asked to remain anonymous.
Tu hadn’t yet reached the point of traveling to the Chinese capital – four hours away by car from Shijiazhuang – but she had tried the usual avenues and gotten nowhere. Her goal was to secure compensation owed to her husband, Liu Tie Zhu, by a hospital that had admitted to malpractice during treatment he received back in 2003.
Among the documents she gave us was an agreement drawn up by the hospital, stating that Liu would be eligible for up to 80,000 yuan (roughly $12,000) so long as he did not pursue a lawsuit against the institution. Liu, who is now disabled, signed the contract, but it seems he and his wife never received the money.
Tu’s story had nothing to do with the trial over tainted milk going on inside the courthouse, but she wanted us to report her case in the faint hope that a news report would galvanize local authorities.
‘Try to bring order’
"These people are most often the most vulnerable people in Chinese society, but they’re also the last of the true believers," said the human rights expert. "They live in a world without rules and so they do everything to try to bring order and logic and fairness to their world by extensively documenting their experiences in the hope that some authority at a higher level – who is not subject to the type of interference, lack of interest, indolence, possible retribution that they face at the local level – will actually do something."
Retribution is a serious problem for petitioners.
Studies by Chinese academics indicate that, in some years, the State Petition Office confirmed as many as 80 percent of petitioners’ cases were legitimate, but only one percent were resolved. Moreover, more than 50 percent of these petitioners suffered from reprisals as a result of their efforts.
In recent years, the Chinese government has introduced reforms to the system, but critics say petitioning still remains a poor substitute for a rigorous legal system. And while central authorities say they are supportive of petitioning, their actions sometimes suggest they are not.
In late 2007, Beijing’s Petitioners’ Village – an ad hoc community of thousands of petitioners from around the country – was demolished well ahead of the Summer Olympics. Not long after, it was rumored that the central government had ordered all provincial officials to keep petitioners from traveling to the capital in the months leading up to the Olympic Games.
More recently, state-run Chinese media reported last month that petitioners in Shandong Province had been forced into mental hospitals during the past two years for "disturbing the social order."
And this year, petitioning could be on the rise, in tandem with more widely reported disgruntlement. A report released this week predicts a surge in so-called "mass incidents," or large-scale protests across the China – owing to growing economic uncertainty.
If so, officials may be wishing more for petitioners like Tu and their modest demands.
