China's most recent white paper on human rights, issued in September, claimed continued progress, as did earlier ones. For example, it said that 'in 2009, the number of letters from, and visits of, the people for petition dropped by 2.7 per cent over the previous year, a decrease for the fifth consecutive year'.
It added: 'Leading officials of all levels of the [Communist] Party and government are required to read and reply to letters from the masses, open their offices to complaints from visitors on a regular basis, take responsibility for the cases they handle and be held responsible for any dereliction of duty.'
This sounds good in theory but, in practice, the system doesn't work. Local officials go to great lengths to keep residents from petitioning and central government officials encourage their local counterparts not to allow petitioners to travel to Beijing.
Last week, The New York Times published a devastating article on how potential petitioners - including anyone with a grievance who may want to lodge a petition - are thrown into psychiatric hospitals regardless of the state of their mental health.
One example cited was Xu Lindong, a poor farmer in Henan province who was locked up in Zhumadian Psychiatric Hospital after he filed complaints against the local government over a land dispute. The government committed him to a mental hospital and kept him there and at a second mental institution for 6 1/2 years.
The savage treatment to which petitioners are subject was publicised in July, after the wife of a Hubei provincial official was beaten so badly by plain-clothes policemen that she was admitted to hospital. She had been mistaken for a petitioner.
Subsequently, the head of the local public security bureau apologised, saying: 'It was a mistake. We were not aware that we had beaten the wife of an important official.'