Chinese county’s rare disclosure sheds light on plight of nation’s petitioners
Local government says it spent more than US$48,000 trying to ‘dissuade’ resident’s petitioning
Following a practice which dates back to imperial times, hundreds of thousands of petitioners from across China stream into Beijing each year in the hope that their grievances, often spawned by local officials, will be rectified once central authorities are made aware of their plight.
Anxious not to look bad in front of their political masters in the capital, the same local officials despatch teams to travel across provincial lines to intercept, detain and forcibly return petitioners home.
It is a bleak game of cat and mouse that plays out all year but intensifies during periods when politically sensitive meetings are held, like the National People’s Congress which begins in Beijing this weekend.
The case of Wang Fengyun – a villager from Duolun county in Inner Mongolia who travelled to Beijing nine times to seek justice over an alleged local government land grab – would have been otherwise unremarkable.
But having detained and charged Wang, as well as her husband and her father, with “picking quarrels and provoking trouble”, the Duolun government proceeded to detail the time and cost it invested in “dissuading” her persistent petitioning over five years, according to documents seen by Reuters tendered in court as proof of her “extremely harmful” behaviour.