Scrapping safety-valve petition could
backfire By Antoaneta
Bezlova
BEIJING - As China considers doing away
with one of its unique communist vestiges, the
shangfang - or system of petitioning the
government - there are fears that scrapping the only
channel available to people to air their grievances
might lead to a serious escalation of social unrest.
For more than 50 years of communist rule,
shangfang has provided the disgruntled with an
opportunity to gain redress from the highest levels of
government.
Communist China's founding fathers,
from late chairman Mao Zedong to paramount leader Deng
Xiaoping, used the petition system to present a
benevolent face to people who had been wronged by local
officials and deprived of the chance for a fair hearing
or trial. And sometimes they meted out justice and
defused unrest.
Now, however, social researchers
and legal experts argue this rather imperial way of
dispensing justice is undermining China's efforts to
establish a modern society based on the rule of law, not
the rule of senior leaders.
Disillusioned with
leaders and law enforcers at the local level, plaintiffs
often choose to spend months in Beijing petitioning
offices rather than go through the slow motions of the
Chinese courts. Yet the rapidly escalating number of
grievances has rendered the system totally inefficient,
and there seems to be mass discontent, according to
researchers.
The success rate of China's
petitioners is infinitesimal. Last year, the
government's China Petition Office received more than 10
million petitions, but just two out of every 1,000 cases
were resolved, according to a new survey published in
the Guangzhou-based Southern Weekend.
The
question now is: if the petitioning system is
maddeningly ineffective, what alternatives are there for
the poor to seek redress against corrupt local
officials?
"Many people are running afoul of our
proposals to abolish the system," said Yu Jianrong, a
researcher of rural issues with the Chinese Academy of
Social Sciences. "In fact, we don't propose to seal off
this outlet for redress - people can still use it to
voice their opinions - but we suggested to the
government to separate people's right to social relief
from the old system of petitioning top leaders.
"If the system is not reformed, the political
outcome for the government could be disastrous," Yu, who
is leading the team in charge of the shangfang
survey, told Southern Weekend.
The proposal,
submitted to the high echelons of Chinese government,
comes at a volatile time. In recent months China has
experienced a series of violent ethnic clashes and riots
that have forced open the floodgates of pent-up social
anger.
Despite restrictions on reporting, news
about various protests reflecting seething resentments
across this country of 1.3 billion have filtered through
the state-run media and prompted alarm among Chinese
leaders.
The Xinhua state news agency even
reported the five days of pitched battles this month
between thousands of Hui Muslims and Han Chinese
villagers in central Henan province. The agency said
seven people were killed and 42 injured, but other local
sources told foreign media that as many as 148 people
died, including 18 police officers.
The rioting
was triggered by a simple traffic accident, which pitted
the mostly Han residents of one village against Hui
Muslims from a neighboring hamlet. A number of other
riots, protests and clashes have been reported over the
past weeks, showing grievances were widespread and the
underprivileged driven to desperation.
In
another case of widespread civic unrest in Hanyuan
County in Sichuan province, villagers rioted over the
loss of their land to a dam project and the meager
compensation and relocation package offered by the
government. Up to 100,000 farmers clashed with the
police last week, forcing Chinese leaders to impose
martial law and dispatch droves of paramilitary police
to stabilize the area.
Despite China's economic
expansion, many citizens are simmering with discontent,
and independent observers say resentment among the
country's disenfranchised is running high.
More
than 3 million people took part in protests and
demonstrations in the month of September alone,
according to the New York-based Human Rights in China.
In more than 100 cases nationwide, protests escalated
into large, violent clashes between demonstrators and
local police, resulting in the torching of several
government buildings.
Those caught up in the
disputes - mostly farmers, industrial workers and
members of ethnic minorities - represent a wide spectrum
of disadvantaged groups. Unable to voice their
discontent, they are often ready to resort to drastic
action when their rights are trampled.
In one of
the most recent examples, seven migrant workers in the
northern city of Shenyang tried to commit pact suicide
by swallowing large doses of sleeping pills together. In
their case, replayed in many places throughout the
country, all their yearly wages had been stolen by the
building contractor who had recruited them to work, and
later fled the site once construction was finished.
The increasing social strife is an indication of
the widening wealth gap between China's rich and poor,
pervasive corruption and officials' aloofness toward
people's grievances. According to World Bank statistics,
income disparity in China is now wider than in India,
and nearing the levels in Latin America.
Most of
the rural protests occur when peasants are cheated of
their land by local officials, said Li Ping, the Beijing
representative of the Rural Development Institute, a
US-based non-governmental organization. "The problem of
illegal land seizures is widespread and can lead to even
more rural protests in the future," Li said in an
interview.
In China's rush toward modernization,
more than 40 million farmers have been displaced, and
the number is increasing by more than 2 million a year.
Farmers without land are now among the poorest people in
the country, said Zhao Dianguo, an official with the
Chinese Labor and Social Security Ministry.
Beijing fears that if the entrenched system of
petitioning is revoked, pent-up social anger could find
more dangerous outlets. Yet, top leaders have no
choice but to reform the obsolete mechanism of
shangfang, according to Yu Jianrong, the rural
researcher. "What we ultimately want is a rule by the
law and not the cult of honest officials and resolutions
scribbled on our petitions by superiors."
