When Qiu, an assistant manager at the Internet Forum of People’s Daily, returned from Hong Kong, he didn’t know that he was in deep trouble and had to run for his life. Qiu had gone to Hong Kong in late June to attend the International Federation of Journalists’ conference. During his stay, out of curiosity and the desire for first-hand experience, he attended the July 1 march for democracy and human rights, a protest rally held annually since the 1997 handover of Hong Kong from Britain to China.
After returning to Beijing, he was charged with “participating in the Hong Kong July 1 rally, possessing secret state documents, and speaking to outside sources without permission.” Instead of trying to go through the formal processes to clear his name, Qiu chose to run. He fled to Hong Kong on July 30.
Qiu, at 34 years of age and working for the official mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party Central Committee (CCPCC), could still have had a promising career inside the system if he had been able to clear his name. Now he is facing the painstaking process of asylum and an uncertain future.
There are two options in China for someone like Qiu who wants to clear his name. If formally charged he can defend himself in court, by himself or through his lawyer. Or he can go to the appeals office, formally called the Office for Letters and Calls.
When Qiu knew he was in trouble, his first thought was that he could hire a lawyer to defend him, or, at worst, spend a few years in jail. But his friends who had worked for the Public Security Bureau asked him if he could withstand constantly being slapped in the face, for seven days and nights. He finally decided not to risk going to court.
As for the other choice, Qiu has never mentioned the appeals office during interviews with the media. It would be surprising if he did. Even though thousands of people go to the central appeals office in Beijing every day, officials inside the system, either Party cadres or state officials, hardly ever do so.
According to Mr. Guo Guoting, a former human rights lawyer in China who sought asylum in Canada in 2005, the Office for Letters and Calls was created by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), “Because the CCP wants to keep all power in its own hands, taking power away from the judicial courts. The courts don’t have any authority, and the Office for Letters and Calls is totally controlled by the CCP.”
The people of China go to the appeals office, according to Guo, “because the people have no other place to go.”
Those inside the system understand that the appeals office functions as a safety valve for the regime, giving hope that official misconduct could be redressed, but almost never resolving the cases brought before it.
According to Guo, “The Chinese people don’t really understand the law with regard to petitioning, or how the law is actually carried out. They don’t get it. In reality, where petitioning can actually solve the problems is in less than 0.1 percent of cases.”
Safety Valve Closed
On Aug. 18, Xinhua News Agency published a Q & A for the “Opinions on Enhancing and Improving the Work of Letters and Calls Concerning Law and Litigation” (the Opinions) by the Political and Judiciary Committee of CCPCC. The Opinions terminate any petition to the central level, that is, the Office of the State Bureau of Letters and Calls in Beijing.
The Letters and Calls Office is a system unique to China. There is nothing like it anywhere else in the world. In ancient China, the head of the local government was also the judge. If someone thought that he didn’t get justice at the local level, he had the option of appealing to higher levels of administration, all the way up to the emperor.
Appeals came at some cost. For example, the petitioner would roll over a wood board full of nails with the sharp ends up (Gun Ding Ban in Chinese) to prove that he was wrongfully accused and was willing to suffer that much to seek redress. The most famous case in the Qing Dynasty involved a couple whose case was reversed by the Empress Dowager Cixi herself, with the corrupt officials being punished. The case was portrayed in a classic play called Yang Naiwu and the Small Colza.
In 1911, the petition system disappeared along with the Qing Dynasty. The Nationalist government adopted the Western legal system and the administrative and the judicial systems were separated. When the CCP took over China in 1949, however, it considered re-establishing the petition system outside the legal system as necessary, in order to show how tightly the Party was linked to the people. After the Cultural Revolution, the CCPCC re-established the Office of the State Bureau for Letters and Calls in Beijing with the same idea, without realizing the difficulties the office would enmesh the regime in.
For the past decade or more, social injustice has increased as the economy has developed. Farmers who have lost their lands, city residents who have lost their homes, and state enterprise workers who have lost their jobs are being mistreated by the local Party and state officials, the police, and the courts. After months or even years of fighting with the local legal system and the local appeal offices in vain, individuals come to Beijing to the Office of Letters and Calls, their last hope for finding justice.
The most famous incident happened 10 years ago, in April 1999, when more than ten thousand Falun Gong practitioners showed up outside Zhongnanhai, the administrative offices and living quarters for the top Party officials. The practitioners had actually attempted to go to the Office of State Letters and Calls, which is down the street from Zhongnanhai, but police had diverted them, arranging it so that they were made to surround Zhongnanhai.
A report by the Chinese Human Rights Defenders (CHRD), “Silencing Complaints: Human Rights Abuses Against Petitioners in China,” quotes the mainland newspaper Southern Weekend as saying that “According to official statistics there were ten million petitioning cases in China” in 2003.
The report goes on to observe that “Considering that the Chinese government has a tendency to adjust downward numbers that may reflect negatively on its performance, there is reason to believe that the number of petitioning cases, and therefore the number of petitioners, could be several tens of millions.”
Petitioners in Beijing seek cheap lodgings near the South Train Station, or live in makeshift shacks constructed on open ground, or become homeless, sleeping under bridges or on the streets. According to CHRD, there are reports of petitioners dieing during Beijing snowstorms.
They regularly go to the appeals office to press their case and often hold impromptu protests on Tiananmen Square or elsewhere in downtown Beijing.
In order to try to gain control over the swelling crowd of petitioners, the State Council issued a new regulation on the Office of Letters and Calls in 2005. That regulation put very tight restrictions on petitions.
Now, only four years later, the CCPCC has now issued another regulation, the Opinions, which goes even further, ending petitions in Beijing.
The issuing of the Opinions has the appearance of following legal form, but in fact violates the legal institutions of China. The Party has no legal right to issue such a regulation, which is supposed to come from the State Council.
But the reality of the legal system in China regularly differs from appearances. On paper the legal system is independent, in actuality, the Party calls the shots. This time the Party has chosen to close off the safety valve the Party had built into the regime.
This at least clarifies things. The people now know they can no longer expect Qing Tian. “Qing Tian” means blue skies, and in ancient China referred to the justice brought by a good official in a bad system. That hope is now gone for China.
Additional reporting by Matthew Robertson
