Dozens of Petitioners Detained in Beijing Before Petition Law Anniversary

The clampdown on citizens who flocked to the Chinese capital seeking justice for a wide range of grievances intensified over the past two weeks.

Police officers patrol an area outside Beijing's Tiananmen Square on World Press Freedom Day on May 3, 2020. Nicolas Asfouri/AFP via Getty Images

Ahead of the 20th anniversary of China’s petitioning system, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) escalated efforts to intercept petitioners arriving in Beijing.

Dozens of Chinese citizens who flocked to the Chinese capital seeking justice for a wide range of grievances over the past two weeks were rounded up or detained by police as they made their way to the central petitioning office, according to activists.

The Chinese regime set up its petition system decades ago, inviting citizens to directly address with central authorities issues or injustices caused by local officials. Numerous people from across the country travel to Beijing each year to file their petitions, especially before major political meetings or anniversaries. Petitioners believe that during these times, with more officials gathered in the capital, they have a better chance of having their grievances heard and corrected by someone in authority.

In response, the CCP typically ramps up its already stringent security measures ahead of dates deemed sensitive, stopping petitioners and preventing any potential escalation into protests at the nation’s political center.

One of the latest petitioners to be targeted was Gu Guoping, a retired university lecturer from Shanghai, who was intercepted on April 27 near the central petitioning office. Gu had traveled to Beijing to submit complaints about previous unlawful detentions, alongside five other petitioners who were there to submit separate complaints.

“Our demand is for the Chinese communist government to honor international treaties, respect the human rights of Chinese citizens, and resolve long-ignored grievances from victims of rights violations,” Gu told The Epoch Times.

The Chinese regime published its Regulations on Letters and Visits (“petitioning regulations”) in January 2005, and they became effective on May 1 that year. Bureaus and offices were set up at various levels of the government as an alternative to formal Chinese legal channels, allowing Chinese nationals to seek to redress their grievances. These Chinese citizens are called “petitioners” in China.

After the petitioning regulations took effect, in the first quarter of 2005 written complaints to the State Council Petitions Bureau in Beijing surged by 99.4 percent and in-person visits rose by 94.9 percent year over year, according to Human Rights Watch, a nongovernmental organization that conducts research and advocacy on human rights globally.

Beijing hosts the central office for Letters and Visits, where petitioners go to file their complaints seeking justice.

Their efforts are frequently met with violence, and many are kept in mass detention sites, or “black jails,” waiting to be sent back to their hometowns.

Police and Checkpoints Everywhere in Beijing

Gu told The Epoch Times on April 30 that he went to the central petitioning office at about 3:40 p.m. on April 27 upon his arrival in Beijing, well before its official closing time of 5 p.m. However, he was turned away without explanation.

The next day, Gu and the group gathered near Lixue Hutong, close to Zhongnanhai, the office compound that houses the CCP’s top government and party bodies.

Gu said there were many policemen near Zhongnanhai. The police stopped them, checked their IDs, and put them all on a bus that took them to Jiu Jing Zhuang, a residential compound in the southwest of Beijing. A building in the residential compound is used as a detention facility for petitioners who have come to Beijing from across the country.

Gu has been petitioning for redress in the loss of his family’s property since 2001. Gu, a university lecturer at the time, saw the homes and property of his entire extended family, spanning four households and nine people, forcibly demolished without any legal procedures. He and his family have not received either compensation or resettlement yet.

Another group of four petitioners from Shanghai took a bus to Zhongnanhai on April 28. The bus was stopped by police when it was still three stops away from the central government compound. Those passengers with big luggage or backpacks were regarded as petitioners by the police and were forcibly sent to Jiu Jing Zhuang.

On April 26, a group of 12 Shanghai petitioners traveling to Beijing via the railway got off the train at Langfang, a city about 40 miles south of Beijing, hoping to avoid the checkpoints at Beijing Railway Station. They took a long-distance bus heading to Beijing but were intercepted by police at a checkpoint outside Beijing.

Petitioners are intercepted at a checkpoint in Langfang, China, on April 26, 2025. Courtesy of Anonymous Petitioner

“There were so many petitioners in Jiu Jing Zhuang,“ a petitioner from Shanghai, who asked to stay anonymous for fear of retaliation, said. ”They had to open a new building to hold everyone. Some people are being sent home tomorrow, others the day after.”

On April 29, 39 petitioners were forcibly escorted back to Shanghai on a train, Gu told The Epoch Times.

Shanghai petitioners are forcibly escorted back to Shanghai by train on April 29, 2025. Courtesy of Anonymous Petitioner

Petitioners from Chongqing were also intercepted by police in various localities in Beijing in late April.

On April 26, Chongqing veterans He Fanrong and Yang Ziyou were stopped at the Beijing Railway Station. They were identified as petitioners while applying for transit cards using their IDs. They were later held at the Qianmen Bus Station police post.

The Epoch Times attempted to contact He by phone after receiving SOS messages from him but was unsuccessful.

Another case involves Li Xiaorong from Chongqing’s Fuling District, who was abducted by unidentified individuals on April 23 in Beijing’s Changping District. She has not been heard from since. The Epoch Times’ repeated calls to her phone have gone unanswered.

‘Black Jails’ and Psychiatric Prisons

Jiu Jing Zhuang is one of the detention centers in Beijing that keeps petitioners. An international rights advocacy group—Chinese Human Rights Defenders (CHRD)—calls such facilities illegal, as they “operate completely outside China’s judicial system” and “have no legal basis in Chinese law.”

CHRD said in a 2008 report that there were at the time three such detention facilities in Fengtai, a district in the southwest of Beijing. The organization reported four more such facilities in Beijing and many more in other parts of China.

The human rights organization said that the violent interception and detention of petitioners are performed by state officials, usually “under the eyes of the police, and often with their active cooperation.” Detainees are subject to beatings and could be “held incommunicado for months without charge, trial or access to legal counsel.”

Gu’s bio on his account on social media platform X states what he has experienced in the past 20 years: “[I] petitioned in Beijing over a hundred times, was criminally detained six times, sentenced and imprisoned for a year and a half, and had four ribs broken while being held in a black jail for six months.”

The CHRD condemns such state-sanctioned “black jails,” which have become “increasingly extensive and systematic.”

The Epoch Times is unable to verify if the facilities reported by the CHRD are still in operation. The Epoch Times reached out to Jiu Jing Zhuang and did not receive a reply by publication time.

Worse yet is that the Chinese communist regime forcibly locks up petitioners in police-run psychiatric prisons without medical justification, according to Safeguard Defenders (SD), a pan-Asian human rights nongovernmental organization.

“Victims are locked up for days, weeks, months or years, some have been there for more than a decade,” SD wrote in a 2022 report, noting that the majority of these victims are petitioners and that some “are sent back repeatedly, some more than a dozen times.”

Petitioning System ‘Massive Scam and Trap’: Petitioner

Gu condemned the CCP’s petitioning regulations as “a system designed to cover up the CCP’s lack of legitimacy” that violates “the spirit and core principles of international law and treaties.”

“At its core, the petitioning system is a massive scam and trap,” he told The Epoch Times in a phone interview on April 30.

“The petitioning system forces you to return to your hometown to resolve the issue—yet the local authorities are often the very ones who created the wrongful case against you. You’re told to seek justice from your abuser. The result is the opposite of resolution. Not only are the problems left unsolved, they just keep getting worse.

“I believe the very creation of the petitioning regulations is unfair, unjust, unlawful, disconnected from public opinion and social reality, and ultimately fails to address the root problems—it is a harmful system.”

Li Xi and Dorothy Li contributed to this report.