In China, the Grievances Keep Coming

A peculiar feature of Chinese society is that a complaint process runs parallel to, but outside, the legal system.

Victims of corruption and injustice have no faith in the law, and yet they dream that an upright official will emerge to right their wrongs. Although a complaint mechanism is in place at all levels of Chinese government, petitioners seem to believe that the central authorities are less susceptible to corruption, and so make Beijing their destination. By some estimates, more than 10 million complaints are filed around the country each year, far more than are heard by the regular courts.

Law in China, at least on paper, is more firmly established than it once was, and some legal experts propose doing away with the grievance system. But the government has retained it — perhaps it, too, lacks confidence in China’s laws. Also — and crucially — it wants to leave the petitioners some slender hope, a fantasy that one day injustice will find redress. If all hope is lost, petitioners may take more extreme action.

Often, the State Bureau for Letters and Visits simply goes through the motions of registering the complaints, then asks the petitioners’ local governments to look into them. But years of failure have sharpened the petitioners’ wits. They know that the only way they can put pressure on their local governments is by persistent, repeated visits to Beijing, and they realize that collective visits are even more effective. The government rigidly controls demonstrations, but the collective submission of a complaint remains a means for ordinary people to exert pressure.

At the same time, some petitioners have come to focus more on the process of lodging a complaint than on the outcome. Seeing the judiciary as biased and the grievance process as a sham, they treat petitioning as a means of extortion.

Here’s an example. In the fall of 2007, during the Chinese Communist Party’s 17th Congress, a man from Shandong Province phoned his village chief and told him he was in Tianjin and about to board a train for Beijing to appeal a miscarriage of justice. The village chief was shocked: if the petitioner were to appear in Tiananmen Square at such a prominent moment, not only would the chief lose his job, but his immediate superiors — the township and county chiefs — would be disgraced as well. He begged the villager not to go to Beijing. All right, the man said, but there was a price for his acquiescence: 20,000 yuan, about $2,600 at the time. The village chief put down the phone, withdrew this sum from public funds, and personally delivered it that very day, to the man’s wife.

The pay-off should not surprise us. Alarmed by worsening social unrest, government officials have adopted “stability maintenance” as a mantra — and a pretext to stifle protest. While the grievance process coexists politely with the regular legal system, the insistence on maintaining stability is, all too often, utterly at odds with it.

The priority now given to keeping order has enabled local officials to regain the initiative when there are complaints or protests. In the name of maintaining stability, the interception and detention of petitioners seems perfectly reasonable, and higher-ups look the other way.

After the collision of two high-speed trains near the southeastern city of Wenzhou last July, relatives of those killed and injured rushed to the scene. Three days later, law offices in Wenzhou received an urgent notice from the local judicial bureau and lawyers’ association: “The train collision is a major, sensitive incident that bears on social stability.” The notice directed lawyers to “immediately report” all requests for legal assistance to the judicial bureau and the lawyers’ association and not to “respond to such requests without authorization.”

When the contents of this circular were revealed by the news media, an uproar ensued. The lawyers’ association took responsibility and issued an apology, saying it had issued the notice without judicial permission.

But the lawyers’ association takes orders from the judiciary, so this apology was greeted on the Internet with derision. It reminded me of the old adage, “A soldier fears his superior more than he fears the foe.”

The recent episode in Wukan, a village in southern China where residents staged an uprising that received international attention, reflected the uneven balance among the grievance process, the legal system and the insistence on stability. Local officials ignored complaints about corruption involving the sale of farmland and then cracked down on the subsequent protests. The uproar was eventually resolved through political arrangements, not judicial action.

In China, an extramarital love interest who comes between a happy couple is known pejoratively as “Little Three.” The expression appears in a joke about three kindergartners who want to play house.

“I’ll be the daddy,” the boy says.

“I’ll be the mommy,” one girl says.

Another girl frowns: “I guess I’ll have to be Little Three.”

If the law, the grievance process and stability maintenance were ever to play house, I think we’d see the following exchange:

“I’m the daddy,” Stability Maintenance says.

“I’m the mommy,” Grievance Process says.

The Law pouts. “Well, I’m Little Three.”

By Yu Hua, the author of China in Ten Words. This essay was translated by Allan H. Barr from the Chinese.

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