Petitioners' grievances were once heard during the National People's Congress. Not any more, writes CLIFFORD COONAN.
SOME OF the petitioners were at the wrong end of unfair court judgments, some were victims of medical malpractice, but the lion’s share of angry visitors from Shanghai who gathered outside a Beijing police station were angry at receiving poor compensation for the demolition of their houses.
About 100 Shanghai residents came to the station yesterday to obtain permission to march during the National People’s Congress, China’s annual parliament, but their chances of being allowed to do this were never great.
Police quickly intervened and they were detained or dispersed – word of their arrival had been sent from Shanghai, and they were held before being sent from China’s political capital back to its financial capital.
Zhang Cuiping (47) used to run a small shop in her community on Zhabei Road in Shanghai, just 15 minutes’ walk from Shanghai railway station and five minutes from the Nanjing Road shopping precinct.
Their land was taken by official order to build a skyscraper. They received little compensation and were driven out of the area in 2001. Now she is unemployed and doesn’t really know what to do.
“Since 2002, my husband and I began to petition various petition bureaus in Shanghai, but they were all part of the police and they did not care. Then we came many times to Beijing to petition,” said Zhang.
She came to Beijing yesterday with her husband of 12 years, Tian Baocheng (51).
Petitioning is an ancient system dating from the imperial age, where Chinese people who felt they were being abused by the system turned to the emperor for help, travelling to Beijing to petition for the assistance of the supreme authority.
The tradition has continued in the communist era, but in the last few years it has become a tricky practice.
Any petitioners seen near Tiananmen Square are rounded up and often jailed in “petitioners’ hotels”, which are basically detention centres.
It used to be that petitioners were heard during the National People’s Congress, but fear of social unrest means those days are gone. During big public gatherings like the congress there is a blanket ban on petitioners coming to the capital and, in the run-up to the Olympics last August, there were roadblocks outside the city stopping people coming in to air their grievances.
“Every time we come to Beijing, plainclothes policemen from the Beijing liaison office of the Shanghai government take us to railway station and send us back. In the train they often beat us,” said Zhang.
Last week, the Tiananmen Mothers, a group representing families of demonstrators killed or maimed in the armed crackdown on the Tiananmen Square protests 20 years ago, urged the government to name the dead, denouncing official silence over the anniversary.
Three family members who set themselves on fire in a car in Beijing last month were Uighurs, an ethnic group from China’s far-western frontier, who had come to the capital to petition lawmakers.
The price Zhang’s family paid for petitioning the authorities was high – she said she was given 2½ years of “re-education through labour”, while her husband got 1½ years of re-education through labour and a prison sentence of 2½ years.
“They can sentence us for any fake crime. We all have no other options,” said Zhang.
Her husband was a bus driver for 31 years but was fired after he was detained and sentenced.
The family now relies on the 400 yuan (€46) they get every month on relief, which is less than the minimum basic living allowance in a rich city like Shanghai.
“We cannot live on such little money,” she said.