China Law Blog

Ms Harm's fiance is a native born Chinese accused of a crime by (typical) local officials. He has been in the klink without trial or formal charges. She is trying to use the petitioning system and is getting about as far as most Chinese, nowhere. She was even detained during Obama's visit. Shades of "Red Corner" as the US embassy let her languish. Our tax dollars not at work and apparently Americans abroad who aren't Fortune 500 execs or wealthy investors don't mean a hill of beans to the State Dept.

She at least may have standing as the fiance of a PRC citizen, a foreign business may have a harder time. Probably just better to hire good local attorneys and let them do their thing.

Just a suggestion Dan but would u consider running a live chat once a week so u can interact with your readers. Just a thought.

Petitioning isn't worth the cost of the flight to Beijing.

Interesting post. That is a creative way of looking at additional possible avenues for legal remedies in China.

This relates to China's "black jails" that I have been seeing more of in the Western news. Both the WSJ and CNN have run stories in the last few months of how petitioners from local provinces are intercepted by handlers in Beijing that are connected to the local province. In order to avoid looking bad by the central govt the handlers manage to re-direct the petitioners into quasi-legal "black jail" detention centers, which are often just half-star hotels. They keep them there under force until they give up pursing their petition. Some of the stories are really quite heart-breaking. The treatment in these black jails can be worse than the problem they came to petition.

Anyway, to the extent one would encourage a Chinese national to pursue this avenue, the risk of ending up in a black jail should be weighed very seriously.

The petitioners I've interviewed were pretty much all nothing-to-lose cases: people who'd lost their only children, or had no home to go back to. A couple of them were genuinely crazy -- one of them informed me, after giving me a great quote about the mental hospitals petitioners are sometimes sent to ("if you aren't crazy they'll make you crazy"), that he was actually the sun. All of them had been sleeping rough under a bridge or in parks near the petitions office; most of them were on their second or third trip to Beijing. I can't see many foreigners putting up with the things those people put up for any reason -- much less just to resolve their visa issues.

Agreeing with Richard. I get that consensus plays a big role in resolving disputes in China, but having read quite a bit about Chinese petitioners (whom Jonathan Watts has called "China's most desperate underclass...probably the only group with lower social status than the peasantry.") and their cases over the past few years, my understanding is that people with grievances that they feel haven't been dealt with sufficient redress locally often end up stuck for years in an unsympathetic system that more often than not only continues to fail them further.

Given the relationship between local authorities and Beijing and Beijing's lack of jurisdiction in far-off or rural areas, it's not hard to see why any effectively non-binding decision that a petition office in Beijing manages to reach between petitioners and the parties involved can easily end discarded once people return home.

As I see it, keeping petition offices open only serves to retard the rule of law, taking pressure off most courts to handle (受理)—conflict of economic interest, for example—sensitive cases and makes it easier for them just to say, take it to Beijing.

Last year journalist turned documentary director Zhou Hao (周浩) was working on a film made from footage he shot over the course of several weeks from inside a rural Letters and Petition (信访) office in Fujian province, worth a watch if it's been released.

I agree with dude putting a live chat would help your readers a lot.

One issue with petitioners is that I very seriously doubt that they are petitioning for the purpose of getting something done.

Also, it's been suggested to move the petitioners into the courts, but I don't think that's such a great idea. One problem is that in most situations, the law is often very strongly against the petitioners which is why they are petitioning. If you have a land claim and the law is on your side, then the court system works pretty well. The trouble with a lot of these petitioners is that the law *isn't* on their side.

The other issue is that a lot of disputes involve economic factors that courts can't deal with easily.

If a court orders a local government to pay money, but the local government is dead broke, that's not going to help anything. Also if a petitioner wins in court that can set a precedent in which tons of people with similar claims come out of the woodwork, demanding money from a government that is dead broke.