Road to Petition

• Source: The Global Times
• [22:18 April 29 2009]
• Comments

By Li Hongwei

Undeterred by threats, beatings and detention, defiant doctor joins the long line of petitioners aiming to beat the odds

Yang Xianfen from the city of Liupanshui in Guizhou Province displays train tickets and receipts from nine years of petitioning in Beijing. Finally in 2007 her father Yang Zongfa (15-year sentence), mother Li Mingying (10-year sentence) and husband Xie Hua (five-year sentence) were cleared of all charges in the murder of her grandfather Zhang Huaxiu.

In the darker shadows of the dilapidated underpasses by Beijing South train station lurk desperate people. They come from all over China, yearning for grievances to be addressed. The road the petitioner walks is not just long and dangerous, but – most likely – futile.

One out of every 500 petitioners, or 0.2 percent, have their problem actually solved, noted Yu Jianrong, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, in his 2004 report The Deficiency of Petition System and its Political Consequences. Each and every petition is a reminder for the government to redouble its efforts at ongoing legal reform.

It’s a chilly March morning as Shan Yajuan, a 40-year-old medical doctor from Heilongjiang Province, crams on a bendy bus to the State Bureau for Letters and Calls, the country’s central petition office. She gets off a stop ahead of her destination and instead walks around the corner from the railway station via secluded alleys.

“I received a couple of strange phone calls this morning,” she says. “I’m afraid they know my whereabouts.”