MCLC: Yu Hua on grievances

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: Anne Henochowicz <annemh at alumni.upenn.edu>
Subject: Yu Hua on grievances
***********************************************************

Source: NYT (1/1/12):
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/02/opinion/in-china-the-grievances-keep-comi
ng.html

In China, the Grievances Keep Coming
By YU HUA Beijing

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
China¹s 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 petitioners¹ local
governments to look into them. But years of failure have sharpened the
petitioners¹ 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.

Here¹s an example. In the fall of 2007, during the Chinese Communist
Party¹s 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 man¹s wife.

The pay-off should not surprise us. Alarmed by worsening social unrest,
government officials have adopted ³stability maintenance² 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 lawyers¹ association: ³The train
collision is a major, sensitive incident that bears on social stability.²
The notice directed lawyers to ³immediately report² all requests for legal
assistance to the judicial bureau and the lawyers¹ association and not to
³respond to such requests without authorization.²

When the contents of this circular were revealed by the news media, an
uproar ensued. The lawyers¹ association took responsibility and issued an
apology, saying it had issued the notice without judicial permission.

But the lawyers¹ association takes orders from the judiciary, so this
apology was greeted on the Internet with derision. It reminded me of the
old adage, ³A soldier fears his superior more than he fears the foe.²

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 ³Little Three.² The expression appears in a joke
about three kindergartners who want to play house.

³I¹ll be the daddy,² the boy says.

³I¹ll be the mommy,² one girl says.

Another girl frowns: ³I guess I¹ll have to be Little Three.²

If the law, the grievance process and stability maintenance were ever to
play house, I think we¹d see the following exchange:

³I¹m the daddy,² Stability Maintenance says.

³I¹m the mommy,² Grievance Process says.

The Law pouts. ³Well, I¹m Little Three.²

Yu Hua is the author of ³China in Ten Words.² This essay was translated by
Allan H. Barr from the Chinese.