Incentives for local officials to block petitioning and punish petitioners

Specific incentives impel local officials to prevent petitioning and to persecute persistent petitioners. Such incentives range from general directives to orders to monetary rewards. 

While there is little public scrutiny of government officials in China, there is a system of internal performance review. A “point deduction system” means that when a petitioner from a certain local area lodges a complaint at a Letters and Visits Office managed by a higher authority, that authority deducts points from or fines the relevant authorities at the lower level, and the punishment is passed down through the layers of government, getting heavier each time, until it reaches the location of origin of the complaint or petitioner. As a result, those at lower levels have a strong incentive to try their best to prevent petitioners from lodging complaints. The incentive to intercept petitioners gets stronger as petitioners lodge complaints with higher levels of government. The incentive to intercept also gets stronger as petitioners organize themselves into larger groups.³⁸ For example, in Shimen County, Hunan Province, a local government unit gets 0.5 points deducted if a group of 6 to 20 petitioners lodges a complaint against it at the county level, but 5 points deducted if the group is larger than 100 people.³⁹ 

At lower levels, this system also leads to the establishment of rewards for agencies that engage in persecution of petitioners. A set of regulations concerning petitioners from Jiangyong County government, Hunan Province, states:  

“If the county PSB detains one petitioner, the reward is RMB 2,000 (US$282); for sending one petitioner to RTL camp, the reward is RMB 6,000 (US$844); for investigating a petitioner's criminal responsibility, the PSB receives RMB 6,000, the county Procuratorate receives RMB 2,000 and the county court RMB 2,000.” ⁴⁰ 

In Hunan’s Shimen County, an official document describes a system of points awarded to interceptors who persecute petitioners and deducted from those who fail to do so:  

“Regarding those who go to petition at the provincial capital or to Beijing and those who persistently petition unreasonably, if they are returned to the county and sent to law learning classes in a timely manner…add two points [to the relevant units directly under the township, district and county government]. Failure to implement this, deduct half-a-point [from the relevant units directly under the township, district and county government].”⁴¹  

Similarly, in Yilan County, Heilongjiang Province, a government document states:  

“Especially regarding petitioners who go to Beijing, regardless of the reasonableness of their petitions, the PSB and the Court…are specifically responsible for re-assigning staff and vehicles to forcibly return petitioners. At the same time, evidence needs to be collected and transferred so that petitioners can be legally subjected to 15 days of either administrative or judicial detention. Send repeated petitioners to RTL camps.”⁴² 

It is believed that such documents promoting the suppression of petitioners have been issued by local governments around the country. There is also cause to believe that higher government authorities are responsible for, or at least are aware of and actively encourage, such actions by local governments. Certainly the criteria for the evaluation of the performance of officials are set at the highest level, but there is also evidence of more specific involvement. For example, the aforementioned regulations by Jiangyong County government state that these express “the spirit” of a document that originated at provincial level.⁴³ ,

Letters and Visits turned into profitable businesses

Although the Letters and Visits system is supposed to help citizens appeal against wrongful treatment, in practice it protects the interests of those in power accused of wrongdoing. This is partly because the political careers of Letters and Visits officials and the funding of Letters and Visits Offices depend on those in power. Also, the phenomenon of using petitioners as a means of exchange, of holding petitioners for ransom, as described below, has become commonplace.

All central government Letters and Visits Offices have relationships with interceptors from various local governments stationed in Beijing. When petitioners come to obtain registration forms to file their petitions, the Letters and Visits Offices immediately and secretly notify the interceptors from the relevant local areas. When the same petitioners return to hand in their forms, they are taken away by the interceptors. Many petitioners do not even get a chance to register their petitions. When the Offices record the petitions, the records become one basis upon which higher authorities decide to deduct performance points or seek reductions in the budgets of local governments.  

Petitions regarding local governments at an even lower administrative level (for example, at the district level) that do have not established relationships with central government Letters and Visits Offices in Beijing are first registered by the central government Letters and Visits Offices, which then notify the local governments’ liaison offices in Beijing of the registration and ask them what they would like to do to “remedy the situation.” The local governments usually pay a bribe to cancel the registered petition. In the words of a Henan county official, “For cancellation, you only pay an economic price; without cancellation, you pay a price in your career….the result affects the image of the county Party committee and the county government…. This is not responsibility a certain individual or a certain unit can afford.”⁴⁴ Cancellations are carried out to protect the image of the local party officials, so they can avoid being investigated by higher authorities. 

Although the official number of petitions is about 10 million, the number is likely to be far greater because many petitions go unregistered. Petitioners whose local governments have no relationships with the Letters and Visits Offices in Beijing are more likely to be able to successfully lodge their petitions; others face significant obstacles to doing so.  

Other government departments have found “creative” ways of capitalizing on the desire of local authorities to block petitioners. For example, Youanmen police station under Beijing Municipal PSB has frequently “sold” petitioners they caught at RMB 500-1,000 (US$71-142) apiece to the relevant interceptors. If the interceptors from the relevant local governments refuse to pay, the petitioners are then sent to Majia Building, a government facility, where petitions are processed. As a result, many local governments are willing to “buy back” their petitioners from the police.

Vagueness of the Regulations on Letters and Visits

A number of articles and clauses in the Regulations provide opportunities for the violation of petitioners’ rights. The system of “self-review” outlined by Article 4, the restriction on collective petitioning stipulated by Article 18 and the list of vaguely-defined “crimes” described in Article 20 encourage officials to retaliate against petitioners, whether petitioning individually or in groups, and provide ready legal basis to do so.

System of “self-review”

Under the current system of petitioning, a complaint about a particular agency will be handed back to it to deal with, even if it has failed to do so in the past. According to Chapter 4, Article 21, Clause 3 of the Regulations,  

“With regard to a letter-or-visit matter which involves an administrative organ at a lower level or its staff members, directly transfer the matter to the administrative organ which has the power to handle it according to the principle of territorial jurisdiction, responsibilities assumed at different levels, and the department in charge being the department responsible, and send a copy of the matter to the department or unit for letters and visits of the people's government at the next lower level.”  

A direct result of this principle of “territorial jurisdiction” is that the government departments or the officials responsible for the alleged wrongdoing described in the petition are also the ones responsible for dealing with the petitions. This system means that there is no impartial third party that processes the dispute. As a result, few petitions are successful. It also lays the foundation for the persecution of petitioners by angry officials who have an interest in evading accountability for wrongdoing and punishing accusers or whistleblowers. Interestingly, Article 23 of the Regulations prohibits Letters and Visits staff from divulging “the materials of accusation…or the relevant information provided by a letter-writer or visitor to the individual or department accused or exposed.” Articles 4 and 23 thus directly contradict each other. Article 23 is routinely violated by Letters and Visits staff in their handling of petitions.

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