Speak no evil in China

JOHN GARNAUT, BEIJING

November 14, 2009

LIU Yuhong’s problem began as a private land dispute with the family’s landlord. But small troubles have a habit of escalating in China, a country that lacks institutions for resolving disputes. Last year, Liu’s parents lodged a complaint at the local government’s petitions office. Since that brave move, the family has been drawn into a vortex of state-sanctioned kidnapping, ”black jails” and violence.

”My father is 69 years old and he is in a ‘re-education through labour’ camp,” she told The Age this week. ”A baby has died … and I don’t know whether my mother is dead. For a rural woman, that is too much.”

In the absence of an effective legal system, citizens are officially encouraged to take their grievances to a unique Chinese institution called Letters and Calls. These petitions offices were established in imperial times and have since been replicated at almost every tier of government. The design flaw of the petitions system is fundamental: the offices are typically run by the same officials that the petitioners are complaining about.

When petitioners don’t get results at the local level they tend to aim higher, in Beijing. Professor Yu Jianrong, of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, surveyed 632 Beijing petitioners and found only one case that had been satisfactorily resolved. Yu has warned that officials have incentives to subvert the petitions system because complaints relating to their jurisdictions count against their performance appraisals. He says the petitions system is strained to breaking point, because the Communist Party refuses to loosen its grip on the political and legal systems, choking off alternative ways for disputes to be debated or independently adjudicated. The party ignored Professor Yu’s advice, choosing to reassert its primacy over the country’s media and courts.

So China’s enormous security and legal apparatus devotes ever-increasing resources to preventing complaints from being officially registered or publicly aired, rather than resolving them.

Six years ago a high-profile death in custody led the central Government to abolish lawful detention centres used to contain vagrants and petitioners. This didn’t end the persecution of petitioners; it only drove the practice underground. Human Rights Watch this week released the results of its survey of 38 petitioners who had been illegally held in China’s ”black jails”. ”Faced with financial incentives to keep petitioners out of sight in Beijing, but no longer armed with a legal means for doing so, provincial and municipal-level officials have developed an extrajudicial system to intercept, abduct and detain petitioners in black jails,” says the report, Alleyways in Hell. ”Their emergence since 2003 constitutes one of the most serious and widespread uses of extralegal detention in China’s recent history.”

The result is an endless tide of personal catastrophes, such as the case of Liu Yuhong. Liu’s parents grow poplar trees for timber on a small tract of land they rent from a farmer in Liyuan county in Tangshan, China’s steel-producing heartland. Their dispute arose when the landlord permitted a builder to cut down several trees and they received no compensation.

The county petitions office agreed with their claim but did not enforce its verdict. Liu’s parents wanted to lodge their documents with the State Council’s petitions office in Beijing but were prevented from doing so. So they took their documents to Tiananmen Square and became compulsive petitioners. ”The Government offices won’t accept their report, so they come and report directly to the people,” says Liu.

Liu’s mother, Liu Fengqin, has tried to take her documents to Tiananmen Square on 35 occasions since September last year. She was detained each time. Liu has also been detained several times and has become an expert on the system.

She describes a network of unofficial ”interceptors” who are paid by local governments to stop petitioners before they make it to the Beijing petitions office or Tiananmen Square. ”Some petitioners get caught as soon as they get off the bus on Chang’an Avenue, before they even know what’s happening,” says Liu.

More frequently, petitioners are stopped by Beijing municipal police on or around Tiananmen Square. Petitioners are escorted to Tiananmen East police station. Every couple of hours a busload of petitioners is taken to Majialou, in Beijing’s south. Liu had been on that bus five times before. She took us there.

Majialou is a former police station that was shut down, then reopened and rebadged as a city government ”Welfare Relief Centre”. In the basement, she says, there are about 30 large rooms, each with the name of a province above the door. Liu was taken to the Hebei room and then ”retrieved” by Hebei officials and their casually hired assistants.

The guard at the Majialou front gate asked if we were ”retrievers”. Retrievers from Xingtai and Handan cities asked the same question, and if we were ”retrieving” for a public security bureau or local petitions office. The going rate for retrievers is about 150 yuan ($24), they said.

Tangshan city retrievers take their local petitioners to the Kailuan Hotel. ”It’s just an ordinary hotel, except taken up entirely by Tangshan petition officials,” says Liu. Tangshan petitioners are grouped in the lobby and taken ”home” to their local county detention centres. At this point, there has been no paperwork or legal justification for the petitioners’ abduction, detention and expulsion from Beijing.

”Recidivists” are sometimes sent to ”re-education through labour” camps. Liu and her parents have worked in brick kilns and outsourced factory units, helping to make light bulbs, cotton buds and cardboard boxes. Often there are valid arrest papers, but sometimes there are not. In July, Liu’s parents were sentenced to a year’s re-education through labour.

On September 26, this year, Liu was again in Beijing, this time seeking advice from a lawyer about her parents. She usually stays in one of Beijing’s many ”underground” hotels. ”They don’t report you to police and they are literally underground, so police have trouble tracking the signals from our SIM cards,” says Liu.

But in late September, the central Government gave edicts to prevent petitioners from arriving in the city and disturbing the October 1 National Day military parade – the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic. Patrols were taking place around Beijing and Liu’s usual underground hotels had been shut down. She took the risk of registering at an above-ground hotel. Haidian district police knocked on her door at midnight, searched her phone and found a text message from a local journalist, received on September 1.

It said: ”Why did your mother kneel down [petition] so many times in Tiananmen Square? I need detailed information.” That was evidence enough for the police to detain Liu again. ”I told them that China was a country of law,” says Liu. ”But they said this is National Day, there is no law.”

This time, Liu was given special treatment to match the importance of the national celebration. She says that at 2am on September 27, she was driven to Xinggezhuang guest house and handed over to four young men without uniforms, who drove her to a new destination. Liu says she thought of running, but outside her cell window was a county government car with five Liyuan county officials, some of whom she knew. County officials came and went and the guards were rotated in shifts. She was then driven in a county government car to a lone row of dirty, bare-concrete cells near Tuhe reservoir.

”I couldn’t fall sleep at night because of several days without food and the cold,” she says. She overheard her young guards confirming their pay-rate with a county discipline and inspection official: 100 yuan per day. At other times, she heard them on the phone to a person they called ”elder brother”, receiving instructions.

Liu was still in her black jail cell on the morning of October 1, when President Hu Jintao stood in front of an immaculately presented Tiananmen Square to applaud China’s glorious 60 years. ”The Chinese people have stood up,” he told the world.

At about that time, Liu says, her plain-clothed guards bound her to a stretcher bed and a county family-planning doctor tried to insert an intravenous drip. By now she had gone five days with little food or water, and the doctor left when he couldn’t find a vein. She says she was made to vomit and the walls were splattered with her blood, as they beat her face.

She was released and later detained again. On October 19, in another detention cell, she miscarried what would have been her third child. On October 5, she received a phone call from a senior county police officer. ”He told me my mother had died of a heart attack,” Liu says.

This week, Liyuan county police chief Chang Zhiqing told The Age, when asked about the black jail: ”I’m not sure what happened after [Liu] was taken back to Liyuan county.” But he added: ”There is special treatment during special times.”

He acknowledged that people aged over 60 are not supposed to be held in labour camps, but said Liu and her mother were ”habitual petitioners”. He also delivered the first good news Liu can remember: ”Liu Yuhong’s mother is not dead. She is now in Hebei Woman’s Re-education Through Labour Centre.” It seems the earlier false news of Liu’s mother’s death had been another layer of administrative torture.

We then spoke with The Age’s photographer, returning from meeting Liu at her now-abandoned black jail in Tangshan. His vehicle was being tailed. We called Liu. ”My house is surrounded by two-dozen officials,” she said. But she had already got her story out and did not seem concerned. ”I have no idea how to finish this,” she said. ”But yes, for my parents, I will keep petitioning.”

With SANGHEE LIU

http://www.theage.com.au/world/speak-no-evil-in-china-20091113-iern.html