China Squelches Speech the Simple, Ancient Way: Ann Woolner

Commentary by Ann Woolner

Aug. 22 (Bloomberg) -- Say it's your job to quash protest in your country's capital city, even as the whole world is watching. You don't want to look repressive, but you don't want malcontents embarrassing your nation, either.

You've got plenty of work to do, so why not publicly invite any troublemakers out there to turn themselves in?

That way, you don't have to run about the country looking for them. Nor would you have to roll tanks over them if they show up en masse, say, at the central square.

Ah, but how to get them to come?

In the run-up to the Olympics, Chinese officials invited people wanting to protest to come into government offices and fill out forms identifying themselves and listing their complaints against the government, the slogans they intend to use and any other people wishing to join them in dissent.

China lured them by saying it would happily allow peaceful demonstrations during the Olympic Games for those who register ahead of time and confine their protests to certain parks.

True, those sites are far away from Olympic venues, but the plan was sufficiently accommodating of free speech to win approval of the International Olympic Committee.

Another example of the democratizing effect of the Olympics? Not so much.

Of 77 people who signed up, none got permits.

Worse, at least seven people who registered were detained, interrogated, charged, arrested or threatened with a year in a labor camp if they didn't keep quiet, according to human rights groups.

Applying Five Times

Two women in their late 70s applied five times to protest the 2001 demolition of their homes near Tiananmen Square. Like hundreds of thousands of other Chinese, their neighborhoods were razed to make way for modernization or the Olympics. Promises of new housing proved empty as the displaced were shoved into dilapidated flats, often far away from their neighborhoods.

Complaints like those of the two former neighbors, Wu Dianyuan and Wang Xiuying, are common. Perhaps because of that, instead of permits, they were given one-year sentences to ``re- education through labor'' for ``disturbing the public order,'' according to New York-based Human Rights in China and to an account in yesterday's New York Times.

To avoid serving their sentences in a labor camp, they would have to stay away from certain places and, presumably, keep their mouths shut.

That's one way to keep the designated protest zones empty.

Requests Withdrawn

As for the would-be protesters, 74 applicants withdrew their requests after police forwarded them to government agencies, China's official news service, Xianhua, reported this week.

The number sounds suspiciously high. And it would be lovely if the government is working to resolve all those people's problems as it says it is.

But it also sounds like a centuries-old practice at work.

In imperial days, it was called ``capital appeals,'' because people from the countryside unable to get a wrong righted locally would go to the capital. There they hoped to get the emperor's ear, according to Jonathan Ocko, a scholar on imperial China and chairman of North Carolina State University's history department.

``The popular notion was that if injustice was done, you could go to Beijing'' for relief, Ocko says.

There, they could bang on a special drum and announce they had a grievance. They might drop to their knees at the imperial palace gates, or throw themselves in front of an imperial procession and hand the emperor a letter.

No Satisfaction

Most grievances were referred back down the hierarchy to officials who had already offered no satisfaction, Ocko says. But it was a way for the people to let off steam and for authorities to take the pulse of the public.

As time wore on, this system of ``letters and visits,'' as it is called, became so institutionalized that most government agencies on all levels established an office to handle petitions.

In modern times, officials often send the petitioner on an endless treadmill from one office to the next, eventually referring the cases back to local officials. Sometimes, those local officials were the very ones who wronged the petitioner in the first place, perhaps the very police officers whose beatings prompted the petitioner to go to Beijing.

Nonetheless, millions of petitions are filed each year, with rural Chinese streaming into Beijing in hopes they can find someone, somewhere who will do right by them.

They live in squalid settlements for years while pursuing this usually futile hope, according to human rights groups.

Of 2,000 petitioners surveyed in a 2004 study, only three had their cases resolved, according to Human Rights Watch, citing a study by Chinese professor Yu Jianrong of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

Subjected to Beatings

Worse, half the petitioners Yu questioned reported having been beaten by government agents.

Local officials who want to prevent people from complaining to the central government often use force to make sure they never leave their homes, or use ``retrievers'' to kidnap them from Beijing, beat them and force them to return home, Human Rights Watch found.

``Over the years I've been in China, I've never once seen someone win justice through petitioning,'' Susan Jakes, longtime Time correspondent in Beijing, wrote in the magazine's China Blog last year.

``Instead, I've seen it give people unreasonable hope, turn them into vagabonds, get them beaten up and make them homeless,'' she wrote.

Ah, but what an effective way to keep people from protesting in public.

(Ann Woolner is a Bloomberg news columnist. The opinions expressed are her own.)

To contact the writer of this column: Ann Woolner in Atlanta at awoolner@bloomberg.net.