2015-09-17
Petitioner Yang Shihe lies slumped on the ground after drinking pesticide, Beijing, Sept. 17, 2015.
Photo courtesy of Civil Rights and Livelihood Watch
Police in Beijing on Thursday took away a man who drank pesticide in an apparent suicide bid outside the headquarters of the ruling Chinese Communist Party government close to Tiananmen Square, rights activists said.
Yang Shihe, a petitioner from the northeastern city of Harbin, collapsed on the pavement near the guard-post outside government headquarters in Beijing’s Zhongnanhai palace compound after swallowing pesticide, with white foam coming from his mouth, the Hubei-based Civil Rights and Livelihood Watch group said.
“It happened this morning outside the guard-post of Xinhua Gate [the front gate of Zhongnanhai],” the group’s founder Liu Feiyue told RFA. “He was discovered by police.”
Liu said Yang had pursued a complaint against authorities in his hometown for many years, but to no avail.
“He has a lot of grievances, and I think he just drank pesticide in the heat of the moment,” he said. “The police lifted him into a vehicle, and they probably took him to hospital.”
“We don’t know his situation now,” he said.
A photo of the scene shot clandestinely by an eyewitness showed an elderly man on the pavement next to a couple of bottles and some luggage.
Liu’s website quoted eyewitnesses as saying that the man was from Mulan county near Harbin in the northeastern province of Heilongjiang, and had drunk the pesticide outside a sentry box on Beijing’s Chang’an Boulevard at around 8.00 a.m. local time.
However, repeated calls to one of the eyewitnesses quoted in the story resulted in a switched-off message.
Frequent attempts
Attempted suicides are growing increasingly common among disgruntled petitioners, many of whom are forced evictees, and most of whom pursue complaints against local officials for years or even decades with no result.
Petitioners, who flood China’s official complaints departments with more than 20,000 complaints daily across the country, frequently report being held in “black jails,” beaten, or otherwise harassed,if they persist in a complaint beyond its initial rejection at a local level.
According to Liu, the sheer emotional strain of petitioning takes a heavy toll on some.
“If they weren’t in a state where they really couldn’t take it any more, they wouldn’t commit suicide,” Liu said. “High suicide rates among petitioners tell us that their grievances aren’t being effectively handled.”
Petitioning in China has a long history, and is officially regarded as a legal and legitimate activity, but petitioners are often targeted by local officials keen to avoid bad publicity.
“Not only are their issues not dealt with, but they are themselves subjected to further persecution, such as being locked up in black jails, [and subjected to] criminal detention, jail sentences, and incarceration in mental health institutions,” Liu said.
