{"id":45597,"date":"2015-02-23T20:12:00","date_gmt":"2015-02-23T20:12:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/127.0.0.1:10081\/?p=45597 "},"modified":"2015-02-23T20:12:00","modified_gmt":"2015-02-23T20:12:00","slug":"45597-revision-v1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/?p=45597","title":{"rendered":"Shanghai Petitioners Descend on Beijing Ahead of Annual Parliament"},"content":{"rendered":"
2015-02-23<\/div>
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Chinese police patrol Tiananmen Square in Beijing, looking for petitioners, Dec. 4, 2013.<\/div>
AFP<\/div>
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Around 1,000 petitioners from Shanghai have converged on Beijing ahead of China’s parliamentary sessions next month in a bid to highlight their complaints against local governments.<\/div>
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“Right now there are more than 1,000 people who have already arrived in Beijing, by our estimate,” Shanghai petitioner Shen Lida told RFA on Monday from the Chinese capital.<\/div>
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“We have been forced to come to Beijing … to ask the central leadership to pay attention to us,” Shen said. “The local governments are full of corrupt criminals engaged in activities that are against the law.”<\/div>
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“We have come to bring our injustices to our mother and father, the central government,” he said. “We want justice, and legal and reasonable solutions to our cases.”<\/div>
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China’s rubber-stamp parliament, the National People’s Congress (NPC), will hold its annual session at Beijing’s Great Hall of the People on March 5.<\/div>
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Its advisory body, the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), convenes two days earlier in Beijing.<\/div>
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Such top-level meetings are a magnet for the vast number of Chinese people who are pursuing complaints against their local governments, often for years at a time and with scant hope of redress.<\/div>
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But petitioners who get past a tight security cordon around Tiananmen Square, including security scanners and bag searches for documents, are promptly detained and taken to unofficial detention centers on the outskirts of Beijing.<\/div>
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Last May, Beijing banned the practice of complaining to higher levels of government in cases where the local authority hadn’t yet dealt with the complaint.<\/div>
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But petitioners say local authorities often retaliate against them with arbitrary detentions, beatings, and other forms of harassment, and never allow a complaint to make it far enough through the system to qualify for a higher review.<\/div>
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China’s “letters and visits” complaints system is flooded with some 22,000 new complaints daily across the country, according to government figures from 2013.<\/div>
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Right to complain<\/div>
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Shen said his fellow activists had left their families during China’s Golden Week new year holiday in a bid to make it to Beijing before security arrangements are tightened ahead of the NPC.<\/div>
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“When we arrived, there wasn’t [much security],” Shen said. “But today, there were police, neighborhood committee people, and officials from different districts detaining petitioners at [Beijing’s] southern railway station.”<\/div>
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Shen hit out at the practice. “Petitioners have the right to complain to any level of government or any department,” he said. “What are they afraid of?”<\/div>
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Fellow Shanghai petitioner Li Xuemei said she is now being held under tight surveillance by the authorities, with a security detail of three watching her every move.<\/div>
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For detail please visit here<\/a><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

<div>"We have been forced to come to Beijing … to ask the central leadership to pay attention to us," Shen said. "The local governments are full of corrupt criminals engaged in activities that are against the law."<\/div><div><\/div><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":24,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-45597","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ChinaHumanRights","et-doesnt-have-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45597","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/24"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=45597"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45597\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=45597"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=45597"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=45597"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}