‘Retrievers’ keep petitioners off Beijing streets

BEIJING | The street outside the State Bureau of Letters and Visits in the south of Beijing is packed with about 200 unconvincing actors.

Most are middle-aged men, and some are armed with sightseeing props: crumpled tourist maps of the capital and Beijing 2008 Olympic T-shirts. Yet they spend all day in the same spot, sitting on foldaway stools, chatting and smoking. Others wait at a line of bus stops, spurning every bus that passes.

These “retrievers,” as they are known, are local officials, plainclothes police officers or simply heavies hired by local governments to do their dirty work.

They have a common goal: Round up and return petitioners who have traveled to Beijing to file complaints of injustice and corruption against government officials in their home provinces.

Their numbers have swollen in recent weeks because of an additional motivation: an order by the Beijing government to rid the streets of petitioners before the Olympic Games.

The chances of petitioners resolving their cases are remote at any time of the year, said Yu Jianrong, director of the government-backed Institute of Rural Development at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

In a recent report, Mr. Yu concluded that only one petition in every 500 succeeds.

Seeking redress in the capital is a process that stretches back to imperial times, when Chinese villagers traveled hundreds of miles in an attempt to relay tales to the emperor of mistreatment at the hands of local authorities.

Hundreds of thousands of Chinese carry on the tradition every year at petition offices in Beijing, imploring the central government to come to their aid.

Observers say the practice highlights the lack of options available to ordinary Chinese battling abuse of authority at a local level and is not conducive to fostering the image of harmony China craves for the Olympics. For the duration of the games, the petitioners´ right to protest has been put on hold.

“During any political event and large-scale meeting, especially something like the Olympics, local officials are under extreme pressure not to have large numbers of petitioners in Beijing,” said Carl Minzner, an associate professor of law at Washington University in St. Louis who has studied the Chinese petitioning system.

Petitioners say police began rounding up people lining up outside petition offices in the middle of July. The Hong Kong Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy reported that 1,500 petitioners were arrested July 14 to 16.

“The police just started arresting people like crazy. The government is being much stricter this year,” said 61-year-old Ye Xin Kun from Henan province, who has been seeking justice for his wife´s wrongful imprisonment since 1996.

In the past 12 years, he said, he has been detained and sent back to his hometown on numerous occasions and sentenced to a stint of “re-education through labor.”

“A few weeks ago, there were several thousand of us in Beijing; now there are only a few hundred,” said Shaanxi-born Cheng Kun Fu, who wants file a petition claiming that a man suspected of killing his son and daughter-in-law escaped trial because he bribed local officials.

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