By Sara L.M. Davis

Yu Hua’s New York Times op-ed, “In China, Grievances Keep Coming“, says that China’s petitioning system works alongside the legal system as a parallel way to channel thousands of individual grievances each year. In fact, as Asia Catalyst sees in our work with Chinese AIDS NGOs, the petitioning system undermines social stability.

China’s petitioning system dates back thousands of years, and has become an accepted channel for individuals to complain about corrupt and abusive local officials to their higher-ups. Many begin by complaining locally, and when they get no satisfaction, petitioners may chase their complaints all the way up the hierarchy until they arrive in Beijing. As Yu Hua says, this grievance system offers “a fantasy” that incorruptible senior officials will intercede to help petitioners – in fact, Chinese scholar Yu Jianrong has found that only 0.2% of their cases are resolved.

Because petitioning doesn’t create effective accountability for local officials, and because of the official abuses that often result, the grievance process actually worsens social unrest.

This is an issue that we see in Asia Catalyst’s work with grassroots HIV/AIDS nonprofits in China. AIDS NGOs in Beijing
and Henan province are besieged by petitioners for help, especially around World AIDS Day (December 1), and 2011 was no exception. Thousands of people infected with HIV/AIDS through unsafe blood collection and hospital blood
transfusions in the 1990s have petitioned the government for compensation, especially since law courts, fearful of being inundated by thousands of cases, often directly refuse to accept them.

Many blood disaster victims struggle in poverty. As one woman interviewed by the Dongjen Center for Human Rights Education and Action said, “In my home there are six mouths to feed, and all of us have to rely on my husband to get constructions jobs…[he] is not healthy either. We just work all day and cry all night.

Some groups, such as Dongjen, have called for a national compensation fund.  But to date, there has been no  national response to the world’s largest HIV/AIDS blood disaster.  As a result, on World AIDS Day, victims of the blood disaster descend on the capital in droves.

How do officials respond? In the absence of a clear national policy on the blood disaster, combined with heavy pressure
from above to maintain social stability at any price, officials are left between a rock and a hard place.

Thus, as Yu Hua writes, some local officials pay off victims in order to keep them quiet. Though the government provides free antiretroviral treatment to all people with HIV/AIDS in China, the high cost of treating opportunistic infections and lack of reliable income means that many blood disaster victims are constantly desperate for funds.  They go through these meagre government payoffs quickly – and then go right back to petitioning.

Those are the generous officials. Many others threaten petitioners with force. Local government officials often send ‘retrievers‘ or ‘interceptors‘ (接防人) to kidnap petitioners from their locality. Some petitioners are detained in ‘black jails’,
and others are sent to abusive detention facilities. Many are just sent home and told to keep quiet. Blood disaster victims say that some officials try to combine payments and threats together – the carrot and stick approach.

However, the use of force gets many petitioners more fired up – now to seek accountability for their beating and detention,
in addition to their original demands for compensation for the blood disaster.

When injustice piles on injustice, it only fuels more petitioning. Carl Minzner writes that the system of official incentives that reward officials for maintaining ‘social harmony’ is at the root of the problem. In his article “Riots and Cover-ups: Counter-productive Control of Local Agents in China“, he asks why officials engage in abusive behavior even when national directives prohibit it, and argues that the answer is the Communist Party metrics used to evaluate officials for year-end bonuses and promotions:

Party cadre evaluation systems heavily stress social order statistics. These sanction
local Party secretaries based on the number of citizen petitioners who leave the
jurisdiction to present grievances to higher-level officials. This leads local
officials to resort to repressive tactics (including illegal detentions) to
prevent petitioners from reaching higher officials and thereby negatively
affecting the career prospects of local officials.

In other words, the problem is not that China lacks systems of accountability for officials, but rather that a system
that incentivizes cover-ups is not the kind of accountability that creates social stability for the long term.

What would work better? A stronger and more independent legal system – and a national compensation fund to give blood disaster victims relief.

Sara L.M. Davis is the executive director of Asia Catalyst.