Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Will the Boat Sink the Water? also details in other chapters how angry
peasants appointed representatives to travel to Beijing to petition the
highest authorities of the land for relief and how they were sometimes
intercepted, mistreated, and returned to their homes without results.
Tens of thousands of oppressed and angered people from the country-
side still travel to Beijing with petitions for redress of their grievances,
and they are routinely rounded up, imprisoned in secret prisons called
“black houses,” mistreated, and sent back home. According to
Andrew Jacobs of the New York Times, China's petition system has been
overwhelmed recently:
According to the state media, 10 million petitions have been filed in the
last five years on complaints as diverse as illegal land seizures and
unpaid wages. The numbers would be far higher but for the black
houses, also called black jails, the newest weapon local officials use to
prevent these aggrieved citizens from embarrassing them in front of
central government superiors. Officially, these jails do not exist. In
China's authoritarian state, senior officials tally petitions to get a rough
sense of social order around the country. A successfully filed petition—
however illusory the prospect of justice—is considered a black mark
on the bureaucratic record of the local officials accused of wrongdoing.
So the game, sometimes deadly, is to prevent a filing. The cat-and-
mouse contest has created a sizable underground economy that enriches
the interceptors, the police and those who run the city's ad hoc detention
centers.
Human rights activists and petitioners say plainclothes security
officers and hired thugs grab the aggrieved off the streets and hide them
in a growing constellation of unmarked detention centers. There, the
activists say, the aggrievedwill be insulted, roughed up and then escorted
back to their home provinces. Some are held for weeks and months
without charge, activists say, and in a few cases, the beatings are fatal.
(Jacobs 2009)
Thousands of incidents of public unrest have occurred in China
every year for the past several years. Most but not all of them occur
in the countryside. Kristin Jones of The Committee to Protect Journal-
ists states succinctly the major reasons behind the turmoil:
“Mass incidents” is the term the Chinese government uses to describe
demonstrations, riots, and group petitioning. In January 2006, the Min-
istry of Public Security announced that there were 87,000 such incidents
in 2005, a 6.6 percent increase over the previous year. Protests over cor-
ruption, taxes, and environmental degradation caused by China's
breakneck economic development contributed to the rise. But some of
