Huang,Jianbing: Appealing to higher authorities fo
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Date: 11/20/2010 9:05:59 AM
Sender: Huang,Jianbing
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Huang,Jianbing: Appealing to higher authorities for help and maintaining their legal rights underlines a hard knot of contradictions in Chinese society
Huang,Jianbing
The recent concerns of incidents and developments in Chinese society should be appeals and safeguarding rights. Appeals of Chinese people have become a focus of public opinion and media domestically and overseas. The methods and styles are getting more intense, and catch our eyes.
One part of the intensity is Chinese government including all levels oppress appealers, trying to stop and reduce appealers and the impact. Recently a word “intercepting appeals” is popular among appealers, which is because polices intercept and arrest appealers. Even judicature is used to maintain stability. A recent case in Beijing exemplified such situation. Zhao,Lianhai, who maintain legal rights for those gallon stone babies because of poisoned milk power, was charged for crime of picking quarrels and provoking troubles and sentenced two years and a half in prison, and himself showed for protest.
On the other hand, actions of appealers have evolved to collective cases from former single cases. The characteristics are: firstly the scales are getting larger. For instance, thousands of appealers surrounded letters and visits station of the State Council in Beijing last year, calling for slogans of “down with corrupt officials, punish corruption, and maintain human rights”. It can be seen that Chinese government violates personal property rights and personal rights of citizens, with no big decline or change, future scale of appeals and safeguard of legal rights will be larger; secondly contents are wider. If maintaining legal rights is defined as people fighting for the basic rights and interests granted by the constitution through appeals, judicature, and make cases public, then maintaining legal rights have broader contents, and almost include everything. Like forced demolition, forced acquisition of lands, immigration in the reservoir area, unfair judicature, unemployment, extortion of taxes and levies, corruption of officials and authorities and so on, all of which involve all aspects of Chinese society; thirdly is the increasing degree of these issues. Appeals of Chinese people have always been tough, seek heaven’s sympathy and lay their hope on the blue sky. Not only it’s very difficult to appeal, but also appeals will be seen as making trouble out of nothing and being persecuted. Government takes no notice of these appeals; people are getting more disappointed and are losing patience, and are taking more aggressive express means. For example, appeals have turned to gatherings and protests; some people even committed suicide and burned themselves to show their anger and exposure.
For the ups and downs of appeal movements, the generalization and normality trend, to analyze the reasons, historical follows, deficiency in the system, all count for the situation. See the Chinese history from a wide angle, appeals of Chinese people actually end up with appeal to the Emperor. Under the political environment of rule by men for over thousand years, people who have nowhere to appeal usually turn to the Emperor or the heaven in the hope of promoting virtues and punishing evils one day. After CCP took control of the government, letters and visits replaced appeal to the Emperor. However, what has changed is people in the history appeal to the power-holder, nowadays CCP shift the appeals on to letters and visits stations that has no power and no legally binding force. This determines the typical measure of appeal in China is not a good measure to solve violation of human rights.
Appeals of Chinese people have become a profoundly manifestation of deepened social contradictions. The truth of many Chinese officials oppresses and persecutes common people, involves legal issues of perverting the law and abuse of power. Legal means should be adopted to give justice back to the masses. However, in today’s society, there is only constitution and no legal system, power surpasses law, law subordinates to power, business and politics corrosively intertwined, and power-money deals, there is no justice and fairness in judicature. Social contradictions and conflicts have showed that the current system already prevent society from further development, and come to the point of what Premier Wen,Jiabao said “there is only a dead end without reform”. Our requests for political reform is not a show that’s just a temporary medical relief, but to end the one-party autocracy, implement a multi-party democratic constitutionalism, and establish a society that has democracy, freedom, equality, legal system, human rights and prosperity.
Huhang,Jianbing
11/20/2010
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