Countless thousands of China's rural poor travel to Beijing every year to appeal against injustice, but many find that is where the injustice really begins, writes Mark Magnier
As Chinese have done for generations, Qiu Jie came to the capital to seek justice after being cheated out of his life savings. Instead, he says, officials from his home province lured him to a Beijing hotel, slapped him in handcuffs, beat him and took him away.
Back home, they committed him to a police-run psychiatric hospital, where he was tied to a bed for 32 days, Qiu says. When he launched a hunger strike, they placed him on an intravenous drip.
Staff doctors, all police employees, diagnosed him with unspecified "mental disorders," he says, and forced drugs down his throat.
After he suffered a minor heart attack, the hospital released him. Qiu believes it would have raised too many questions if he had died in custody.
Seeking justice in the capital is a tradition rooted in China's imperial days, and even today Beijing maintains offices for tens of thousands of petitioners to file complaints against local officials for alleged corruption, theft, even murder.
Experts say the practice of appealing to the central government, even as China seeks to project a modern image in the approach to the summer Olympics next year in Beijing, reflects a lack of avenues available to average Chinese to fight abuses of power. Many courts remain under the thumb of Communist Party and government officials.
But when they get to Beijing, petitioners face huge obstacles. A 2004 study found that fewer than 1 in 500 complaints were addressed. Many petitioners are simply referred back to the local authorities they are accusing. Others, like Qiu, face what fellow petitioner Wu Keqin calls "state-sanctioned kidnapping". Every day, hundreds of provincial prosecutors, local officials, undercover police and hired criminals are working in the capital as "retrievers", those familiar with the system say. Their swagger and brutality have earned them nicknames such as "the wolves" and "the vultures".
"It's implied by the provincial officials who hire them that they're allowed to use violence," says Zhao Tianxin, an activist. "People really hate them but are too afraid to fight back." The work can be highly lucrative. Officials are willing to pay retrievers well because they know they face the loss of their jobs and party membership, imprisonment and even execution if national authorities decide the complaint against them has merit.
Qiu (49) says that in 1988, he entrusted the Dalian Municipal Real Estate Bureau with $19,000 for two planned apartments. His family put down 20 per cent and the rest was supplied by his employer.
The bureau never built the units, nor would it refund his money, Qiu says. His appeals went unheeded, and in 2004 he began petitioning Beijing.
Qiu's account, like that of many petitioners, could not be independently verified. An official at the psychiatric hospital confirms that Qiu had been a patient there. "But what he told you is not necessarily true," says the woman, who identifies herself by the family name Wang before hanging up.
Today, Qiu lives off a small pension from his job at a grain company. "Retrievers are little more than guard dogs for dark, corrupt officials," he says.
Still, Qiu kept trying. Family members say he was grabbed again in April and sent back to the psychiatric hospital. He suffered another heart attack, and relatives were told to supply his medicine themselves - even though they were refused permission to visit him.
Police say Qiu was receiving "forced therapy" because he had been schizophrenic for more than 20 years, and had "seriously disturbed public order by running naked, holding banners and threatening police and officials with knives." His family dismissed the police version as an excuse.
"They're lying. This is ridiculous," says his wife, Jian Yingfeng. "If Qiu Jie had done any of these things, can you imagine they'd let him go?"
Recently, several retreivers stood in front of petitioning offices of the National People's Congress and the State Council, China's legislature and cabinet. They could be distinguished from the stream of bedraggled petitioners by their expensive clothes, cars and what the petitioners call "hunter eyes". "You feel like a bit of prey passing the predators," says an unemployed woman, Wang Jinlan (45).
She was fighting to win compensation for her family's €8,900 truck, which police in Henan seized after a minor traffic offence, she says. "Even though you know the crocodiles are there, you still have to go through."
Retrievers often recognise their province's petitioners on sight. One of them is Hu Cuiying (61), a retired engineer from Nanjing, who estimates she's been picked up and sent home a dozen times in two decades as she has sought compensation for the razing of her extended family's homes.
"Unless I never leave my hotel, they'll find me," she says.
Since retrievers are paid only to bring back people from their own provinces, a common tactic is to ask petitioners where they're from. Even if they lie, their accents give them away.
Sometimes retrievers don shabby clothes and pose as petitioners. Or they work with Beijing police to gain access to guest lists at the cheap hotels where petitioners congregate, particularly before major Communist Party meetings. Sometimes petitioners are so desperate that they turn in other petitioners for small rewards.
Wu Youming, a police officer who worked periodically as a retriever for Hubei province, says he came to believe that the system is wasteful and illegal and creates distrust between citizens and the government.
"No one thinks petitioners are really committing crimes," he says. "It really pained me." In March, after he called on China's rubber-stamp Congress to ban the practice, he was fired.
"According to the police code, I betrayed the system," he says. "I became the 'horse that hurt the herd'."
There's no clear data on how many claims might be justified. Some appear to involve small slights from long ago. Despite their limited prospects, some petitioners make repeated trips to Beijing, sometimes for decades.
Petitioners sometimes elude capture by making a dash at an opportune moment, jumping from a bus window or slipping away while using the restroom.
Huang Jinhe, a police officer who became a petitioner after stumbling across the questionable finances of his superiors, says he avoids capture by acting like a retriever.
When captured, some petitioners are sent home. Others say they initially were kept in dark basement rooms of the hotel and office complexes the provinces maintain here. Still others are rounded up by Beijing police and sent to Majialou, a low-rise holding facility behind a wall guarded by police. A brass sign on the gate reads: "No interviews, no photos. No video. No unrelated persons." Expensive government cars and police vans bearing provincial plates stream past.
Former detainees of the facility say that once there, they were checked, photographed and sorted into rooms based on province, where they waited for the retrievers. A television set blared a propaganda video on a 20-minute loop, they say. Its message: police were justified in holding them in the interest of public order. Sometimes the message was buttressed by testimonials from petitioners confessing to "frivolous complaints". Most detainees ignored it.
Jing Huaiyu (53), a frequent detainee at Majialou, says he likes leading crowds in singing the communist Internationale with tongue planted firmly in cheek.
"I especially like the ending about how the (capitalist) snakes and evil beasts eat our flesh and blood," he says. "The real snakes are the retrievers and bad officials."
Many petitioners are released the same day, but those kept overnight sleep on benches and are given little to eat. Once home, they might be released or face temporary house arrest. They also could be subject to interrogation, imprisonment or "re-education" at labour camps, which are run by police without judicial oversight.
He Fangwu (41), a farmer from Hunan, says he has been petitioning for more than a decade after his father was beaten to death in 1992 for reporting that local officials were embezzling from a disaster relief fund.
Using chopsticks, He demonstrated how officials jammed splinters under his nails and subjected him to the "tiger chair," in which the victim's torso is bound to a chair and his legs tied to a bench. His feet are gradually raised until his knees are at near-breaking pressure.
The cost of capturing petitioners is estimated at tens of millions of euro a year, say lawyers and activists. An experienced retriever says he drew a full salary plus $700 (€520) a month in subsidies, in addition to $250 (€185) for every petitioner he caught. During peak periods before big political meetings, he says that he grabs at least 50 petitioners in two weeks.
Alerting a major property developer to a petitioner who could jeopardise his real estate empire results in an immediate deposit to the retriever's bank account, he says.
Retrievers also spend money to make money. The petitioning offices often have three windows: one for petitioners to request forms, a second where they turn in the forms and a third where they go if an official grants a hearing. Retrievers bribe the clerks at all three to prevent petitioners' gripes from being processed, says a person who used to work in one such office. He estimates that at least 60 per cent of complaints were buried.
Street vendors who make a living helping illiterate petitioners fill out forms are also paid off, says the retriever, who adds that his income and perks make him the envy of people back home.
"But I regret I took the job," he says. "You use whatever means to get them back, but you still have your conscience." Yang Zongsheng (47), unemployed and nearly blind since birth, has spent decades petitioning for a Beijing residency permit after his family was stripped of it during the tumultuous 1960s.
A year ago, police stopped him in front of Beijing's main railway station, taped his mouth and eyes shut and left him in the trunk of a car for three hours before locking him in a hotel. The next day, Yang says, he was sent back to Hebei province and put in a labour camp for a year.
"The whole system is designed to scare you and prevent you from petitioning anymore," he says. "While it's easier to catch me since I'm blind, for many of us, all this just increases our resolve. No matter how often they drag us back, we'll keep fighting for justice."