Global activists use U. S. petition site to bring attention to causes
BEIJING — The poisoning of a college student 18 years ago recently re- emerged as a hot topic in China, but censors soon squelched the politically sensitive online discussions over whether the culprit may have eluded punishment because of Communist party connections.
Those in China looking for justice found another way to keep the issue alive. They took it to Washington.
Appealing to a White House online petition page, they soon gathered the 100,000 signatures required for an official response, and — although there has been no response from Washington so far — news of the request revived talk about the case in China. Beijing police issued an explanation after weeks of silence, and state media chimed in with editorials.
“The Chinese public went to a foreign site to vent off their frustration, and that speaks of
That speaks of the loss of credibility of the Chinese government.
SHEN DINGLI PROFESSOR OF AMERICAN STUDIES AT FUDAN UNIVERSITY
the loss of credibility of the Chinese government,” said Shen Dingli, professor of American studies at Fudan University.
Started in 2011 as a project in open government for the Internet age, the Obama administration’s “We the People” site is a work in progress that already
has spawned unintended consequences domestically, prompting updates of the ground rules for a successful petition.
Though clearly intended for U. S. citizens, the guidelines on gathering online signatories remain broad enough to hearten activists overseas who
— frustrated with their own governments — hope to raise the international profile of their cases.
Malaysians have complained to the White House about election fraud in their country, drawing more than 222,000 signatures within a week to become the site’s second- most popular issue. Other petitions ask U. S. President Barack Obama to secure the release of two abducted Orthodox Christian archbishops in Syria and to urge a recount of votes in Venezuela’s presidential elections.
And in the past week, requests have poured in from China, where petitioning the
central government in Beijing dates back to imperial eras, but where nowadays the tradition is usually fruitless and sometimes perilous.
It started with the case of Zhu Ling, a woman who was paralyzed for life from thallium poisoning during her third year at Tsinghua University in Beijing. No one was held responsible for the crime, and the cold case resurfaced in April after another poisoning at Fudan University. The Chinese public demanded an investigation into one of Zhu’s roommates — who had long been considered a suspect. They questioned whether the original investigation was quashed because of her family’s political ties.
Before there was any satisfactory answer, Chinese censors began to remove posts and shush online commentators, effectively ending the discussion. But then someone started the petition on the White House page early this month, and by last Monday it had garnered more than 100,000 signatures in about three days. Since then, about a
dozen more China- related petitions have appeared.
The Chinese petitions have asked Washington to disclose assets held by Chinese officials’ children residing in the U. S., and have urged remembrance of the bloody Chinese government crackdown on the 1989 student protest in Tiananmen Square.
The White House says that, for now, it will give equal treatment to petitions from overseas.
“We the People is just part of the administration’s commitment to open government and the code powering the application has been made available to anyone, including other countries, who wish to set up a similar system,” White House spokesman Matt Lehrich said.
It has rapidly become popular in China, where the tightly controlled media and Internet put politically sensitive topics off limits. People who bring their grievances to the central government as petitioners are routinely harassed, beaten and sent to labour camps as troublemakers — or locked up.