cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/60027618

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[China’s] decades-old petitioning system (called xinfang or letters and visits) in China provides a framework for the public to lodge complaints of official misconduct or seek dispute resolution outside of the legal system. However, petitioners are one of the most persecuted groups in China with local authorities often using hired thugs or police to harass and punish them to prevent them from filing their grievances.

Safeguard Defenders interviewed a number of local human rights lawyers in China to get their responses to these new rules. Here’s what they told us along with additional analysis from our research.

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The two key changes in “Measures of the State Bureau for Letters and Visits on Further Standardizing the Registration of Public Visits” that went into force 1 July 2026 are:

• Article 4, which bars petitioners from registering their complaints in Beijing if they do not have paperwork showing they have already completed the petitioning process with lower (up to provincial-level) petition offices. And,

• Article 6, which bars repeated petitioning, gives police powers to “educate” or “guide” those who do so, and potentially criminalizes “disruptive” or “persistent” attempts to petition in Beijing allowing police to handle the matter “in accordance with the law”.

The main impacts of these are to keep petitioners out of Beijing and force local governments to handle the huge numbers of complaints, say the lawyers.

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The lawyers came up with two main reasons why they think the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) released these new regulations:

• reduce the overall number of petitions,

• keep petitioners and potential violent incidents out of Beijing by making local governments take more responsibility.

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According to two of the lawyers, the system is overloaded with complaints, and the CCP wants to reduce the number of new petitions, especially in Beijing. The current system was clearly not working (and has not been for many years) with inspection teams bogged down with huge numbers of petitions, petitioners stuck in endless procedures, more people travelling to Beijing to petition and heavy pressure on local governments to stop them (which is expensive).

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By drastically limiting who can petition in Beijing, the authorities can now not only control the numbers of petitioners in the capital, they can also shift the responsibility for unresolved petitions to local governments. If petitioners become desperate and angry from years of fruitlessly appealing for justice, they are less likely to protest in the capital.

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In principle, petitioning is a legal activity but because local governments are afraid of being punished for having too many complaints (see below), they have often engaged police to target petitioners on trumped-up public order charges, such as using the crime of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble” to sentence them to yearslong jail terms.

Another tactic has been to illegally hold them in psychiatric hospitals, also sometimes for years on end. But there is a danger that the wider public could view these actions by the police as extralegal and illegitimate.

That is why, historically, governments often hired thugs from security firms to kidnap and threaten petitioners to stop them petitioning in Beijing. By using thugs with no public connection to the government, they had plausible deniability that they were involved in the persecution, a system which scholar Lynette Ong calls “outsourcing repression”.

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One lawyer believes petitioners will now face more pressure and become more fearful. They can more easily be arrested—and it’s possible they may be used as examples to scare others off from petitioning.

The Beijing route—which used to be so important for them—is now mostly closed off.

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