1,000s of petitioners sent home

An apparent influx of petitioners into Beijing on Tuesday, National Legal Advocacy Day, resulted in thousands of them being rounded up when they staged unauthorized demonstrations near key buildings and landmarks.

Most were bundled into hired city buses and sent to the Beijing Jiujingzhuang petitioner reception center in Fengtai district. They were then handed over to officials from their hometowns and offered free transportation home.

Liu Guijie, a petitioner from Qingdao, Shandong Province, told the Global Times that she came to Beijing with a group of people on National Legal Advocacy Day in the hope of drawing attention to her case, which she won in her local court only to have the order ignored.

"More than 30 petitioners accepted the offer of a free ticket home early Wednesday. I decided to stay in Beijing with 12 other petitioners with whom I came to Beijing," Liu said.

A Beijing-based judge from the Qingdao Intermediate People's Court, surnamed Li, who was assigned to process Qingdao petitioners at the reception center, confirmed with the Global Times that many petitioners accepted a train ticket home.

Li refused to answer additional questions.

A staffer at the reception center ordered a Global Times reporter not to come within 10 meters of the center's gate and refused to say how many people had been brought to the center. From a higher vantage point in a nearby building, the center's complex of buildings appears much larger than a football field.

Petitioner Liu said she spent two evening at the center and was held in a 100-square-meter room. "On Monday there were 100 people in the room but on Tuesday the number doubled."

Zhang Fengying, 72, who travelled from Taiyuan, Shanxi Province, to petition on National Legal Advocacy Day, told the Global Times she was immediately picked up and put on a bus when she tried to demonstrate in front of the new CCTV tower.

"I knew it wouldn't do any good, but I wanted to come anyway," said Zhang, adding that there were so many people at the Jiujingzhuang center that she had to wait on the bus for four hours before being processed.

Tang Renwu, dean of the political management school at Beijing Normal University, told the Global Times that Beijing police made a safe and strategically correct decision.

"Bring them to the reception center is a good way to deal with city's harsh winter," said Tang, adding that demonstrations are not a solution to people's petitions and reforms to the system of letters and calls are badly needed.