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IMAGING BEIJING |
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Beijing, June 28th, 2007 There is an ancient tradition in China where people would travel from all parts of the countryside to plead their grievance before the Emperor.They would queue up for an audience with the Emperor |
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and grovel at his feet, citing incidents of local government corruption and human rights abuses. Although transformed and bureaucratized, this tradition continues today. I was having coffee with a friend one afternoon, after the "Imaging Place" fieldwork was complete, when the topic of the petitioners village surfaced. Although few locals had ever been there and certainly fewer foreigners, there were rumors of a temporary village somewhere south of the city center. We decided to go try to find the place, however we weren't sure where to go. We hailed cabs in the rain for a while, but the cab drivers were reluctant to take us there or simply denied knowing the village's whereabouts. Frustrated and now wet, my friend suggested we check the internet. Since neither of us had a laptop and a wireless connection was nowhere near, he suggested that we go to a nearby internet cafe. The internet cafe was an experience in of it self. It was truly a windowless basement den where hundreds of gamers had been sequestered for hours or even days. It turns out that there are clinics in China dedicated to the treatment of internet addiction. It seems ironic that what we consider the development of the skills which will be necessary to navigate electarcy, China treats as a disease. After my visit to the local internet cafe, I can partially see their point. At any rate, we got the directions to the petitioners village and in a matter of minutes we were on our way. At first we were still not able to find the village, but we manage to find the Ministry of Correspondence (loosely translated). The idea is that the petitioners are supposed to write their grievance down and mail it to the ministry. They are not supposed to come to the ministry in person. But come they do, in the hundreds, waiting to catch the ministers as they walk to their cars at the end of the work day. The petitioners would wheat-paste their grievance to the wall of the hutong leading to the ministry. The government would come at night and paint them over. Then the petitioners would return the following day and paste more grievances creating layers of horrific stories of trumped up detentions and deaths of loved ones. |
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David Barboza, The New York Times | May 4, 2007 China Makes Arrest in Pet Food Case SHANGHAI, The general manager of a Chinese company accused of selling contaminated wheat gluten to pet food suppliers in the United States has been detained by the Chinese authorities, according to police officials here and a person who was briefed on the investigation. The manager, Mao Lijun, head of the Xuzhou Anying Biologic Technology Development Company, is being held in coastal Jiangsu Province, about 320 miles northwest of Shanghai, though a police spokesman in the area, Pei County, declined to say on what charges. In a telephone interview a few weeks ago, Mr. Mao denied any knowledge of how melamine, an industrial chemical, had been mixed into pet food supplies sold under his company label earlier this year. He also insisted that his company had never exported any wheat gluten and that his products were sold only on the domestic market. But regulators in the United States identified Xuzhou Anying and another Chinese company in nearby Shandong Province as the only sources of the contaminated ingredients that killed 16 dogs and cats, sickened thousands of others and led to one of the biggest pet food recalls in American history. |
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We then payed a guy 5 yuan (about $0.66 USD) to take us to the village in a motor-driven rickshaw. He would only go so close and told us to walk the rest of the way. Still not completely sure where to go, we continued on, following the steady stream of petitioners. We stopped to read a petition which was given to us by an eighty-five-year-old woman who's son died while being detained on false charges. We suddenly realized that we had found the village when a large group of petitioners started to descend upon us, thinking that we might be able to help them. I began to have a "we may be in over our heads here" moment when we decided to beat a hasty retreat. I made no images that day, no pictures of the petitions, the petitioners or the new Olympic building constructions site that was encroaching on the village itself. |
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