Chinese gov't taps for new mechanism handling complaint letters and visits

To meet the increasing pressure from the people's complaints letters and visits year on year, Chinese government is exploring a brand new mechanism for handling them so as to reduce those people gathering in front of government offices. appealing to the above for their injustice and wrongs.

The Chinese have been used to bring their cases they thought they were wronged up against those before the "imperial superior in the capital city" for thousands of years. Since the founding of the People's Republic of China, China has established a series of mechanism handling complaint letters and visits, which guaranteed common people's rights of petition theoretically. According to State Letters and Complaints Bureau, the number of people who appeal for help from the central government offices has been on the rise in recent years and most of them should have appealed to their local governments for the redress of their wrongs beforehand.

"For those cases of complaint letters and visits, more than 80 percent are reasonable and another 80 percent are solved by the joint efforts from Party committees and governments at various levels. One of the important reasons accounted for the increasing number of people who come to Beijing to appeal for injustice is that the local governments haven't provided relevant helps to those in need," said Zhou Zhanshun, director of State Letters and Complaints Bureau.

China's new leadership has attached great importance to the problems existing in the process of handling complaint letters and visits. Starting from last year onwards, President Hu Jintao and other top Chinese officials have made a series of instructions demanding local governments and departments at various levels to strengthen cooperation and gradually form a large mechanism that makes overall plans and takes all factors into consideration and gets at the root of the problems in handling complaints from the ordinary people.

Currently, a joint conference mechanism has been formed with the general office of the CPC central committee to handle those outstanding problems of people's complaints and other mass problems. The mechanism includes 28 various departments and sections such as General Office of the CPC Central Committee, State Letters and Complaints Bureau and Beijing Municipal Government. In response to the current outstanding issues from the masses, the joint conference has set up five special working groups to tackle those problems, for instance, the land requisition problems in rural areas. Each of these groups has a leading cadre and holds regular meeting every month.

The judicial departments have always been one of the most complained objects. The Supreme Court and the Ministry of Public Security have started checking up all the overstocked complaint cases. The Supreme Court has also issued China's first regulations on people's complaints, The Regulations on the standardization and improvement of complaint system to solve the difficulties such as complaints and appeals.

Actually, almost all the governments of provincial levels and big cities have working groups stationed in Beijing and their responsibility is to solve problems of visitors from the localities on the spot. Meanwhile, they are also responsible for the registration of visitors according to their categories and bring the cases to various officials and departments concerned, and persuade the visitors to return to their hometown as soon as possible.

Some loopholes existing in the current complaint system is considered to be the "bottleneck" in solving ordinary people's complaints. The complaint departments are usually in charge of the registration and the transmission of relevant complaint cases, but lack of authorization from the government above, which has resulted in the postponement of handling some major and difficult complaint cases. Jia Ruoyu, deputy director of State Letters and Complaints Bureau under NPC Standing Committee noted that they often sent letters of the relevant complaint cases to the local judicial and administrative departments, but the replies were at a low rate with last year to see less than half of the sent letters get replied.

The central government is now conscious of the seriousness of the issue and consequently published relevant documents to make clear regulations on the reception and handling of the complaint cases. The regulation has put the handling of complaint cases into the checkup administrative achievements of officials concerned and will punish those malfeasants or those neglected their duties when tackling the complaint cases.

The importance the Central Government has attached upon and the close attention from the public have exerted unprecedented pressure on the local governments. As a result, many local governments have begun to establish a mechanism more effective in tackling the daily growing complaint cases and try to solve those cases at the gross root level.

NPC representatives, relevant experts, officials and persons concerned took part in the hearing held in northeast China's Liaoning province, with an aim to define openly and legally the reasonability of long-term and repetitious complaint cases. Whereas in south China's Guangdong province it has been trying to solve this problem through the reform of its personnel policies. At the beginning of 2004, Guangdong province transferred twelve publicly elected deputy-department-level cadres to work in the provincial letters and complaints bureau and stick to this system. And in central China's Henan province, 687 governmental officials bringing with them some 1,622 complaint-cases went to various parts of the province before long for a three-month-long "return visit".

Many regional legislative bodies have also creatively taken the handling of complaint cases into their daily work. The NPC Standing Committee of Guiyang, capital city of southwest China's Guizhou province, has already taken people's complaint letters and visits as an important source for the NPC legislature and law enforcement. In Shanghai, the municipal NPC has taken the handling of complaint letters and visits as one of the important evidences for supervising and examining government and judicial officials.

At the 2nd session of the 10th NPC Standing Committee in last March, Wu Bangguo, chairman of the NPC Standing Committee, decided on the handling of complaint cases as one way of the NPC to perform the supervision function in his NPC's work report for the first time.

The State Letters and Complaints Bureau invited experts and scholars to attend a seminar on the 28th of last August. The experts present at the seminar unanimously believed that with the constant development of China's economy and society, the Chinese people have come to be more and more concerned about the protection of their legal rights and interests. The increasing complaint cases are the inevitable results of this change, and under the current situation it was necessary to maintain the complaint system.

But with regard to the issue of reforming the system, the experts differed in their opinions. The experts believed that the appropriate solution of the complaint cases is vital to China's sustainable development. Only the governments attached as much importance to the handling of complaint cases as they did to the economic development and family planning could the handling of complaint cases find a way out for its proper solution.

By People's Daily Online