BEIJING — As Chinese have done for generations, Qiu Jie came to the capital to seek justice after being cheated out of his life savings. Instead, he says, officials from his home province lured him to a Beijing hotel, where they slapped him in handcuffs, beat him and took him away.
After they got him back home, they committed him to a police-run psychiatric hospital, where he was tied to a bed for 32 days, Qiu says. When he launched a hunger strike, they placed him on an intravenous drip.
Staff doctors, all police employees, diagnosed him with unspecified "mental disorders," he says, and forced drugs down his throat. After he suffered a minor heart attack, the hospital released him. He believes it would have raised too many questions if he had died in custody.
Seeking justice in the capital is a tradition rooted in China's imperial days, and even today Beijing maintains offices for tens of thousands of petitioners to file complaints against local officials for alleged corruption, theft, even murder.
Experts say the practice of appealing to the central government, even as China seeks to project a modern image in the approach to the Summer Olympics next year in Beijing, reflects a lack of avenues available to ordinary Chinese to fight abuses of power. Most courts remain under the thumb of Communist Party and government officials.
But when they get to Beijing, petitioners still face huge obstacles. A 2004 study found that fewer than one in 500 complaints were ever addressed. Many petitioners are simply referred back to the local authorities they are accusing. Others, like Qiu, face what fellow petitioner Wu Keqin calls "state-sanctioned kidnapping."
Every day, hundreds of provincial prosecutors, local officials, undercover police and hired criminals are working in the capital as "retrievers," those familiar with the system say. Their swagger and brutality have earned them nicknames such as "the wolves" and "the vultures."
"It's implied by the provincial officials who hire them that they're allowed to use violence," said Zhao Tianxin, an activist. "People really hate them but are too afraid to fight back."
The work can be highly lucrative. Officials are willing to pay retrievers well because they know they face the loss of their jobs and party membership, imprisonment and even execution if national authorities decide the complaint against them has merit.
