Recently, an internal document from the Chinese Communist Party petition department has been exposed online, revealing the establishment of a “Petitioner Harassment Warning and Assessment Model.” By analyzing petition behaviors, it assesses individual risk levels, focusing on identifying illegal, escalated, and malicious petitioners. The model categorizes different warning levels with blue, yellow, orange, and red markings, aiming to target “core leaders” and “potentially active petitioners.” Some petitioners revealed that local authorities have further subdivided petitioner “risk” into six levels. Currently, the original text of this document is difficult to find online.
The circulated document titled “Petitioner Harassment Warning and Assessment Model” is currently undergoing its “second revision.” The model classifies petitioners into four warning levels, assessing risk levels based on their petition records over the past year. The lengthy internal document indicates that authorities are utilizing data mining technology to analyze petitioner trends, specifically focusing on “core leaders” and “still active potential petitioners.”
Local Communist Party governments have been obstructing petitioners from going to the Beijing “National Petition Office” for over twenty years, establishing a so-called “warning mechanism.” The internal document further proposes to “accurately identify various illegal petitioning and harassment, disturbances of petitioners,” and to notably identify “disorderly escalated petitioning,” “malicious visit to Beijing petitioners,” and “still active potential petitioners.”
Radio Free Asia reported that on May 22nd, Mr. Zheng, an elderly petitioner in Shanghai, confirmed the authenticity of the document he saw. He revealed that local governments have similar classification documents to prevent petitioners from going to Beijing: “They monitor petitioners’ petition risk levels with blue, yellow, and even red, and I am in the highest level—black. This kind of classification has long existed. The leaders in our city also told me that I belong to the highest category (of control), for instance, during Beijing’s ‘Two Sessions,’ while others are not yet controlled, I am already under surveillance.”
Rights activist Liu Lequn from Jiangxi said that local governments have long restricted petitioners from petitioning by data models, which now extend to various aspects of their lives, including going out for errands, visiting relatives, etc. He said, “Every time there are ‘Two Sessions,’ the government will hire seven or eight security guards to watch you in advance, preventing you from going out. When you go out normally, they track you with your phone. Not long ago, when I went to Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Shanghai, and other places, I was inspected at a hotel in Hangzhou, where the police asked me what I was doing there, who I was with, who I wanted to meet, my license plate number, they checked very thoroughly.”
In recent years, the Chinese Communist Party’s judicial system has also established a petition risk warning mechanism. For example, the Higher People’s Court of Shanxi Province implements a “red, orange, yellow” three-tier warning management system, corresponding to different petition risk levels, and formulating corresponding disposal measures.
In 2010, scholars from Tianjin University of Technology, including Yan Yaojun, published an article proposing to “conduct systematic monitoring, evaluation, and judgment of a series of problems reflected in petitions and the petition process, to preemptively discover and forecast potential petition problems.”
These mechanisms have raised widespread concerns about privacy rights and freedom of speech. Lü Qiumin, a petitioner from Shandong, said that petition warning levels are divided into six grades locally, with her in the highest level: “I am in the highest category, monitored jointly by the National Security Bureau, Ministry of Public Security, and the Petition Office. Local governments have assigned ‘stabilization personnel’ to follow me all the time.”
She mentioned that local officials are concerned that petitioners going to Beijing may affect their careers: “The National Petition Bureau has a points deduction system for local officials. As long as petitioners go to the National Petition Bureau, local officials will be penalized, which may affect their promotion or even lead to their dismissal. The document leaked online is actually internal materials from local governments, which are present everywhere. We can all feel it.”
Scholar Deng Guangqing from Shanxi pointed out that authorities have long viewed petitioners as “potential hazards” and have extensively used this logic in the stability maintenance system. He said, “From rights lawyers to religious believers, from labor organizers to ethnic minorities, China’s ‘precision governance’ is about controlling dissent groups under the guise of ‘prediction’ and ‘prevention,’ by using technical means.”
Rights activist Mr. Zhu from Nanjing said that the police system has included “the capacity for organized mobilization” as an assessment criterion for petitioners: “It’s not about what you have done but what you ‘might’ do. Now, this logic has also been applied to petitioners.”
An anonymous legal scholar from Beijing said that without judicial independence and legal safeguards, such warning mechanisms can easily be used as tools for suppressing rights: “Once lacking transparency and an appeals mechanism, this predictive governance becomes a means of arbitrarily violating citizens’ rights.”