Photographs and Text by Sim Chi Yin
Under the orange glow of a distant street lamp, Aygu Tohiyti, 41, cooks over an open fire. Every now and again, she sits down on the soiled mattress where she also sleeps and takes most of her meals. Every day as dust falls, thousands of men and women like Tohiyti return to their nooks on sidewalks and under bridges in the area around Beijing’s Southern Railway Station, known to locals as the “petitioners’ village.”
These petitioners hail from all over the country. Jaded about the lack of justice in their hometowns, they arrive in the capital seeking help from Beijing’s central government. Armed with little more than plastic bags of handwritten documents, they are desperately trying to receive compensation and redress for all sorts of unsolved cases: alleged illegal land seizures, unpaid pensions or wages, unfair dismissals from work or sexual assaults. By day they file papers at the state’s petition offices. By night they sleep outside.
Petitioning, a tradition rooted in China’s imperial era, is famously futile. Studies by Chinese scholars show that fewer than 6 percent of petitioners actually see their cases resolved. But millions of ordinary Chinese still believe in this ancient practice. In the same way that Chen Guangcheng, the blind activist lawyer, appealed directly to Premier Wen Jiabao in a video message he recorded upon his escape from brutal house arrest in April, many petitioners remain hopeful that if only high-level officials knew of their woes, help would finally arrive.
Among the most marginalized groups in Beijing, petitioners make repeated trips to the capital, or they stay for years, collecting scraps to support themselves or picking up thrown-out food to eat. In recent years, even as China’s economy has ballooned, the country has witnessed growing unrest. The petitioners’ presence is a sign of how millions of Chinese do not view the country’s Communist Party–controlled legal system as an impartial arbiter.
To party officials, the petitioners’ shantytown in Beijing is an eyesore, something that needs to be eradicated. The government has certainly tried. Authorities tore down much of the old petitioners’ village ahead of the 2008 Beijing Olympics to make way for the gleaming Southern Railway Station, home to China’s new ultra-high-speed trains. Since late 2010 when I started photographing in earnest what was left of the village, the area has been even more aggressively blotted clean. Places where wood and cardboard shacks once stood are now fenced off or boarded up. Tunnels and underpasses where petitioners once slept under canvas sheets have been sealed shut with cement. And those who are now forced to camp out in the outskirts of the capital are often chased down and rounded up by people sent by their local governments. Many are shipped home, while others are summarily detained. The most tenacious of them, however, keep coming back, over and over again, hoping their voices will someday be heard.
