To deliver a single complaint to China’s national petition office, Liu Qin spent 45 hours on a Beijing sidewalk. He ate dry rations, drank bottled water, washed in a public toilet, and dozed in a folding chair beside a moat through the night. By the time he reached the door on a Thursday morning, he said, he “reeked all over.”
He could have spared himself most of it. For 500 to 1,000 yuan (about $75 to $150), Liu said, a scalper would have walked him straight to the front of the line.
The State Bureau for Letters and Calls, in Beijing’s Xicheng District, is billed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) as the highest channel for ordinary people to seek justice when local courts and officials fail them. For many, it is the last door left to knock on—and petitioners and rights groups have long called it a dead end.
Now, according to Liu and other petitioners who described the scene to The Epoch Times, it is a dead end with a cover charge: Organized crews seize the front of the line for days at a time and resell the spots to worn-out petitioners, while security guards look the other way—or, petitioners allege, take a cut.
Nowhere Else to Turn
Liu, who asked that a pseudonym be used citing fear of reprisal, is an entrepreneur from the eastern province of Zhejiang. He said his company collapsed after what he described as wrongful enforcement by the local market regulator, costing him more than 100 million yuan (about $15 million).
Officials at his provincial petition bureau told him the sums were too large for them to touch, he said; their advice was to keep petitioning and hope that one day “some upright official takes notice.” So since the end of the pandemic, he has made the trip to Beijing every two months.
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In China, petitioning—known as shangfang—in its modern bureaucratic form dates to the early years of communist rule, but the practice of visiting higher authorities to escalate grievances has far older roots in imperial China, when subjects used to beat a drum at a magistrate’s gate to plead for redress.
Under the Chinese communist regime, with no independent courts and no free press, petitioning remains, on paper, a way to go over the heads of crooked local officials.
However, in practice, it almost never works. The most widely cited evidence comes from Yu Jianrong, then a scholar at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, whose team surveyed 632 petitioners in Beijing and reported in the magazine Phoenix Weekly in 2004 that only 0.2 percent said petitioning had ever resolved their problem.
Yu detailed the project the following year in Twenty-First Century, a journal of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and the figure has since been cited by Human Rights Watch and the U.S. Congressional-Executive Commission on China.
The official statistics Yu quoted show the scale of the demand: Party and government petition offices nationwide logged 12.7 million letters and visits in 2003 alone.
A 45-Hour Wait
The bureau receives petitioners five days a week—full days on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, mornings only on Tuesday and Thursday. Because there is little room inside, Liu said, the authorities have fenced off three holding pens, labeled A, B, and C, on the strip outside the entrance.
Petitioners first line up across the road, along the moat by Yongdingmen—a rebuilt imperial-era gate that once marked the southern entrance to the old walled city—then move in batches through the zones before reaching the hall, where swiping an ID card or handing in documents takes only a few minutes.
The bottleneck is brutal. By Liu’s estimate, the office processes about 1,000 to 2,000 people a day, while 3,000 to 4,000 wait outside.
On his most recent trip, he arrived at 1 p.m. on a Tuesday and counted at least 2,500 people ahead of him; realizing he had no chance the next day, he settled in for Thursday instead—45 hours in the open.
The weaker women and elderly people around him, he said, went without water for hours rather than lose their places to a toilet trip.
Paying to Cut the Line
It is in that exhaustion that the market works. Liu said the spot-selling began two or three years ago amid the country’s economic slump but turned brazen from the second half of 2024, as the crowds swelled.
“The ones at the front sell their spots—1,000 or 500 yuan (about $150 or $75) each, and for that money you can skip the line and go straight to the front of Zone A,” Liu said.
The sellers mostly speak with northeastern accents and work in crews of a few to a dozen people, he said, lining up daily to claim spots and hawking them to the petitioners behind them.
Prices have climbed with demand—from 50 or 100 yuan (about $7 to $15) early on to a going rate of 500 to 800 yuan (about $75 to $120), sometimes 1,000 yuan—and peak on Monday and Wednesday nights, before the bureau’s full days.
When Liu watched one family of four cut the line together to grab spots, a veteran petitioner from Shandong quietly warned him off: “They’re in the business. Don’t make a fuss—they’ve got a whole crew.”
A petitioner from Hunan beside Liu broke down after staying up all night and still failing to get in—exactly the moment, Liu said, when a scalper steps in to promise a paying customer the front of Zone A by 4 a.m. the next morning. A young man who had just flown in was approached within minutes by a seller flashing eight fingers: 800 yuan (about $120).
The trade survives, Liu believes, because the guards let it. The whole scheme turns on swapping ID cards at the gate—sellers leaving the zones must deposit their cards with a guard—and it works only because the guards never check the cards against the faces holding them, he said.
“Without some backing, no one would dare be this bold outside the State Bureau for Letters and Calls,” Liu said. “From what people say, it’s connected to the guards.” A young night-shift guard told him he earned 3,000 yuan (about $440) a month—a sum a scalper can clear in a day.
Cameras cover the whole area, and a police station sits next door. “If the police really wanted to crack down, they could round them all up in two days,” Liu said. “Every transaction is right there on camera.”
Even the misery has spawned commerce. Belongings vanish in the crush; Liu has lost an umbrella, a chair, a blanket, his glasses, and a phone battery. In winter, petitioners buy army-surplus coats for 50 yuan (about $7), must leave them on racks outside the hall, and come out to find them gone—gathered up and resold at the gate the next night, Liu said. “Wherever there are people, there’s business.”
A System Built to Fail
The scramble outside the door is only the visible edge of a system stacked against petitioners. Local officials are punished when residents of their areas carry grievances to Beijing, so provinces post agents in the capital to “intercept” them.
Nor is the corruption confined to the sidewalk: in 2017, a former deputy director of the bureau, Xu Jie, was exposed for taking bribes to make petitioners’ cases disappear, the South China Morning Post reported.
The authorities’ answer to the desperation, petitioners say, has been to manage its symptoms.
Footage that circulated in late May showed metal netting several meters high newly installed along the moat outside the bureau—a barrier, petitioners said, meant to stop people from jumping into the water.
For Liu, every grueling trip changes nothing about his case. He goes anyway. “Outside it’s a sea of people,” he said, “but inside it’s empty, and the staff take their time.” Swiping his card, he said, is just a way of telling the office, one more time, that his problem still has not been solved.
Cheng Mulan and Gu Xiaohua contributed to this report.
