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PRC orders conflict resolution

China has told local government leaders to be more responsive to people’s complaints after several rural protests threatened to disturb the run-up to the Olympic Games, a government notice said yesterday.

Officials should better resolve disputes and prevent mass events, said a high-level meeting on dealing with petitioners held in Jinan, Shandong Province, this week, a notice on the Web site of the Ministry of Supervision said.

The deputy secretary of the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, He Yong (何勇), said the changing social and economic landscape in China had created new challenges.

As Beijing enters the final stretch before the Aug. 8 to Aug. 24 Olympics, the government is trying to limit protests or complaints across the country that could embarrass the country, which is striving to project the image of a modern nation.

Two recent mass protests have brought discontent with local officials in the countryside into the open. Last month, more than 30,000 people protested and torched a police station in a town in hilly Guizhou Province over what they believed was a cover-up of a teenage girl’s death.

And over the weekend, hundreds of migrant workers attacked a police station in eastern Zhejiang Province after one worker was allegedly beaten while trying to get a residence permit.

The protests and China’s petition system, which allows people with unresolved local complaints to come to Beijing to ask for help, have become worrying areas for the government before the Olympics.

Petitioners coming to Beijing have been under a close watch, with police from the provinces lined up outside petition offices all day, sometimes sending them back home.

Local Communist Party leaders around the country have been holding meetings this month in which they have been ordered to “thoroughly” deal with local disputes, Outlook Magazine, published by Xinhua news agency, said on Monday.

“Every locality should inspect and resolve all kinds of conflicts and disputes completely,” the magazine said, citing a central government decision.

“Party secretaries at all local levels should take the lead in handling those key cases and thoroughly get involved until it is completely resolved,” it said.

Photos shown on an Internet forum yesterday showed government banners in the town of Jianghua in Hunan Province forbidding any petitions against the government.

A female employee with the petition office of Jianghua, who refused to give her name as is common with officials in China, confirmed the banners were up.

“Our county heads hosted meetings in our county, addressing the importance of security work during the Olympics,” she said.

“Because of the meetings, we began our work on putting up those banners since last month, and all party and government departments were involved in this work,” she said.
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