A Reuters UK article published two days ago relating the story of a riot sparked by local suspicions of a government cover-up in the death of a teenage girl, disclosed some interesting figures:

Petitioners often pressure local officials by journeying to provincial capitals or the national capital with complaints about lost land and corruption.

Over the past decade, the number of petitioners journeying to provincial capitals and to Beijing has swollen. Nationwide, petitions and complaint visits grew from 4.8 million in 1995 to 12.7 million in 2005.

Numbers about Chinese petitioners are cited often, and can be misleading. The implication Reuters leads us to draw for ourselves here is that petitioning in China is similar to protesting, or even rioting, in the U.S. and other Western democracies.

The truth is that such a rise in petitioners in China is, first and foremost, an indicator of rising political health. China’s system of “centralized democracy,” after all, asks citizens (in a tradition stretching back to imperial times) to find redress and political change with well-worded “memorials” to the leadership–the idea being that, even in the absence of political competition, the Chinese Communist Party (with its “scientific” world view) will be able to recognize and redress all wrongs brought to its attention.

In practice, of course, things don’t work out so well. The government often tries to “hide” the offices where petitions are supposed to be delivered and the cost of a trip to Beijing, or even just the provincial or county government center, can often be prohibitive for farmers and laborers (some of whom cannot read or write). The Maoist-Marxist rationality that theoretically grants the government the power to discern the “correct” course of action for each petition, moreover, has lost a great deal of status as a political value in Beijing, shoved aside in favor of economic growth and pragmatic foreign policy. Most alarmingly, the infrastructure needed to handle the enormous volume of petitions given to the government simply doesn’t exist–leading the government to sometimes suspend this critical system when resources are already under strain. (This is the case right now: Citing the need for social stability and smooth operations during the 2008 Olympics, all petitioning to the government has been suspended.)

The point, however, is not to misinterpret the meaning behind the numbers. Most petitions in China are about individualized matters (“this state-owned enterprise won’t pay my pension” or “I think that my cousin’s death was the result of malpractice”) and rarely directly address wider political grievances, such as human rights or democracy. A spike in petitioners may presage such political dissatisfaction, of course, but, more than anything, they are a positive sign for everybody: comparable to voter turnouts in the U.S., petitions indicate an increased interest in–and optimism in the ability of the individual to influence–politics. For the government of the PRC it’s a badge of legitimacy that, if properly handled, might be channeled into creating the increased transparency the country’s political system needs to defend against foreign criticism. For “China hawks” and overseas dissidents, its a promising sign that, despite the general political apathy among Chines people that has existed since the Tian’anmen crackdown, Chinese people are finally starting to ask their government for more than just money.

Is he negotiating with her, or just hearing her petition?