Petition, a documentary that took director Zhao Liang 12 years to film (1996-2008), is “dedicated to those in pursuit of their beliefs,” which in this case are the many people who travel to Beijing and other Chinese cities seeking juridical closure at the Petition Offices. The petitioners have been wronged and ignored by their local officials and spend months or years camping out in squalid conditions in all seasons, waiting for the higher administrative stratum to finally award recognition of their grievances. It’s not entirely clear what the petitioners expect — remuneration, retribution, restoration — but what becomes apparent very quickly is that their hopes are unfounded and their resolve tragic.
The hardships are incredible. One teenage girl is unable to attend school because she lives with her mother in a Petition Village. The petitioners are waylaid and beaten by retrievers, who are hired to bring the number of petitions down in their localities so that the government can save face. Late in the film, we watch as a group of petitioners walk along the train tracks collecting parts of a man and a woman who were hit while fleeing from retrievers.
The mortal danger, however, is an ancillary worry. The greatest obstacle is that the judicial system is impenetrable. The best way to describe it is to quote at length from page 113 of Breon Mitchell’s translation of Franz Kafka’s The Trial:
He had of course set to work immediately, and the first petition was already nearly finished. It was very important, for the first impression made by the defense often influenced the whole course of the proceedings. Unfortunately, and he felt he must point this out to K., on some occasions initial petitions were not even read by the court. They were simply put in the file with a note that for the time being the hearings and surveillance of the accused were much more important than anything put in writing. If the petitioner pressed the issue, it was added that once all the evidence had been collected, and prior to the verdict, this first petition would be considered as well, together with all other documents of course. Unfortunately that wasn’t true either in most cases; the first petition was generally misplaced or completely lost…
The Communist Party of the PRC doesn’t tolerate dissent well, so it comes as no surprise that they would leave some of their citizens stuck in a circuit of forms, stamps, and papers impossible to negotiate. One of the film’s most bitterly funny moments is when a Petition Office official tells a frustrated woman, “It can’t be solved here. Go to the Supreme Court.” Like in The Trial, there is no endpoint in the chain of authority. Even if the Supreme Court exists, one can never get there. And at every level below the highest, the officials claim not to have the power to deliver a judgment.
That seems to be what the petitioners long for most: judgment. If a sentence were delivered against them, their case would at least obtain a definite status. The petitioners live in an existential suspension parallel to their nomadism and juridical dissolution. The woman replies to the official’s suggestion of taking her petition to the Supreme Court, “Why not just execute me?” Her life becomes inextricably bound up with her petition, and if the latter can’t be settled, the former loses its value. When a woman picks up the train victim’s jawbone, a man says, “It’s all evidence,” and she places it in a bag.
The paradox of the petition system then is this. The petition stands for all political injustice, but the method of enacting justice “can’t [be understood] without a degree in law.” The petitioners often talk about the law and how the government fails to follow the law. They seem to believe that if only the governmental operations and institutions can be brought in line with the law, then the people would live in harmony. But who makes and enforces the law?
So, you see, we’ve come to an impasse, and we’ve arrived too early. The film is 124 minutes long (and this is the shorter foreign cut), meandering in a way less meditative than aimless. Petition holds interest as an anthropological document, but its narrative threads are too sketchy to sustain drama and the political critique doesn’t seem to extend beyond the weary petitioner’s conviction, “I hate the way of this world.” Zhao Liang says in an interview, “Petitioning is unlikely to happen to me. I know it’s a meaningless thing and I don’t want to waste my energy.” Twelve years filming something that is ultimately a meaningless waste of energy is undeniably an instructive exercise, only perhaps not as much so for the Western observer.
