By Dale McFeatters
Police officers in foreign countries are no longer nonplused when people they’ve arrested demand to be read their Miranda rights ― the result, perhaps, of overexposure to U.S. cop shows in foreign syndication.
Something like that is happening now with the White House website “We the People.” The Obama administration started the website in 2011 with the promise that any petition collecting 100,000 valid signatures within a month would be seriously reviewed and get an answer.
Now the Chinese, “motivated variously by a sense of justice, powerlessness or just plain humor,” have flooded the website, according to the Financial Times. Picking up 100,000 signatures in China is apparently not a terribly big deal.
The most serious petition, which received 135,000 signatures just five days after being launched, asks the U.S. to use its influence to have the Chinese reopen the unsolved investigation into the 1995 poisoning of Zhu Ling that left the doctoral student at a prestigious university disabled.
Appeals within China went unanswered and the authorities blocked her name. The Financial Times speculates that the government was embarrassed by its inability to solve the crime or that a key suspect, Zhu’s former roommate, was the granddaughter of a former high-ranking official.
The former roommate now lives in the United States, where Zhu’s supporters have pursued her over the unblocked U.S. Internet.
Just in the last three days, five other petitions have been submitted to the White House. Two urge U.S. military intervention to liberate China and Hong Kong. You can imagine how happy the White House was to see those. Two others urge U.S. assistance in raising concerns about pollution from one existing chemical plant and another under construction.
The fifth, which the Times contends may be a joke, urges standards for the ingredients in tofu curd, a Chinese breakfast favorite. But considering China’s haphazard food safety standards and its suspect use of illicit additives like ground rat meat, maybe it’s not a joke.
The Chinese government has its own petition offices ― petitions are a long tradition there dating back to the emperors ― but people complain that the provincial offices are swamped and that officials ignore petitions they find inconvenient or embarrassing.
The especially aggrieved try to take their petitions to higher authority in Beijing, but they’re often barred from traveling to the capital or are simply thrown in jail. It would probably be a bad idea if the thwarted petitioners insisted on their Miranda rights.
The author is an editorial writer for Scripps Howard News Service (www.shns.com).