Feng Zhenghu: The Door to Redress That Cannot Be Closed: Assessing the “Asymmetric” Dilemma and Procedural Maze of the New Petition Registration Rules

In recent years, how to promote the petition system toward “rule of law and orderly administration” has remained an important issue in the development of the national governance system. On July 1, 2026, the National Public Complaints and Proposals Administration officially implemented the Measures on Further Regulating the Registration of Public Visits (hereinafter the “Registration Measures”), attempting to reduce petitions submitted to higher-level authorities and ineffective visits to Beijing, and establish a clearer petitioning order through refined, full-chain management covering “registration—diversion—tracking—supervision—filtering.”

From the perspective of technical governance and regulatory order, Article 2 of the Registration Measures details the obligation to provide written notification within 15 days, while Articles 3 and 5, for the first time, include dereliction such as “failing to accept a matter that should be accepted” and “failing to handle a matter that should be handled” within the scope of supervision and accountability. These provisions undoubtedly signal the central authorities’ good-faith effort to standardize procedures and urge local governments to perform their duties.

However, the essence of the rule of law should not be the long and arduous journey of the helpless. When we examine the Registration Measures in the real-world context of failures in local governance and ineffective judicial redress, we find that behind their precise rule design lies an asymmetric dilemma in which the structure of rights and responsibilities is severely unbalanced. Almost the entire burden of regulating order and imposing rigid constraints is placed on petitioners, while the core cause driving petitions upward—the “inaction” of local and judicial authorities—is addressed only through toothless constraints.

This deviation in governance logic is pushing this rule-of-law reform toward the abyss of a closed loop of “procedural formalism.”

I. The Prerequisite of “Provincial Documents”: Information from the Grassroots That Is Blocked and the Reality of “Local Cover-Ups”

Article 4 of the Registration Measures stipulates that when members of the public travel to Beijing to petition beyond their local or next-higher-level authorities, they must possess written materials such as a notification letter or written response issued by a provincial-level authority. If they cannot provide such materials, the National Public Complaints and Proposals Administration and central ministries and commissions will “refuse to register” the petition and directly “persuade and guide” the petitioner to return.

The original intention of this “provincial prerequisite certification” was to promote “petitioning through the levels” and prevent resource wastage. Yet this precisely overlooks the most brutal reality of China’s grassroots petitioning environment: the reason petitioners appeal to higher levels, and even go to Beijing at great cost, is often that provincial- and lower-level authorities fail to act, refuse to correct errors, and even refuse to issue any standardized documents.

In practice, many ordinary people face “neither filing nor adjudicating,” “cold treatment,” or “template replies.” When local governments use stability maintenance, interception of petitioners, and delays to “cover things up,” requiring petitioners in an absolutely disadvantaged position to obtain a response from a provincial authority is tantamount to “asking the oppressed to go to the oppressor’s shelter to obtain a permit to appeal.”

This creates a terrifying vicious circle:

The more local authorities fail to act and the less they provide standardized responses, the less able petitioners are to obtain the “pass” needed to register a petition in Beijing. As a result, local dereliction itself becomes a “sieve” and “firewall” blocking the public from lodging appeals lawfully.

Although Article 5 of the Registration Measures proposes that “improvement suggestions may be made regarding those who fail to issue documents,” a “suggestion” is not binding and is seriously subject to delay; it cannot at all alleviate the petitioner’s immediate, rigid deprivation of access to the door. The original intention of assigning responsibility by level must never be distorted into “territorial blockade” by local administrations.

II. “No Longer Registering and Not Including Data in Statistics”: Can Muting the Data Eliminate Real Contradictions?

Article 6 of the Registration Measures stipulates that for reasonable demands that have been resolved in accordance with law and policy, but where the petitioner continues repeatedly to visit Beijing, the petition authorities, together with public security organs, shall provide rule-of-law education, guidance and persuasion to leave; the petition shall no longer be registered, and “the relevant data shall not be included in statistics or reported.”

The reasonable core of this provision is to prevent persistent and disruptive petitioning and conserve public resources. But at the legal and operational levels, it harbors enormous implementation risks.

First is the dilemma of discretionary power in which the “judge and player are one.” What does it mean for a “demand to have been resolved in accordance with law and policy”? In the absence of an independent third-party assessment or judicial review mechanism, this is often determined unilaterally by the local government or the authority originally involved in the case. Once power lacks neutral oversight, local governments, seeking to evade assessment pressure, can easily unilaterally label all reasonable demands that remain unresolved as “settled,” thereby lawfully shutting the door on them.

Even more worrying are the policy consequences of “not including the data in statistics or reporting it.” Data on petitions to Beijing is a “barometer” and “early warning signal” exposing local social contradictions and governance gaps. Once data on repeat and persistent petitions is forcibly erased from statistical reports, the local government’s assessment reports may look better, but the real grievances and facts of harm to people’s interests have not disappeared.

This kind of “assessment burden reduction” can easily evolve into “burying one’s head in the sand” in local governance. It builds an information isolation wall between the central authorities and society’s grassroots, concealing genuine crises within data silence. Ultimately, these crises may erupt at the grassroots in more intense and uncontrollable ways, undermining the foundations of social stability.

III. The Asymmetry of the Confrontation: Hard Constraints on Petitioners, Soft Constraints on Authorities

Looking across the Registration Measures as a whole, the asymmetry in their institutional design is glaring:

Article 41 of China’s Constitution expressly guarantees citizens the right to submit appeals, complaints, or reports to relevant state organs concerning illegal or derelict conduct by any state organ or state employee. The petition system is essentially an extension of this constitutional right at the level of administrative governance; it cannot be substantively hollowed out through administrative registration rules.

The causal relationship reflected in social reality is this: “The reason petitioners choose the ‘disorderly conduct’ of appealing to higher levels often stems from the local government’s prior ‘inaction.’” The Registration Measures, however, reverse the allocation of responsibility at both ends of this causal chain: local governments whose conduct creates the responsibility for petitions moving upward face only “improvement suggestions,” while petitioners forced upward by inaction face the punishment of “refusal to register + police intervention.”

When Article 6 links public security organs with “rule-of-law education, guidance and persuasion to leave” in ordinary petitioning scenarios, it can easily blur the boundary between “expressing a demand” and “causing trouble in violation of the law,” resulting in the premature “public-security treatment” of petitioning issues. This not only fails to resolve contradictions at their source, but also seriously depletes the judicial and administrative credibility of a country governed by the rule of law.

IV. Escaping the Maze of “Technical Governance”: Reconstructing Substantive Justice in the Petition System

The Registration Measures are essentially an advanced technical-governance program. They seek to exchange the optimization of data indicators, blanket interception, and the setting of admission thresholds for a temporary, statistically defined petitioning order. But technical governance cannot repair institutional formalism. The deeper roots of the petitioning predicament remain:

1. The failure of the main channel for judicial redress: the refusal to file or adjudicate cases, and local administrative interference with judicial independence, have forced petitioning to serve as a substitute for substantive rights-based redress.

2. The distortion of assessment mechanisms: single and mechanical indicators such as a “zero loss rate” and “zero petitions to Beijing” force local governments to focus their efforts on “controlling people and covering things up,” rather than “correcting errors in accordance with the law.”

To truly break the “petitioning vicious circle” and reconstruct substantive justice, fundamental corrections to this system must be made in the following three respects:

· First, shift the focus of constraints from “controlling petitioners” to “controlling authorities that fail to act.” A rigid mechanism for retrospective accountability must be introduced. For local authorities’ failure to issue response documents in accordance with the law, and their deliberate creation of procedural barriers that prevent petitioners from obtaining provincial certification, the National Public Complaints and Proposals Administration should implement Article 5 and carry out rigid, penetrating accountability, placing local power’s “inaction” inside the institutional cage.

· Second, activate the final judicial safeguard and break the vacuum of “neither filing nor adjudicating.” Law-related and litigation-related petitions must be resolutely and completely diverted from administrative petitioning and brought onto the rule-of-law track (such as retrial and state compensation). A rigid system of individual accountability for erroneous cases must also be established for judges who fail to act, so that people’s grievances can be redressed lawfully in court and the pressure spilling over into petition channels can be reduced.

· Third, reconstruct performance assessments: move from “data beautification” to the “substantive resolution rate.” Mechanical and single-minded assessment based on the rigid “zero-petition” target must be completely abandoned in favor of a scientific evaluation system centered on the “substantive resolution rate of public demands, the rate of local administrative error correction, and procedural compliance.” Supervision by people’s congresses, assessments by third-party lawyers, and mechanisms involving the media and people’s assessors should be introduced to ensure that every determination to “no longer register” a petition can withstand procedural and legal scrutiny.

Conclusion

The rule of law concerns not only order, but also the provision of justice. The Registration Measures demonstrate procedural efforts by the state to guide petitioning back onto the rule-of-law track. But the essence of the rule of law should be to support the helpless, not to make the path of appeal for the vulnerable increasingly impossible to navigate.

Only by pursuing both measures at once—standardizing the order of registration while using overwhelming force to constrain local power and safeguard the channels of redress granted to citizens by the Constitution—can the petition system leave behind the mire of procedural formalism and truly return to its original purpose of safeguarding social fairness and justice.

July 4, 2026