Chinese Citizens Petition White House for Redress of Grievances

The Obama administration set up a web site called We The People which allows American's to petition the White House over concerns they about various policies.  One of the unintended consequences has been the plethora of petitions from people living outside the U.S.   many of which have come from China where its citizens were once able to petition Beijing  for redress of their problems however that has changed with most of those petitions ignored or the petitioners harassed or thrown into jail .

It has rapidly become popular in China, where the tightly controlled media and Internet put politically sensitive topics off limits. People who bring their grievances to the central government as petitioners are routinely harassed, beaten and sent to labor camps as troublemakers — or locked up in what are known as "black jails" in a kind of extralegal detention.
Enthusiasm for the White House site shows the lack of avenues at home to vent frustration, said David Zweig, professor of social science at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.
"There is no mechanism for the Chinese citizens to really express their views. It's really as simple as that," Zweig said. "The citizens are looking for any strategies to make their grievances known."
It started with the case of Zhu Ling, a woman who was paralyzed for life from thallium poisoning during her third year at Tsinghua University in Beijing. No one was held responsible for the crime, and the cold case resurfaced in April in the wake of another poisoning at Fudan University. The Chinese public demanded an investigation into one of Zhu's roommates — who had long been considered a suspect. They questioned whether the original investigation was squashed because of her family's political ties.
Before there was any satisfactory answer, Chinese censors began to remove posts and shush online commentators, effectively ending the discussion. But then someone started the petition on the White House page early this month, and by last Monday it had garnered more than 100,000 signatures in about three days. Since then, about a dozen more China-related petitions have appeared.