Between Officials And The Public, Folklore Unscramble Of Petition Behavior

Although the public voice system is one set up in modern times in china, but similar behaviors have emerged since the ancient times, such as the admonishing drum and the calumny wood in the story of Yao and Shun, Tiying lettering Emperor Wen of Han to save his father, the story of Baoqingtian in Song and the story of Yang Naiwu and Chinese cabbage in the end of Qing. From these folk stories, it is easy to find that letters and visits have lasted for hundreds of years and are rooted in ordinary people’s heart. Passed on unconsciously, it has formed into a kind of folk culture, becoming a powerful weapon used by people at the bottom to fight with influential officials. Since ancient times, although such behaviors are different in forms and names, they’re same essentially as solutions just like the last straws, providing a road for the masses treated unfairly to seek justice from senior rulers or managers. They can give these people great appeasement mentally.Petition letter plays an important role in various aspects such as promoting the reform and development of China, solving national contradictions and disputes of people, building a harmonious society, and so on.This paper takes X County in central Henan province as an example. The paper mirrored vast farmers’ traditional view of power including thinking of official position as well as imagination and expectation of honest and upright officials by overviewing and classifying the county’s 33 petition letters and analyzing numerous petition cases. Meanwhile, through petition management officials’ statements of each petition case, it turns out that there are many wrong and mischievous petitions, and some government officials consider themselves as victims. The author thinks that this is because the higher central government officials have the complaint reporting policy which merely uses petition numbers as the inspection basis of officials and local governments while neglecting the rationality of complaints’ petitions. What’s more, the paper aims to find out the reasons of conflicts through the opposite statements of the government and the public. The two reasons are on one hand, the individual grassroots cadres’ low ability to solve problems, and on the other hand the masses have strong awareness of rights protection while with weak legal consciousness. The author tried to draw on theories such as Daily Resistance and Weapons of the Weak in order to compare and explain the petition cases; however, it turns out that western theories of social movements can hardly truly explain China’s remaining collective action climax in recent decade, so other ways should be found out. In the end, the paper analyzed and summarized the behavioral logic and motives of farmers’petition letter, mischievous petitions and petitions bypassing the immediate leadership, from several perspectives, such as historical roots of petition system, the spread of folk tales and civilians’ unconsciously collective inheritance. Supplemented with real cases, the paper sought to find out feasible ways to realize the ideal of "zero petition" through perspectives such as educational functions of traditional culture.