Petition to White House to Deport Zhu Lin Poisoning Suspect

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Petition to White House to Deport Zhu Lin Poisoning Suspect

by Allison Pan on Saturday, May 11, 2013

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From NetEase:
30,000 People Signed Petition Requesting White House Intervention on Zhu Ling’s Case

Not long ago, [the news on] Fudan University graduate student Huang Yang being poisoned to death by a classmate shocked many people, the incident reminding people of the 1995 Tsinghua University female student Zhu Ling’s thallium poisoning case. Unlike the Fudan poisoning case, just who is the perpetrator in Zhu Ling’s case remains a riddle to this day.

On May 3, a petition regarding Zhu Ling’s case appeared on the White House’s official website. At the moment, already 30,000 people have signed in participation. According to the related regulations in the U.S., once the number of signatures reaches 100,000 people, the White House must provide a response. The person who initiated the petition wrote this on the White House’s website: “In 1995, Zhu Ling as a Tsinghua University Student was found out to be purposely poisoned twice lethal in chemical: Thallium, which leads to her permanent paralysis. It was indicated that Sun, her roommate, had the motive, and access to the deadly chemical … Resources also show that she changed her name and entered USA by marriage fraud. To protect the safety of our citizen, we petite that the government investigate and deport her.”

Looking at the information disclosed on the White House website, the petition initiator is shown as Y.Z., residing in Miami, Florida of the U.S., his/her basic information essentially concealed. Y.Z. represents the petition initiator’s initials. The Obama Administration launched the completely new “We the People” online petitioning system on the White House’s website in 2011, where one needs only register on the White House website with their email address in order to post a petition on the White House’s website. According to a new January 2013 regulation, if a petition obtains 150 signatures in support within 30 days, it will receive search engine support [can be searched for through the search engine] on the White House’s website. If it can collect 100,000 signatures in support within 30 days, then it can get a response from the White House.

At present, this letter of petition has already obtained 30,000 signatures in support. Among the signatories, there are more than a few who users who are Chinese. According to reports, the suspect Sun accused in the White House website petition is a [former] Tsinghua university student, and Zhu Ling’s roommate Sun Wei. Previously there have been reports claiming that the Public Security Bureau already cleared Sun Wei of suspicion in 1998. Hong Kong’sSouth China Morning Post recently reported victim Zhu Ling’s current condition, stating that her current weight is nearly 100 kg, paralyzed in bed, suffers from diabetes, almost completely blind, and her IQ is equivalent to a 6-year-old child.

 

[oldjunkee]

Shit. Why they close the petition?

Should open it to the world and let millions of global citizens submit!!!

 

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Chinese air their cases by petitioning White House

By DIDI TANG | Associated Press – 1 hr 35 mins ago

Associated Press/Andy Wong - The White House's online petition site called "We the People" is displayed on a computer screen in Beijing Sunday, May 12, 2013. Through the Obama administration’s “We the People” site Chinese looking for justice have found a way to keep issues that our sometimes censored in their own country alive. (AP Photo/Andy Wong)

BEIJING (AP) — The poisoning of a college student 18 years ago recently re-emerged as a hot topic in China, but censors soon squelched the politically sensitive online discussions over whether the culprit may have eluded punishment because of Communist Party connections.

Chinese looking for justice found another way to keep the issue alive. They took it to Washington.

Appealing to a White House online petition page, they soon gathered the 100,000 signatures required for an official response, and — although there has been no response from Washington so far — news of the request revived talk about the case in China. Beijing police issued an explanation after weeks of silence, and state media chimed in with editorials.

"The Chinese public went to a foreign site to vent off their frustration, and that speaks of the loss of credibility of the Chinese government," said Shen Dingli, professor of American studies at Fudan University.

Started in 2011 as a project in open government for the Internet age, the Obama administration's "We the People" site is a work in progress that already has spawned unintended consequences domestically, prompting updates of the ground rules for a successful petition.

Though clearly intended for U.S. citizens, the guidelines on gathering online signatories remain broad enough to hearten activists overseas who — frustrated with their own governments — hope to raise the international profile of their cases. The site does not ask for one's nationality, and one only needs to be 13 or older and have a verified email address to create an account to initiate a petition or sign one.

Malaysians have complained to the White House about election fraud in their country, drawing more than 222,000 signatures within a week to become the site's second-most popular issue. Other petitions ask President Barack Obama to secure the release of two abducted Orthodox Christian archbishops in Syria and to urge a recount of votes in Venezuela's presidential elections.

And in the past week, requests have poured in from China, where petitioning the central government in Beijing dates back to imperial eras, but where nowadays the tradition is usually fruitless and sometimes perilous.

Some of the petitions are serious, and some silly — as with many of the U.S.-generated requests, which include a demand to build a "Star Wars"-style Death Star.

The Chinese petitions have asked Washington to disclose assets held by Chinese officials' children residing in the U.S., and have urged remembrance of the bloody Chinese government crackdown on the 1989 student protest in Tiananmen Square. Others have asked for adjudication on the official recipe for Lanzhou beef noodles, and on the debate over whether the flavor of bean curd stew — a Chinese breakfast staple — should be sweet or salty. The petitions often are written in bad English, and some are in Chinese.

The White House says that, for now, it will give equal treatment to petitions from overseas.

"'We the People' is just part of the administration's commitment to open government and the code powering the application has been made available to anyone, including other countries, who wish to set up a similar system," White House spokesman Matt Lehrich said.

The current threshold for White House response is when a petition gathers 100,000 signatures within 30 days — up from lower thresholds that allowed for too many frivolous petitions.

The Malaysian petition crossed that barrier, but has drawn no response yet. Any hopes for U.S. condemnation of the election results evaporated this week when the U.S. State Department recognized the polling results, while acknowledging allegations of irregularities. Still, supporters feel they accomplished something.

The petition "spoke out the dissatisfactions to the international communities successfully," virologist and the petition's apparent organizer, Kuan Ping Ang, said on her Facebook page.

Shen said the White House page is one of a kind. "No other Western democratic country has a site where the government promises to respond to a petition with 100,000 signatures," he said.

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.

Shi Shusi, a well-known media commentator, sees black humor in the flood of petitions to the White House.

"For a very long time, the Chinese government has responded too slowly on social incidents. It has exhausted its credits," Shi said. "The public probably just need a place to vent their resentment."

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Associated Press writer Sean Yoong in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and news assistant Flora Ji in Beijing contributed to this report.