The right to petition the American government for the redress of grievances has gone universal:
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.
And not just Chinese.
I draw hope from this bit of unintended consequences for what was mostly a political stunt with little impact on our governance. Our freedoms don't rest on a web site petition generator. But a mere stunt here is a rare opportunity to heard in other countries.
And I'll repeat what I've said before, if democracy and voting is such an alien thing for other cultures, why do even the most oppressive governments go through the motions of voting? Why don't those countries just insist that they have a culturally superior way of governance and dispense with rigged votes?
