On July 1, 2026, the Chinese Communist Party’s State Bureau of Letters and Calls implemented the “Measures for Further Regulating the Registration of Visitors” (State Letter and Call [2026] No. 4), which require individuals holding provincial level reply documents to visit Beijing for appeals. Some visitors have expressed that this new regulation has blocked the last channel for the millions of rights-defending petitioners.
Before July 1, 2026, the entrance of the CCP’s State Bureau of Letters and Calls was always crowded with people, with many queuing for two or three days without entering the bureau’s gate. However, a petitioner in Beijing recently mentioned that there are hardly any people at the National Bureau of Letters and Calls now.
A public account blogger, Chen Guohua, stated that the authorities are simply reducing the number of petitions through “blocking,” which only pushes the conflicts from the surface to underground. While it may appear orderly on the surface, in reality, it results in accumulating public grievances and leaving no outlet for appeals.
Recently, a rights defender from Fujian province, Wang Xiuying, visited Beijing to petition and witnessed the implementation of the new regulations. She wrote an article expressing her reflections on this journey, stating, “This is not ‘regulation,’ this is institutional obstruction. When there is an offensive and defensive alliance within the power system, individual calls for justice become like a rootless tree.”
Wang Xiuying, a resident of Wanshan Village, Xiabaishi Town, Fu’an City, Fujian Province, whose village’s collective land has been infringed upon, has been escalating her lawsuit through various levels for 25 years but has always been pushed back to the grassroots level.
On July 15, she arrived in Beijing again with a thick stack of materials and was informed at the National Ministry of Natural Resources that, “Without written proof from the provincial level complaints bureau, we will not accept your case.” She pointed out the illegal issues at the provincial level, which should be passed on to the national level. Before she could finish speaking, they “closed the door” and blocked her outside.
She said, “At that moment, I suddenly realized that the rules had changed. To me, a petitioner tortured by the bureaucratic system of Fujian Province, Ningde City, and Fu’an City for more than 20 years, the new regulation seems more like an institutional barrier.”
She continued, “After the new regulation is implemented, you must first obtain a ‘provincial document,’ which in reality means letting the violator issue you a ‘permit.’ This isn’t regulation; it’s using procedural justice to mask substantive injustice.”
Wang Xiuying stated, “Regarding the new regulation, I asked other petitioners whether the provincial complaints bureau would issue written responses. One petitioner told me that the provincial bureau did give a written response, but they were passed through layers of departments and eventually redirected back to the accused unit. Another petitioner told me that when they followed the provincial bureau’s response to seek the authorized agency, those agencies refused to provide written responses.”
She said that conversations with petitioners revealed the deepest sorrow of the complaints system—the new regulations make it even harder for petitioners to defend their rights: “When local authorities become a collective of interests, and the central department’s procedural checks become a barrier to relief. To perpetrators, they have gained a ‘procedural exemption’ where as long as the complaint material is passed down without processing, they can ‘legally’ reject you. For central authorities, they evade the responsibility of direct handling, safely pushing conflicts back to local areas.”
Public account blogger Chen Guohua pointed out the problems of the new letter and call regulations in his article titled “Implementation of New Regulations, Refusing to Register Letters and Calls Across Levels: When the ‘Last Resort’ is Blocked, Who Pays for Inaction at the Grassroots?”
The article states, “As a social activist who has been concerned about grassroots governance for many years, I would like to ask: If the grassroots can truly ‘handle issues at the front,’ who would be willing to travel thousands of miles to petition in Beijing? The root cause of petitions across levels has never been ‘troublemakers,’ but ‘inaction.’ A small issue that could have been resolved locally, but many places, for the sake of political achievements, stability data, and avoiding responsibility, protect each other at all levels. People report issues step by step, hit walls step by step, and when all legal channels are blocked, they are forced to leave their hometowns (to go to Beijing) to defend their rights.”
“The most absurd thing is that (the authorities) cannot solve the problems, so they target the people reflecting the problems. Numerous letter and call cases originally had single requests. Instead of correcting mistakes and taking responsibility at the grassroots level, they resort to intercepting visits, controlling, suppressing, detaining, etc., to suppress the petitioners. Now, with the new regulations in place, higher levels no longer register petitions across levels, effectively closing the last appeal window for ordinary people. Local grassroots continue to cover up, evade responsibility, and refuse to correct mistakes, while higher-level complaints channels are completely tightened and closed.”
Ms. Wang from Shaanxi, a petitioner, told Epoch Times, “The new regulations for letters and calls have caused great public anger!”
Some petitioners expressed, “Postal petitions sink without a trace, online petition procedures go idle, the likelihood of obtaining provincial documents is slim, and the central authorities claim no jurisdiction over visiting complaints… The State Bureau of Letters and Calls [2026] No. 4 order has brought joy to corrupt individuals and has made the hearts of anti-corruption activists bleed!”