President Barack Obama answers questions during his news conference at the White House on April 30, 2013. Mr. Obama said the U.S. doesn’t know how chemical weapons were used in Syria or by whom.Pablo Martinez Monsivais/The Associated Press
Americans and Chinese are getting used to viewing each other as rivals. But few could have foreseen a day when U.S. citizens would have to compete with Chinese Internet users to get on their own President's agenda.
The White House's online-petitions website has been taken over by cheeky Chinese "netizens" this week. Six of the seven most recently opened petitions on the "We The People" section of whitehouse.gov had more to do with the Middle Kingdom than any of the 50 states President Barack Obama does govern.
Among them were calls for Mr. Obama to declare tofu "sweet," intervene to help stop the construction of a petrochemical plant in China's southern Yunnan province and to "send troops to liberate the Chinese people."
Each petition was gathering thousands of signatures as the hashtag #occupythewhitehouse spread on China's social-networking websites. In a subtle rebuke of their own government's unresponsiveness, Chinese netizens have clearly made a game out of trying to get a reaction from the White House.
Mr. Obama was jokingly referred to as the "head of China's petition office," with Internet users creating fake portraits of the U.S. President sporting the bristling beard and ornate hat of Bao Zheng, a renowned justice official during the Song dynasty.
Once opened, petitions are given a month to reach 100,000 signatures. Earlier this year, the White House famously rejected a petition demanding that it build a Death Star because "the administration does not support blowing up planets." (The signature threshold was raised from 25,000 just days after a White House staffer was forced to respond to an idea from Star Wars.)
The online fun threatened to obscure the serious reason some Chinese initially turned to the White House for help – an almost 20-year-old poisoning case that many in China see as proof their country's powerful are beyond the reach of the law.
The campaigns are a mild embarrassment to China, which has long had its own system for handling petitions, the Office of Letters and Calls. However, few people here trust the country's justice system, which defers to the Communist Party on sensitive rulings. Petitioners who press their grievances too hard are detained and sometimes beaten in extralegal "black jails" around Beijing.
Bill Clinton occupied the White House in 1994 when Zhu Ling, then a 21-year-old chemistry student at Beijing's prestigious Tsinghua University, fell ill with what was eventually identified as poisoning with deadly levels of thallium, a toxic heavy metal. Overseas experts who were contacted online by Ms. Zhu's classmates helped diagnose her symptoms and recommended an antidote, but she remains paralyzed, blind and brain damaged.
Many Chinese believe the only known suspect in the case, Ms. Zhu's roommate, Sun Wei, never faced prosecution because her family had powerful Communist Party ties.
Remarkably, the case has been kept alive on the Internet, where it resurfaced this week as one of the most-discussed items on Sina Weibo, China's Twitter-style social-networking site. Another hot topic was the White House petition website, where on May 3 someone first posted a petition calling for Mr. Obama to deport Ms. Sun, "the main suspect of a famous thallium poison murder case … in China."
The online petition had gathered more than 137,000 names as of Wednesday, easily surpassing the 100,000 signatures required to trigger some kind of reply from the White House. "We can't find legal justice in our homeland, nor are we allowed to petition to Beijing, so we go to the American White House to right a wrong. If America ignores us, we will go on calling for justice at the United Nations headquarters in New York," one supporter of the petition wrote on Sina Weibo.
Some of the other Chinese demands seemed less likely to land on Mr. Obama's desk. The petition for a reclassification of tofu had less than 2,000 signatures on Wednesday; the call for a U.S. "liberation" of China had just over 4,000. There's time left, however, as both efforts only began on Tuesday.
"Going to the gates of the White House to petition may or may not be useful," one online petitioner wrote, in comments cited by Tea Leaf Nation, an independent website that monitors China's social media. "But I know that going there to petition won't get you in trouble."
Mark MacKinnon