In April 2002 a group of approximately twenty thousand veterans --- most of them retired People's Liberation Army (PLA) officers --- descended upon Beijing in order to file a collective petition to the Ministry of Civil Affairs for better treatment. Around many of their necks hung a placard with the words, I am a veteran on its front, and on its back, I want to eat. The veterans made two key demands: to be provided jobs with decent salaries as they were promised by state policy, and to be allowed to establish a national veterans association. Coming not many years after the gathering of close to ten thousand adherents of the Falun Gong spiritual movement in 1999, the size and audacity of the veterans' petition was shocking to the central government. According to one source, the government met the veterans' first demand by issuing orders to local governments to pay the veterans no less than what they were paid in the army, regardless of whether they were assigned a job (whether this order was implemented is difficult to ascertain). However, their second demand --- to establish a national veterans association --- was flatly turned down. Soon after, the leaders of the petition movement were arrested. This incident was ignored in the official press and received no coverage in the international press. Veterans apparently had no contact with the media and did not pursue their claims in some of the more official and institutionalized channels, such as the courts and letters and visits offices, which are now being promoted as antidotes to the more chaotic forms of social protest.

Diamant, Neil J. Hollow Glory: The Politics of Rights and Identity among PRC Veterans in the 1950s and 1960s. In Engaging the Law in China: State, Society, and Possibilities for Justice, edited by Neil J. Diamant, Stanley B. Lubman, and Kevin J. O'Brien, 131-158. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005.

Neil Diamant is a professor of Asian Law and Society at Dickinson College.

For more information on the published version, visit Stanford University Press's Website. https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=7407

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