China has established a petition system to elicit information about
grievances. However, the petition system may have perverse effects
because it also reveals to the center the failure of local-level officials
to resolve those grievances. Anecdotal accounts suggest that local
officials have incentive to silence petitioners, often with the use of
repression. In this article we study whether non–regime threatening
petitions would provoke local governments’ coercive response. To
tackle the endogenous relationship between petition and repression,
we take advantage of a natural experiment afforded by a
change in hydroelectricity policy in China. In particular, we use
provincial hydropower outputs as an instrument to identify citizen
petitions. We find that citizen petitions significantly increase a
province’s spending on its repressive apparatus. The results suggest
a paradoxical outcome of China’s petition system: while it may help
reduce the national authority’s use of repression, it has caused an
explosion of repression within the authoritarian system as a whole.