Wang Huanmei, 62, holds up color pictures of her dead son lying in a coffin dressed in a Western suit, sleeves rolled up showing long, purple bruises on both forearms, and one eye blackened.
She knows the story well. She's been telling it since 1995 when she found out that her son Sun Jie -- a college graduate -- was murdered in a police station in the Shandong provincial capital of Jinan.
"Sun Jie was handcuffed with his hands behind his back and hung from a tree and beaten to death on September 8, 1995 in the courtyard of Dajin police station of Jinan's Huaiyin district," Wang said.
"He was beaten to death by three people, including the police chief of the Dajin station Xu Fang," she said.
Her problem is that after years of fruitless efforts to get Jinan and Shandong officials to investigate her son's death, she is now being threatened with arrest for bringing the case to the complaints bureau of the State Council, China's Cabinet, in Beijing.
Wang is not alone.
Dozens of petitioners who gather around the Yongdingmen Train Station in southern Beijing, near the State Council's complaints bureau, are being rounded up by police, beaten and sent back to their hometowns, they said.
The police action has come since National People's Congress (NPC) Chairman Wu Bangguo (
The new order has left petitioners questioning the sincerity of China's government, which was sworn in last year with a pledge to be open and honest, to give priority to the demands of the people and to rule the country by law.
It was also bad news for people like Wang, who say government protectionism and corruption at the local level -- especially among the police -- are the reasons why they can't get justice in the first place.
"We cannot get justice in Shandong, so we've been coming here to Beijing for several years now," said Wang's husband, Sun Shoulu, 62.
"In Jinan, they have beaten us and threatened us to stop our pandering, now we come to Beijing and they are doing the same. They call this rule by law," Sun said.
Sun laughed off as "a sham" and "worthless decoration" a new amendment to China's Constitution that calls for the protection of human rights, passed by the NPC last month.
"After all these years coming to Beijing, they haven't replied to one of our petitions," he said.
The central government mandate has also jeopardized hundreds of years of Chinese tradition that have allowed local peasants to come to the capital to petition the emperor's court over injustices in the hinterlands.
With a weak civil society, no democratic elections and a press that is controlled by the state, China's system of complaint departments has long been seen as one of the few official channels to openly air grievances.
"I've been threatened, beaten and jailed by the police for trying to petition," said Du Mingrong, a woman from Baishan city, Jilin Province.
Du originally came to Beijing to petition a refusal by Baishan police to investigate the murder of her mother, but is now complaining about a policeman beating her up at the complaints bureau of the Supreme People's Court, the country's highest court, last year.
Like most other petitioners, she has reams of documents, including typed and handwritten petitions to different government organs at all levels.
RSS