It is five o'clock in the morning and Chi Yumei has already begun picking through rubbish bins to see what she can sell. She lives with her 26-year-old son, Liu Suan, in a dark and foetid underground tunnel.
 The tunnel where Chi Yumei lives is home to other petitioners too |
She sold her house to come to Beijing to seek justice for her son, who was brain-damaged in an accident and was not given any compensation.
Now time is running out. He needs an operation, but Chi Yumei is penniless.
"I can't talk about it because it makes me cry," she sobbed.
"My son is too young. I tried to find a government department to solve the problem. But none of them will help. If someone really wanted to help, my son could have his operation."
By day, they trudge from one government office to another. At each, they join the line of the dissatisfied and dispossessed, filing their complaints into a black hole of bureaucracy.
 Liu Suan desperately needs an operation following a head injury |
This is the official petitions and appeals system, seen by the government as a safety valve for absorbing discontent. But with more than 9m complaints submitted last year, the system itself is coming under strain.
"The volume of disputes is expanding rapidly, because problems in the countryside and cities are intensifying," explained Ethan Michelson from Indiana University, who has been researching the phenomenon.
"In the countryside, these complaints are overwhelmingly about local leadership, about despotic tyrannical local township and village officials, known as local emperors, who exact illegal levies, taxes, fees and fines, and who engage in other forms of corruption," he said.
"In the cities, the disputes are often about labour issues."
Many of the petitioners come to the capital from far away. It is a tradition that dates back more than 2,000 years, when commoners came to court to throw themselves upon the mercy of the emperor.
Having left their old lives behind, they live in squalor. At one petitioners' hostel, bed space on wooden planks costs just 30 cents a night.
The petitioners crowd into the tiny, stifling room to relate the stories that bind them together in mutual misery and shared anger. Grief and anguish is etched into their faces.
They clutch documents backing up their cases; the details in each are different, yet all horrifying. But the common theme is clear: wrongdoing, violence, even murder by local Communist Party officials.
Optimism
Yet these people are appealing to that same Communist Party for help.
Chen Ping, a middle-aged woman who has seeking restitution for her son's death, still professes faith in the system, despite being knocked back at every level.
"I believe that uncorrupt judges can help seek truth for ordinary people, and that's why I've made the difficult and long trip to Beijing. If we don't defeat this corruption, our beautiful country will be destroyed. Right now corrupt officials are squeezing the ordinary people. They're sitting on our backs," she said.
Most of the petitioners have right on their side. Even the head of the State Bureau for Petitions and Appeals, Zhou Zhanshan, has admitted that 80% of the complaints are reasonable.
Yet the overburdened system gives few petitioners a sympathetic hearing. And even if they get sympathy, the offices have no legal powers to enforce their decisions.
Now discontent is beginning to spill out onto the streets.
Mass protests by petitioners are becoming increasingly common, and activists are beginning to put groups of the disgruntled in contact with each other.
Zhang Shu - not his real name - is one such organiser.
"I want to make society and the government take notice. The petitions and appeals system is no good. If I don't take action, society will think petitioners can't do anything," he said.
"We don't want to scare the government, we just want them to know that we're already working with each other."
But that is precisely what the government fears most - organised discontent which could lead to spreading unrest.
And so petitioners are treated brutally.
One-way tunnel
Their villages are raided every year before meetings of the parliamentary body, the National People's Congress, and tales of beatings, forcible removals and petitioners being sent back to their home provinces are common.
It is a path paved with frustration and despair, and once people embark down it, there is no way back.
For Liu Suan and his mother, life has narrowed to a daily round of petitioning and collecting rubbish. Caught in this cycle, they are beginning to lose hope.
"I've got no confidence any more", she said. "They can't solve our problems."
But with no home left, and nowhere else to go, they are waiting for justice they fear they will never see.
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Corrupt officials are squeezing the ordinary people. They're sitting on our backs
