They no longer trust the government

System No Help to China's Laid-Off Workers: Couple Who Petitioned For Promised Benefits Get Jail Terms Instead By Edward Cody

An ailing unemployed worker in this frigid northeastern city, having exhausted all other options, made one final appeal last month, to President Hu Jintao. In careful ideograms penned from his sickbed, Zhao Lizhong pleaded with the most powerful man in the country to pay attention to the poor and powerless, who, he said, had nowhere else to turn.

"I told him the electricity company cheated us," Zhao recalled, showing the determination that he and a band of laid-off friends have brought to a four-year struggle with the powerful bureaucracy of China's one-party government.

Zhao, 50, and his wife, Gong Xiuchen, 43, said they had tried everything the system provides to obtain the benefits they were promised when the Liaoyuan Power Supply Co. dismissed them and about 200 other employees at the end of 2000. They and their colleagues repeatedly carried petitions to Liaoyuan Communist Party offices, to the government-sanctioned labor union, to Jilin province offices, even to the national electricity company headquarters in Beijing, all to no avail.

Although Chinese regulations provide for such entreaties, Zhao and Gong were imprisoned without trial because, they said, they refused to give up their campaign against a corrupt company whose officials had friends in high places. Zhao spent a month in a nearby reeducation camp, putting plastic decorations on toothpicks to be used in fancy restaurants. Gong was freed last spring after spending 18 months sewing clothes in a women's prison near the airport at Changchun, the provincial capital, 60 miles to the northwest.

As a result of their experience -- and the apparent futility of their battle -- both have concluded that China's party-run justice system is a dead end for the people it is supposed to protect....

"There is no law in China," Zhao complained. "Where there is money, there is power, and where there is power, that's where the law is."

The ordeal recounted by Zhao, his wife and their colleagues seems to have taken place in a different universe from Beijing, where official pronouncements portray a fast-modernizing society. The government led by Hu and Premier Wen Jiabao has repeatedly vowed to end official corruption at all levels, reinforce the rule of law and give citizens an effective way to seek redress for what they consider wrongful decisions.