By Edward Cody
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, January 24, 2005; Page A12

LIAOYUAN, China -- 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. In a lengthy interview, they expressed their determination to persist, but acknowledged that after the letter to Hu they could think of nothing else to do, at least if they want to stay out of prison.

"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.

Hu told the Communist Party's main anti-corruption agency on Jan. 10 that ending China's epidemic of bureaucratic malfeasance was one of the party's "most important tasks of all time," according to official reports. In the same spirit, Wen's cabinet last week promulgated new regulations designed to protect Chinese citizens who petition the bureaucracy for help against corruption or official errors, a government announcement said.

In addition, the Communist Party just launched an 18-month campaign to strengthen ideological conviction among its 68 million members, toughen their resolve against corruption and renew their zeal for serving the people. Improving the party's standing and inspiring support among China's 1.3 billion people are keys to its retaining its monopoly on power, Hu stated.

But none of the measures adopted in Beijing would allow an independent judiciary, and none authorized any other countervailing center of power, such as an independent labor union. In effect, they amounted to promises by the party and the government bureaucracy to better police themselves -- promises that Zhao and his friends no longer trust.

"I thought the party was good, but here it didn't work for the people," said Cui Yongchun, a driver and 25-year party member who was laid off with Zhao. "I don't believe in it any more."

The trouble in Liaoyuan, a farming hub of 1.3 million, began when the civil service administration assumed control of the city's state-owned electricity company. In the process, Zhao, Gong, Cui and scores of their longtime colleagues lost their jobs, caught in the changes sweeping China's Rust Belt in the northeast since the country started moving toward a market economy.

Thousands of government-owned enterprises have been sold, consolidated or closed in this region over the past decade, putting large numbers of laborers out of work and severing them from such "iron rice bowl" benefits as health insurance, housing and pension guarantees that were an important part of China's socialist system.

The valuations and capital transfers involved in such transactions have been a large source of illicit gains across the country, and Zhao and his friends asserted this was the case in Liaoyuan. They said they suspected from the outset that the $122,000 selling price for the company was far below its value and that management had accepted bribes to arrange the deal.

Asked why they did not go to the police, Cui and his former colleagues laughed, saying the police were part of the problem, not part of the solution. "Nobody goes to the police," Cui said. "If there is a corrupt official, they will have a good connection with the police. You'll end up in prison."

But most of all, Zhao and the others said, they were upset because they believed the company director at the time, Zhang Shuyong, had promised them that benefits such as health insurance and heating subsidies would continue after they left.

Instead, they said, they have had to pay for heat in the bone-chilling winter and go without health insurance. Moreover, they complained, they were told they would have to continue paying into their pension fund at the rate of about $200 a year until they reached the retirement age of 55 to 60.

Unwilling to accept the situation, the dismissed workers have carried their complaints and appeals to bureaucrats for four years, sometimes in groups of as many as 100.

"It's been four years, and not one response," said Yong Huifeng, 43.

Meanwhile, Zhang, the manager, has been promoted to a provincial-level job in Changchun. His company declined to discuss the complaints raised by Zhao and the others.

In September 2002, Gong and her colleagues said, a group sat in protest for three days outside the national electricity company's headquarters in Beijing, refusing to leave until they were given a hearing and allowed to hand over their documents. And that is when the police intervened.

Gong was put on a train home along with the others. Two weeks later, she was summoned to the local police station. From there she was escorted to a nearby detention center.

Three days later, she was transferred to a prison, where she was told for the first time what crime she was accused of: disturbing social order with a petition campaign. She asked for official documentation, she said, but was refused.

Zhao was arrested when he traveled to Beijing with more than 50 companions to seek another hearing at the electricity company. Police put him on a train back to Liaoyuan, a 500-mile journey. On arrival, he was arrested and taken to the same detention center as Gong, leaving the couple's 13-year-old son at home by himself.

"I was told we could not petition in such a large group," Zhao said.

After a month at the detention center, Zhao was transferred to the reeducation camp, where he contracted a liver ailment that has left him pallid and confined to bed.

"I asked them why I was sent to a labor camp," he recounted. "They said it was because I disturbed social stability."