Nothing Left To Lose

When Li Guanqing set off on the first of his 150 pilgrimages to Beijing, he possessed a quiet conviction that justice would be done. It was 1980, and Li's father had been stabbed to death under mysterious circumstances in the family's eastern home province of Shandong. Suspecting that local village chiefs whom Li's father had criticized were to blame, and unable to get any help from police, Li, then 21, gathered his meager life savings and trekked from Shandong to the capital. There, he began endlessly ferrying documents from one government agency to another, hoping each official chop from this bureau...