ALMOST two weeks ago, Tong Yihong's dramatic escape to Beijing from what he feared as looming local persecution won him enormous, nationwide publicity.

Yet publicity alone wasn't enough to prevent him from being "escorted" back home and falling prey to the local justice system.

Once home, the villager in Wuhan, capital of Hubei Province, was thrown into a detention house pending trial on charges of intentional injury, which he denied.

Tong's troubles began on November 18 with a brick attack he said was aimed at stopping a bulldozer about to tear down his home. He didn't target the demolition crew and no injuries were spotted.

Local police had a completely different story. They alleged Tong had critically wounded someone and ordered him to provide a detailed account of his "wrongdoing." Sensing foul play, Tong took a flight to Beijing to "surrender" to the police there because he believed they would be fair.

Following his "extradition" to local authorities, Tong's wife had attempted to visit him in detention center and bring him winter clothes, to no avail. No family visits are allowed while the investigation is ongoing, the Guangzhou-based Yangcheng Evening News quoted the warden as saying on December 6.

Yet the probe has been ongoing for too long to mean it's strictly business. Local police refuse to disclose the identity of Tong's "victim," for no good reason. Since coming clean about this refusal would be even trickier, the police chose to ignore public inquiries about the "victim's" status.

The public is predisposed to sympathize with Tong. Moreover, the police's stonewalling and stumbling hints at the dubious nature of their allegations and the existence of the "victim."

Snippets of information seem to confirm this suspicion. Tong was told by an insider before the standoff that the demolition company planned to provoke him into fierce resistance.

The "injuries" that followed, whether real or fake, would provide the best excuse to frame him. While Tong was in custody, his unguarded house would be bulldozed without difficulty, said the Yangcheng Evening News report.

Deep distrust

Tong's saga speaks volumes about locals' deep-rooted distrust of local officials in handling disputes between their developer friends and ordinary residents in an even-handed manner.

Tong's desperate journey to Beijing also reflected a paradoxical way of thinking - shared by many petitioners who go to Beijing to air their grievances. They trust laws, institutions and the Party's good will but not the grassroots-level agents who enforce them, said the report.

Li Lianjiang, an expert on peasant petitioning at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, told Shanghai Daily that peasants' political trust increases proportionate to the administrative level of governments they ask for help. Few peasants think that the injustices they suffer locally can be redressed by village and county officials, whom they rank as the most inept and corrupt.

However, their trust in higher authorities as a fair arbiter may crumble as people like Tong are increasingly repatriated to their hometowns to await trial, or worse.

While local police's complicity with developers in razing homes amid the home price frenzy is a relatively new story, their harassment of the local foes of bigwigs sounds all too familiar.

Wang Peng, a librarian in Gansu Province, was detained on November 23 by police from neighboring Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region in a cross-border manhunt for blowing the whistle on his college classmate Ma Jingjing, whom Wang accused of cheating in the civil service entrance exam three years ago.

During the 10 days Wang spent in detention in Wuzhong City, Ningxia, where he was taken, his parents were threatened with house arrest should they dare to petition higher authorities.

Naked truth

Ding Lanyu, Ma's mother and head of the Wuzhong political advisory body, was widely believed to be the mastermind behind Wang's plight, though local police spokesperson emphatically claimed otherwise.

Apart from the charges that Ma's unbelievably high scores were a result of nepotism, Wang's exposes of Ding's alleged bribe-taking may have also ruffled her feathers.

The police denial of Ding's role in the incident did not shift popular belief. Given Wang's account of his days in detention, fraught with torture for confession, it's not hard to see whose instructions his captors had been following.One of Wang's worst tormentors, police officer Shi Zhigang, once blurted out to Wang during a debriefing that "you are singled out solely because you offended some powerful official," the Oriental Morning Post cited Wang as saying on December 3.

Shi also dropped hints that the powerful official could well be Ding, who had been "turning up the heat on them to take action against Wang."

The courage Wang manifested in exposing the fraud may be easily dismissed as foolhardy, or compared to the child who states the obvious, that the emperor is naked.

Most of us have heard similar stories and opted to look the other way.

Apart from the services local officials rendered to those in power to intimidate their detractors, Wang's case also highlights the inherent flaws in the selection of officials, especially those running the country's police, judicial and prison systems.

Tellingly, the police spokesperson in Wuzhong admitted on December 2 that "the manhunt is wrong, because its legal procedures are wrong."

The physical abuse Wang endured pale in comparison to the suffering of Zhao Zuohai, a farmer who was convicted of homicide after being mercilessly tortured to extract a confession. Zhao was acquitted only after the "dead" man turned up alive.

In a sequel to this cause celebre, Wu Daquan, a peasant from Guizhou Province, was found guilty of robbery and murder and sentenced to death by a court in Zhejiang in 2006, again as a result of savage police beatings, including use of a "torture rack" that caused immense pain, and burning him with lighted cigarettes. Wu had lost all hope of proving his innocence, until the real murderer showed up, the Beijing News reported on November 15.

Flawed justice

These sordid incidents repeat themselves, due largely to the fact that the wrong people are entrusted with the job of safeguarding social justice.

Imagine Wuzong politician Ding Lanyu and her ilk appointed to exalted posts and possessing both the will power and the manpower to harass their opponents as they please, we will definitely hear more of officials making violent land grabs and locking up outspoken citizens like Wang Peng.

The Beijing News reported on Monday that 1.03 million people sat this year's civil servants' entrance exam, only 10,000 fewer than last year.

This unrelenting fever for government jobs has led many pundits to express concerns about the over-concentration of talent in the public sector.

Yet an even more baneful prospect is that many of these jobs will go to the flawed people mentioned above.