AFTER being chased and cornered in the women's toilet, the Zhong sisters knew it was only a matter of time before they gave in to hectoring pursuers outside.

This was not a manhunt, nor a police raid on the hideout of suspected criminals. The duo forced to hide in a restroom on September 16 at an airport in Nanchang, capital city of Jiangxi Province, were Zhong Rucui and Zhong Rujiu. Both are innocent women in their twenties and thirties fighting for justice for their family.

They were pursued by the very people supposed to safeguard public welfare - county officials, and their henchmen, who tried to keep them from taking their complaint to Beijing. The war is on nationwide against petitioners seeking redress in Beijing for local grievances because appealing cases to higher authorities gives bosses back home a black eye, and could cost them their jobs and careers.

The siblings hail from Yihuang County in Jiangxi, where their family of 13 has made national headlines with the self-immolation of three members - their mother, uncle and one elder sister - to protest against officials forcibly tearing down their homes, ostensibly to make way for a bus station.

On September 10, the 100-strong demolition team, led by deputy county chief Li Minjun and comprised of police and government workers, descended on the Zhongs' three-story house.

They watched as the home owners fled to the roof and set themselves ablaze out of desperation.

Local authorities said the trio had doused themselves with gasoline in hopes of scaring off the demolition crew. They ignited themselves "by accident" during the stand-off, officials said.

This account was later proven false as officials had escalated tension by intimidating the protesters.

The siblings' uncle died on Saturday while their mother and elder sister were being treated for severe burns in a hospital in Nanchang.

As a result of this horror story, the two sisters were about to embark on a flight for Beijing to lodge their petition against local officials' excesses, but scores of officials themselves and their minions were lying in wait and ambushed them.

When the sisters showed up for the airport security check, at least a dozen local officials rounded them up and dragged them away in front of stunned passengers.

Catching their captors off guard, the duo slipped away and retreated to the restroom, where they called journalists and police for help as officials outside banged on the door, shouting orders to come out and obey them, the Modern Express newspaper reported last Friday.

'Escorted' back home

Upon their recapture, they were "escorted" back to Yihuang, only to witness more official transgressions. The duo, along with three of their siblings, were kept under house arrest at a local hotel.

Lest the bereaved family put the uncle's body on public display as a bargaining chip in negotiations with the government, county chief Su Jianguo led 80 men in wresting the corpse from the Zhongs. The family resisted, to no avail, the Yangzi Evening News reported on Sunday.

This all happened while recaptured sister Zhong Rujiu, supposedly incommunicado, kept the public abreast of the latest development and her ordeal.

"Is there no justice under heaven? Why wouldn't they just let a dead man rest in peace?" she wrote in a microblog on Saturday.

For all their efforts to keep word of their strong-arming tactics from trickling out to the public, Yihuang officials apparently weren't tech-savvy enough to block all channels of communications.

And that failure became their undoing. Fuzhou City, which administers Yihuang, has disciplined eight officials responsible for the deadly confrontation; the county's Party chief and government head were being investigated and the deputy county head suspended from duty and also under investigation.

Nevertheless, Fuzhou's Party committee insisted yesterday that the demolition crew had acted according to due procedure and no illegal force was used.

People's Daily carried a commentary on Monday lamenting that the tragedy in Yihuang shows the central government's writs forbidding forcible eviction hold little sway over thuggish local cadres and the bullying way they go about their business.

However, the commentary draws comfort from the fact that officials in this case were held to account, punished and toppled. Over the past three years, none of the eight highly publicized cases of demolition deaths led to the downfall of a single local commander-in-chief.

In this case, the punishment meted out to Yihuang's senior officials finally signals resolve to end the vicious cycle; whether it in fact ends is quite another matter.

Behind every demolition in which blood is spilled (and many in which it is not) we can clearly discern the culprit: the official-developer nexus.

The Ministry of Land and Resources has issued circulars warning local governments against getting directly involved in land development and relocation. Land development is a coveted source of revenue in areas where alternative engines of growth are lacking or inadequate.

So long as officials prostitute themselves for the benefits and income accruing from land use and property sales, they cannot be counted on as fair arbiters or guardians of the people's rights.

Lord Acton famously said, "Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely."

Nowhere is the privatization of public power perhaps more rampant than in the sector of land supply, where no checks and balances exist to prevent venal officials from abusing their power to boost career prospects.

Harassment and mistreatment of petitioners, especially those taking their grievances to Beijing - and embarrassing local chiefs - is not news in China.

So risky has their journey become that petitioners face dogged pursuit and illegal incarceration if caught.

In another big case, fishermen in Dalian, Liaoning Province, lost their livelihood when an oil pipeline belonging to China National Petroleum Corporation exploded on July 16. Fish and shellfish stocks were decimated and fishermen lost millions in withdrawn overseas orders.

Active collaboration

After a fruitless wait for CNPC to deliver on its compensation pledges, the disgruntled fishermen began flocking to Beijing to petition higher authorities in late August.

Wherever they went in Beijing, a large "security detail" shadowed them, the Century Weekly reported on September 13.

Some local officials in regional liaison and lobbying offices in Beijing actively collaborated with the oil giant to thwart the fishermen's campaign. Those wasteful regional offices had been ordered closed, but officials from Dalian lingered on.

This indicates once again the blatant partiality of some officials in settling disputes between the public and big capital.

By silencing the voices of the downtrodden - who if heard could wreck their careers - they no longer serve the public, but eagerly obey whoever can help them score higher GDP, the criterion of promotion. Human life can only take the backseat.

One official in charge of monitoring petitioners admitted in a Caijing magazine report published on September 13, "If I lose my target (petitioner) the first time, I will be put on warning. Losing the target twice might ruin my future. In the eyes of my superiors, what else can I be entrusted with if I cannot even control a petitioner?"

An unlikely beneficiary of the war on petitioners is a Beijing-based security company called Anyuanding, which is hired by regional authorities to seize and lock up petitioners before handing them over to "envoys" who send them back to their home provinces, the same Caijing report said.

The company had a revenue of 21 million yuan (US$3.13 million) in 2008. A sure sign of a booming market, indeed.