A mysterious death, a murky trial and the limits of China’s ‘petitioning’

By the time she traveled to Beijing in June 2009, Li Shulian had spent seven years fighting her local government for revoking a lease to her business. 

She hoped to appeal to senior officials in the capital for justice in her dispute. Instead, thugs, working with authorities from her hometown of Longkou, showed up and forcibly took her back to the coastal city, according to her daughter, Li Ning. 

Undeterred, Li Shulian made the 270-mile trek to Beijing once more as soon as she was able. She was abducted that September and again brought back to Longkou. 

There would be no more trips after that.

A month later, Li Shulian turned up dead in a hotel in Longkou. Authorities said she had hanged herself. 

But Li Ning, who would take up her mother’s fight over the next decade and a half, immediately doubted the official story.

“I saw my mother in the funeral home,” Li Ning, who was in her 20s at the time, recalled. “They’d applied make-up. She had rouge and lipstick on her face. Her face was swollen. Her body had bruises all over.”

Why, Li Ning wondered, had her mother disappeared for a month without contact? And why did she look like she had been badly beaten?

Since that autumn 15 years ago, Li Ning has dedicated her life to getting answers, becoming in the process one of China’s most well-known human rights advocates. 

“I can’t do nothing,” she told RFA Mandarin. “The case only moves forward if I do something, if I speak up. Only if I take action will people pay attention. Without action, there would be no possibilities.”

She has now spent twice as long fighting for justice for her mother as Li Shulian spent fighting her own battle against authorities. 

In their own ways, each of their cases have shown the limits of China’s “petitioning,” system, in which citizens are, in theory, supposed to be able to seek redress for government wrongs through complaints.

In practice, however, petitioning often puts complainants in the crosshairs of the very officials they are seeking relief from. 

A mysterious death

For years, Li Shulian had rented two storefronts in Longkou from which she sold jewelry, leather goods and other items. But she was forced to give them up, her daughter says, after she refused to pay bribes to corrupt officials.

By the time she had traveled to Beijing, Li Shulian had spent more than 100 days in detention, her daughter says. 

Li Shulian didn’t have much of a chance to press her case in China’s capital either. She was taken by security officials in September 2009, according to another petitioner who was there at the same time and who spoke to RFA Mandarin. 

She was shuffled once more back to Longkou. Yet no one, including her family, knew where in the city she was.

A month went by before Li Ning’s brother received news from his company manager that his mother was “severely ill” and staying at a hotel in Longkou’s Nanshan area. When the family arrived, they were instead told that, at 11:30 p.m. the previous evening, Li Shulian had hanged herself.

The news struck Li Ning like thunder, and she immediately suspected that something was amiss. When her mother had gone up to petition in Beijing the second time, an official had told her to return to Longkou to resolve her grievance.

According to Li Ning, her mother had told the man that she dared not go back without filing her complaint, as she had already been forcibly returned once. 

“If I go back to Longkou this time, I will be killed!" she said. 

Unbeknownst to the family, a court began investigating her mother’s disappearance. In December 2010, it found that officials with the Longkou Donglai Subdistrict Office had interrogated Li Shulian in room 6113 of the Nanshan Yingbin Hotel for a week before her death.

According to Li Ning, who viewed the case files, her mother had been beaten by three security guards for refusing to obey some undisclosed order from them. The papers describe how her interrogators had “shocked her with an electric baton and whipped her buttocks with a wet towel.”

But little other information was released to the family. The trial had been held in private. It wasn’t even until 2013 that Li Ning, her brother and her father discovered that it had even been held. 

By then, the three guards sentenced for injuring Li Shulian would have been out of prison.

‘Let everyone in China know’

From the beginning, Li Ning believed the circumstances of the case were being covered up, and like her mother before her, demanded officials take action. She began the petitioning process herself, writing letters to a long list of government departments.

In the late aughts and early 2010s when she started, blogs had become popular in China, and internet controls were not yet as strict as they are today. Using message boards and social media sites like Weibo, Li Ning tried to get the outside world to pay attention to her mother’s story.

“Whatever happened that day, I would share it with the public,” Li Ning said. “I told myself to let 10 people know today, and let 20 people know tomorrow. Let everyone in China know.”

On March 5, 2012, Li Ning upped the ante. During the yearly meeting of the National People’s Congress, she managed to slip past security and make it onto the heavily guarded Tiananmen Square. She took off her clothes, and knelt down naked in a public appeal for justice.

“I wanted to use my body to show that my mother’s death had been unjust,” she said. At the time, she was a college student in Beijing. 

Millions shared her story after it was picked up by investigative journalist Wang Keqin, who wrote about it on his blog along with a photo of Li Ning crying in grief and anger. Word of the “Renmin University girl [who] kneels naked in cry for justice” spread quickly. Tens of thousands of people followed Li Ning on Weibo. 

The stunt seemed to work. After her kneeling protest, a higher court sent the case back to the Longkou court for a retrial. 

During the new legal proceedings, evidence emerged that the decision to abduct Li Shulian had been made at a meeting chaired by one of Longkou’s most senior party leaders. 

This meant that much more powerful people had played a hand in Li Shulian’s abduction, but they remained free from the hand of justice. Security guards had gone to prison for what happened to Li Shulian; senior officials had not faced responsibility. 

But the Longkou court stalled the retrial for years. Li Ning’s lawyer at the time surmised that this was to protect local officials.

Li Ning tried to keep up the pressure. On March 8, 2014, she protested in front of Xinhua Gate, an entrance to the Communist Party’s leadership compound in Beijing.

Police locked her up until people sent by the Longkou government took her back to her hometown. Li Ning remembers how these unidentified, masked minders pressed her under the seat with her hands and feet tied. She was not allowed to go to the bathroom during the 10-hour ride back to Longkou, she said.

She felt like she could imagine how her mother’s final moments all began – of how her mother might have also been arrested and taken back to Longkou the same way. “My mother was beaten to death, and now it was my turn,” she thought.

After arriving in Longkou, police tested her to see if she was mentally ill, she said. In the end, she was given 10 days of administrative detention for disturbing public order.

‘The hard work must continue’

In 2017, the court case suddenly sprang back to life. Prosecutors added officials to the list of defendants and upgraded the charge to “illegal detention.” And the case was transferred from slow-moving Longkou to a court in a neighboring city.

There, a new trial finally began, though it remained closed to the public because, according to government authorities, it involved “state secrets.”

Li Ning’s attorney had to sign a confidentiality agreement, and Li Ning was blocked from entering the courtroom.

On Dec. 28, 2018, the court reached a verdict: four local officials and the three security guards were given sentences ranging from a suspended prison sentence to eight years behind bars.

But Li Ning does not think the new sentences are enough. And the higher level officials in Longkou — the ones she learned were involved in authorizing the abduction — have not been prosecuted. Her mother’s official cause of death is still listed as a suicide.

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The family has also filed a civil suit to receive state compensation for her mother’s illegal detention. Around the start of that trial, in the spring of 2023, Li Ning, who had moved to Japan to study law, began a daily protest across the street from the Chinese Embassy in Tokyo in objection to how the Chinese justice system has dealt with their case.

Every day for nine months, she appeared across the street from the courthouse, recording videos for social media explaining her mother’s case. She was so persistent that she can be seen on a Google Maps street view image of the embassy.

More than a decade into her fight, Li Ning believes people like her family have even less recourse now to challenge official narratives. She once had tens of thousands of followers on Weibo. But after she live streamed a sit-in protest in 2017, her Weibo account was blocked.

In April 2022, the Chinese Communist Party and the central government issued regulations they said were designed to make the petitioning system more efficient. Nearly 900,000 petitions had been filed in 2021, according to the China Media Project, which quoted government sources. 

But some believe the changes have made China’s petitioning system even less responsive. Liu Xiaoyuan, a former human rights lawyer, said one goal of the regulations is to ensure that local problems are handled locally. That can effectively make local officials “both the athlete and the referee” in some disputes, he said. 

Petitioners who still went to Beijing have been sentenced to prison under the catch-all charge of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble.”

‘A fake door on a wall’

Li Ning recalled the last time she saw her mother on June 28, 2009, a few months before she died. It was Li Shulian’s birthday. 

“My mother was a person who loved life very much,” she said. But her petitioning had cost her dearly. She could usually only afford to eat simple food. That day, Li Ning wanted to make sure her mother ate well. 

“Shandong people who live near the coast like to eat seafood, so I bought seafood, shrimp, crab,” Li Ning recalled, “and I made a cake.” 

Today, the family still cannot find closure over her death. The justice system has rejected Li Ning’s demands for her mother’s cause of death to be changed from suicide, and for a public government apology.

“Even the apology toward us [the family] was deemed a state secret and could not be made public,” Li Ning said. “I was so angry.”

Like her mother, Li Ning has also paid the price. After her mother died, the company she was working for ended her contract because she took time off to petition, she said. 

She has lived with intense anxiety for years. 

Now a mother herself, Li Ning has paused her protests to take care of her newborn. But she vows to continue her fight once the demands of motherhood ease. 

Li Ning equates China’s petitioning system with “drawing a fake door on a wall.” 

She recalled how officials who were supposed to take her complaint in Beijing tried to dissuade her from even filing her petition.

“They talked to me about ideals, about finding a partner, and told me to just try to live a good life,” she said. “I [now] know petitioning is useless, and the legal system doesn’t work.”

Her mother’s body, meanwhile, still lies in a morgue, awaiting a resolution to her case that seems unlikely to come.

Translated and edited by RFA Investigative.