Yu Jianrong (left) conducts a field investigation in a petition village in Beijing on February 8, 2007. Photo: Courtesy of Yu Jianrong

By Li Xiaoshu

Three strongmen in security guard uniforms twist the arms of a protester. Pulling her by her hair, the group all join in the punching and kicking.

Petitioners kneel in front of a government building to plead against illegal land seizures in their village.

Police run riot against rioters, beating them and stuffing them into vehicles. 

These pictures and videos make for memorable viewing for officials attending at rather unusual training course at Renmin University in Beijing on November 6.

Next up on screen come some shocking, chaotic scenes from a September 27 clash in Yibin, a Sichuan Province prefecture-level city: Some 200 Hongloumeng villagers demonstrate against the Xijie county government for sequestering more than 20 hectares with inadequate compensation. Fifteen are beaten and six detained for "disturbing social stability" and "besieging the government."

Fidgeting opposite Yu Jianrong sit 90 officials from Shenyang, the capital city of Liaoning Province.

"Who gave these interlocutors the right to beat petitioners?" says the 48-year-old balding professor, a mop of unruly hair bobbing up and down in dissatisfaction.  

"If you guys ever try to block citizens from airing their grievances, then you have infringed upon our rights endowed by the Constitution," he says in a hoarse voice.

The classroom is silent.

"China stands at a political watershed where the ruling mindset that stability-trumps-all must be abandoned," Yu says.

"Your reason, wisdom, character and social responsibility will make a difference in building a more democratic, legal, fair and just state."

Cheers and applause follow. Dozens of officials shake hands with their "blunt" and "sharp" advisor.

"Comical, talkative and pugnacious, a godfather to the disadvantaged," is how one of his high-ranking students surnamed Han describes Yu.

"A bigmouthed ragtag" or "one sandwich short of a picnic" is how his critics would prefer we all defined him.

"An incurable backseat driver and muckraker" of rural politics is how the media more usually characterizes this spicy Hunanese boffin.

Since 2004, Yu has made countless friends and enemies through his bold almost-one-man campaign for the abolition of China's archaic and humiliating petition system.

After he flatly contradicted government propaganda that the "petition practice has achieved groundbreaking progress" and condemned the execution of the amended Regulations on Letters and Visits on May 1, 2005, Yu found himself placed under a gagging order that persists even to this day, with his comments often considered too sensitive to be quoted by many mainland media. 

How Yu has survived unscathed while others have ended up in jail is a riddle few intellectuals can fathom.

"I have three personal guidelines," Yu says.

"Never consider yourself somebody. Never do things secretly to escape State surveillance. Never form any clique: Keep independent."  

And now in an even more unlikely career twist, Yu appears to be making something of a comeback.

Yu lectures on February 12. Photo: Courtesy of Yu Jianrong

From blacklist to gray list, Yu has grown increasingly popular among his apparent enemies - the bureaucrats - in recent months.

Yu today is busy traveling the country lecturing government officials on the rule of law: a lecture for some 600 officials in Jiangsu Province on the 11th, another 400 in the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region the next day and a week's course in Beijing on the 13th.

"Scholars in China have achieved little change to the nation through academic works," he says.

"I realized that we should sell our theories to those in power to advance the nation's transformation."

Invited to visit by the country's most open-minded regional leaders, Yu has now set up courses in more than 30 Chinese provinces.

His presentations continue to eviscerate the Chinese mainland legal system for example by citing Yang Jia, the jobless 28-year-old Beijing resident executed in 2008.

Yang was famous for murdering six police officers with a knife in Shanghai after he failed in a lawsuit against the police who had allegedly beaten him during interrogation in October 2007.

Yu also points to the government of Badong county, Hubei Province, and its handling of waitress Deng Yujiao's fatal stabbing of a Communist Party official for attempted rape on May 10 last year. 

He frames these incidents and the creaking petition system in the complex context of what China calls "mass incidents": his most recent case study being Yibin.

Forced demolitions

Although Yu occasionally lets slip choice phrases such as "damn bureaucrats" and "dear farmers," the powerful men sat in his class seem surprisingly able to tolerate his near-legendary "arrogance" and "aggression."

Some are secret fans, Yu has discovered. Others skip break to write down extensive notes. Still others have actually wept at the shock of Yu's stories. The more savvy simply laugh along with Yu in consensus.

Traditional Chinese officialdom is not traditionally famous for growing a conscience when offered unchecked power and money, Yu concedes.

Chen Xiaoping, secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) committee in Wanzai county, Jiangxi Province, announced during a meeting on August 31 that "residents who resort to unlawful petitions should be warned and fined for the first violation, detained for the second and reeducated through labor camps for the third."

Chen even criticized foreign petitioners for "demonizing China's image."

After Yu's class on October 31, Chen argued at dinner that forced demolitions were a necessity.

"How can we develop China if no demolitions are carried out?" the offended official allegedly told Yu.

"What do you guys [intellectuals] eat?" 

Yu slammed his fists on the table and walked out.

"Without officials like you, I eat better and happier," read the text posted by Yu on his Sina microblog the next day. "The way you treat petitioners could well come back and bite you."

The episode has been retweeted 5,068 times and received 3,425 comments by Internet users.

It was May 29 last year when Yu first sensed a change in the wind.

After calling on higher authorities to abolish the systematic incentives that boost the interception and abuse of petitioners, Yu was stunned to receive three standing ovations from more than 60 officials at the China Executive Leadership Academy Pudong, a Shanghai-based national institution supervised by the Organization Department of the CPC Central Committee.

"I was truly shocked," he says.

"It wasn't smooth, polished rhetoric. It was a speech about the truth - harsh and ugly - that drew waves of applause and a rousing ovation from official circles.

"The change in officials' attitude reflects an urgency to rediscover the government's role and enhance their administrative ability."

More than most scholars, Yu understands the two sides to any authority: He was detained by Beijing police leaving a petition village on February 28, 2007. Wearing a grungy coat and a worn-out hat, he looked dirty and rough.

After eating and sleeping with petitioners for months, Yu had a hard time convincing police officers that he was actually a professor from China's top research institute: the Chinese Academy for Social Sciences.

"The dean had to explain to them that this fellow really does dress this badly all the time," laughs the slovenly professor. 

On a chilly fall day in 1969, Yu proudly wore his new coat of coarse cloth to his first day at primary school.

A former CPC guerilla leader, Yu's father had been denounced as a "bandit," with all their family property taken by Red Guards in 1967. His father had somehow got his son into the village school as an under-the-table student to sit in on classes.

As Yu slipped in through the classroom backdoor, the class monitor, a girl he knew well, recognized him.

She screamed at her young classmates to kick out the "black sheep!"

Yu was dragged out and beaten by the schoolchildren.

When Yu, 7, came home bruised and bloody, his best coat torn apart, his father wept.

Eight hungry years of childhood went by without any rights or hukou permanent residency. He spent two of them selling ice popsicles.

"I'm China's Obama," Yu jokes. "That's why I should speak for my own social stratum."

For three decades, Yu has been struggling to fix a "system that blacks out and treads on individuals," in other words, "a machinery disrespecting basic human rights."

Next to his Songzhuang studio in Beijing is a 20-square-meter room piled high with materials sent to him by petitioners nationwide. 

Petitioners flock to his home, where he helps them hire lawyers, gives them money or publicizes their case for public attention.

"It might be an obsessive compulsive disorder," Yu shrugs. "Whenever I have something on my mind, I just have to say it loudly."

Yu could not resist responding to Premier Wen Jiabao's unpublicized appeal for political reform in an interview with CNN on October 3.

He proposed two reform planks: first, the establishment of an effective form of local self-government; second, to enhance the separation of powers and constitutional checks and balances to the rule of law.

Now thanks to his national tour, Yu can target those officials - all in their 40s - that he holds personally accountable for achieving the dream of reform.

"I won't let them go. The reform starts here," he says.

About Yu Jianrong

1962 Born in Hengyang, now a prefecture-level city of Hunan Province

1979 Enters Hunan Normal University to study law and political science

1983 Graduates and works as legal reporter at Hengyang Daily

1989 Receives national judicial examination certificate and becomes lawyer

1992 Goes to Hainan Province, one of China's special economic zones and becomes a millionaire

1996 Wanders around China conducting field research in rural areas

1998 Enters Huazhong Normal University for PhD in rural studies

2001 Conducts research at the Rural Development Institute of the Chinese Academy for Social Sciences in Beijing

2003 Visiting scholar with the Harvard Yenching Institute at Harvard University; moves to Songzhuang; advocates against amended national petitioning regulation

2006 Conducts research in a Beijing "petition village"; makes an independent documentary