POWERLESS

Huang Guoyu wrings out her long black hair over a small bowl. There are some lettuce leaves next to her on a sideboard. Behind her is a squat toilet and the family's laundry hangs above her on a nylon clothesline. Huang dries herself and then begins preparing dinner in this provisional kitchen/washroom.

In the hallway of the electronics store, Li has built a plywood platform under the ceiling with a ladder that leads up to the small, cramped sleeping area covered in mattresses and blankets. One of the blankets is adorned with comic book heroes, while a pillow is decorated with pigs. It reeks of urine and sweat.

Li and Huang have been sharing this stuffy space for months with their children, while Li's father sleeps on a cot in the front of the store. The children frequently ask when they will have their own rooms again, but it's a question to which Li has no answer.

The compensation for their old house was not nearly enough to buy a new apartment and since his release from the prison camp, Li has appealed to the courts for more money. So far, though, his efforts have been unsuccessful.

The family eats dinner in Li's workshop. They grab a few plastic chairs and sit in a circle among cables, circuit boards and cathode ray tubes from broken TVs. They share rice, roasted vegetables and a few mandarins.

Li immediately reopened his shop the day after he was released, eager to begin earning money for his family again as quickly as possible. But some of his old customers avoided his shop. They wanted nothing to do with a former prisoner.

In one corner of the workshop stands a lockable metal cabinet where Li keeps all of his court documents. His case file is around 30 centimeters thick and weighs over five kilograms.

In addition to demanding greater compensation for his house, Li is also pursuing a confirmation that he was imprisoned unjustly. He even wrote a letter to then-President Hu Jintao. He never received a response.

Li's old police hat sits on a desk in his workshop. A metal emblem adorns the front, with four small golden stars creating a semicircle around a much larger fifth star. The large star symbolizes the leadership of the Communist Party while the four smaller stars represent the workers, farmers, the petit bourgeoisie and the bourgeoisie. It's an old symbol hailing from the era of Mao Zedong.

During his tenure as an elite policeman, Li wore the hat with pride. Today, it reminds him of how uncomplicated his life was before he knew China's dark side.

In 2014, when we meet Li for another time, the last appellate court has dismissed his complaints, the High People's Court in Chongqing. For the first time in his life, Li had lost an important battle.

Only now, he understood that it was a fight he could never win because he was playing by the wrong rules. Li had thought he lived in a country where petitions meant something and the courts were fair.

He believed in a China that no longer exists, one that may never have existed. Once he understood that, something changed for Li Yiwen.