Along with her younger sister Mo Shangyou, Mo Shangzhen tried to get the photograph she holds in this image to the courts. Shangzhen said in 2009 she thought they could be used not just for reparations to her family, but also as evidence in the contemporary corruption trials spurred by Bo's crackdown. The younger sister, who returned after breakfast in July 2008 to a violent scene at her home, said that her head is still scarred from the beating, and that the courts rebuffed the sisters' offer to provide evidence. "Some of the people who also did this," the older sister said in 2009, "are still in their government positions."
Wu Pinghui, then 63, said she left her home one morning in August 2008 and returned to find her house being bulldozed. The police sent her to a hospital instead of helping her because she was shouting that her house had disappeared, she told me in a shanty on a construction site near her former home. Inspired by the widely held feeling that under Bo an era of corruption in Chongqing was entering its endgame, Wu said she later made four attempts to interest higher courts in Beijing in her case, but never heard a reply. Here she holds a paper showing the land she said she owned, the apartments built over it in 2009, and the representative of the developer who she said had been driven to the site in a government vehicle. "Bo Xilai has made it much better," she said then, "but there is still work to do." She paused and then restated: "If Bo Xilai weren't here, it would be much darker in Chongqing."
At the 2009 trial of Wen Qiang, a local police deputy turned director of the Chongqing judicial bureau, Chongqing residents thronged the sidewalk in front of the courts, rubbernecking to see who Bo had brought down and searching for notice for their own particular claims. Convicted of bribery, rape, and collusion with criminal gangs, Wen was executed in July 2010. The complainants outside the courts have presumably returned to their search for justice.
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