I'd like to take you through a few of the things I've seen during my time here. Not a representative portrait - just some of the stories that have stuck with me.

Petitioners

Shortly after I arrived, I paid my first visit to a part of Beijing called the petitioners' village - a run-down collection of alleyways in which some of the country's most desperate people live while they try to get the authorities to hear their appeals for justice.

I met one man who told me of his son's murder, for which no-one had been convicted. The father sat on a bed he shared with two others and shook with sobs as he showed me pictures of his son's skeleton. He wanted to give me a copy of his petition - 40 pages of documents stapled together and sealed inside a brown envelope. He hoped that I might be able to help. I warned that there was little that I could do, but he insisted that I accept it.

Most petitioners campaign for years without any success. They're often harassed and detained by a government which would prefer them to just go away. Earlier this year, a prominent professor dismissed most petitioners as mentally ill.

Almost every day for the last two years, I've caught sight of the bereaved father's petition on my shelf at home and wondered if he ever got the justice he wanted.

Many believe that petitioners suffer from the lack of an independent judicial system. This country's courts operate without any kind of public scrutiny. I've never been able to see inside a courtroom. As a consolation, I was able to see a court building from my office window for a while - until a new building went up on the only empty bit of land between our office and the court.

Many families in China have to carry their own anguish in silence. In the summer of 2007, I went to central China to cover the news that hundreds of men had been found working as slaves in illegal brick factories. Some had been kept underground for so long that they no longer knew their own names.

I met a man called Zhang Bairen. His son Zhang Zhike had gone missing and the father was hoping that his son might be one of the rescued slaves. But he wasn't.

I asked the family if they could show me a picture of their missing son but they didn't have one. The family was too poor to afford any photos.

A year later, some more men working as slaves were rescued. The family hoped that the missing Zhang Zhike might be among them. But, again, he wasn't.

Another year on, family members tell us that they have now given up hope of ever finding their lost son. Theirs is a silent grief.

Dissidents

Anyone who chooses to speak out has to pick their words with care. There appears to be an unofficial rule here, that you're allowed to criticise corruption and incompetence among local officials, but if you criticise this country's main leaders, or if you dare to suggest an end to one party rule, you will get into serious trouble.

In January 2008, I went to Nanjing to interview Professor Guo Quan. He'd just founded the China New Democracy Party. We sat on the grounds of his university as he took me through his party's charter. At the time, I was surprised that the government didn't try to stop him. But in November 2008, the professor was arrested for subversion. He's now awaiting trial.

The activist Hu Jia has also paid for his own determination to campaign against abuses. I first met him at the end of 2007 when he was under house arrest at his apartment in Beijing. His wife, Zeng Jinyan, was expecting their first child. She told me that a police officer slept outside their front door to make sure that her husband didn't escape.

Shortly after the birth of their daughter Qianci, Hu Jia was formally arrested. He's now serving the second year of a 3 1/2 year sentence for subversion.

The police still stop outsiders from visiting his wife, Zeng Jinyan. She sent us a text message to say that the authorities allow her to visit her husband in prison once a month. Hu Jia is now routinely mentioned as a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Economic Progress

But these are subjects that the government prefers not to discuss. The Chinese Communist Party prefers to focus attention on its efforts to raise people's living standards - it argues that economic progress is a much more accurate measurement of human rights.

In recent years, China has got rich because of its engagement with the outside world. This engagement began in 1971 when a group of American table tennis players was invited to compete in China. In 2008, I interviewed Liang Geliang who was a member of the Chinese team which played against the visiting Americans.

When I met him, Mr Liang was running his own ping-pong club in Beijing. He was also trying to market a new kind of table tennis bat. Instead of a normal handle, Mr Liang's bat had a wooden panel in which you insert several of your fingers. He demonstrated this in a one-sided match against our driver.

A year on, Liang Geliang says that he is still trying to find a business partner so that he can mass produce and sell his new bat.

In China, you can try to make money from pretty much anything - including the country's most famous Communist, Chairman Mao.

The first man I ever interviewed here was a sculptor called Wang Wenhai. Mr Wang specialises in making busts of the late leader, and from what I could tell, he never seemed to get bored of sculpting the same person day after day. Mr Wang's cheapest sculptures were on sale for $200.

Almost three years after I met him, the sculptor has now gone back to his home-town to look after his mother. He's still making his Mao sculptures. But he says he's not having much luck in getting people to buy them.

Wang Wenhai's decision to return home makes him an exception. Around 200 million people in China here make a living as migrant workers - they leave their homes in the countryside to find work in the cities. But the world's financial crisis has caused many of these workers to lose their jobs.

Chen Zhongwei is one of them. Earlier this year, he lost his job at a factory in the southern city of Shenzhen. I met him during the New Year holiday while he was lolling about on his parents' small farm. After the holiday ended, he left to find work. But he couldn't find a job. So he's now back at his parents' house.

He doesn't want to work on their farm. His generation has grown up to expect to do something more exciting that farming.

Chen Zhongwei says he is now thinking of borrowing money from his parents so that he can buy a car and get work as a driver.

He has the freedom to choose his own job. That's something that his parents never had.

Thirty years ago in China, your local Communist Party work unit would pick where you went to school, what you studied at university, where you lived, where you worked, and even who you married.

In recent years, the government has stepped back from people's private lives. But the Communist Party still maintains one element of control - it dictates how many children each couple can have. China's one-child policy began in 1979. The first generation of only children the world has ever known has now grown up.

This generation has run into a set of unusual problems. A traditional preference for boys in China means that there now are too many men chasing too few women. A point I learned on the southern island of Hainan when I met a dejected set of young men who were unable to find any eligible women to marry.

Even the chased-after women find it difficult to pick someone who will satisfy their parents. In early 2008, I interviewed Ji Nan, an only child in her 20s who was searching for a husband. When we met, she was an architect. She now works for a magazine which specialises in bridal fashion. She is still single.

Beijing Olympics

For much of my time here, this country was busy preparing for the Beijing Olympics.

Taxi drivers in the capital were made to wear fresh yellow shirts and to take English lessons. One driver even told us he wrote the answers to the English test on his sleeve. Factories and building sites were shut down in order to clear the city's pollution. Organisers promised a drug-free Olympics.

A year before the Games began, I travelled to northern China to meet a former weightlifter, Zou Chunlan. During her career, she was made to take unidentified supplements. She believes that these were steroids. After she took them, she started to grow facial hair and developed serious health problems.

When we met her, she and her husband were running a laundry with the help of the Chinese Women's Association.

Two years later, she tells us that her business is doing so well that she no longer needs any financial support. She and her husband are now thinking of opening up a second laundry.

The couple watched the Olympics on TV along with the rest of this country. China calls itself "The Middle Kingdom". For two weeks last summer this country truly felt like the centre of the world.

Almost a year later, the Bird's Nest Olympic stadium in Beijing has now become a kind of Chinese Westminster Abbey - a national cathedral visited by thousands of tourists every day.

Since last summer, the two men who were meant to be China's Olympic stars have both run into problems.

The hurdler, Liu Xiang, has yet to recover from the injury which forced him to withdraw from his first race at the Games.

I was in the stadium when he pulled out. A legend has grown up that the crowd reacted to his withdrawal in "stunned silence." I can assure you that this was not the case. No-one in the stadium knew what was going on when Liu Xiang walked away from the starting blocks. We were all far too confused to be silent.

The 7ft 6in basketball player Yao Ming - perhaps China's most recognisable citizen - has now broken his left foot. Reports say that the injury may threaten his career.

In happier times in 2007, I watched Yao Ming walk through Tiananmen Square followed by a crowd of fans who barely reached up to his belt.

So, this country may now have to begin finding a new set of sporting heroes.

Communist Party Leaders

But it's already picked its next set of political leaders. In October 2007, I joined hundreds of reporters in the Great Hall of the People to watch the unveiling of the new nine-member Politburo Standing Committee, the inner circle of Communist Party rulers.

The new Committee included two men - Xi Jinping and Li Keqiang - who are expected to rule China for a decade when the current generation of leaders steps down in 2013. The two spent most of their first appearance practising standing still on stage behind the president.

I would love to tell you what the Politburo members are like. But I really have no idea. China offers foreign journalists at best cursory access to its rulers.

During a reception for a visiting African leader, I once got into the same room as China's president, Hu Jintao. But I was sternly told off by an official for speaking during the signing ceremony. Presumably the sound of my voice might have broken the officials' concentration as they signed their names.

The closest I've ever come to an interview with a senior official was when I followed the Commerce Minister, Bo Xilai, down a corridor in the Great Hall of the People. He looked at me with a mixture of discomfort and surprise - you don't do doorstep interviews in China.

Whenever we ask for formal interviews, we're told to send our requests by fax. Chinese government departments seem determined to keep old-fashioned fax machines in business. Our requests are sometimes turned down. They're usually just ignored, as was the case in 2007, when we asked for one-on-one interviews with the entire Politburo. We had to try.

Our most exciting moment came earlier this year when the defence ministry actually returned one of our calls. An official told us that the ministry would consider our request for a trip with the Chinese navy in the South China Sea. Five months later, we have heard nothing more.

Very occasionally, government leaders meet reporters - but only on their own terms. In March, China's Premier Wen Jiabao throws an annual press conference which is so heavily scripted and planned that it's like going to see a (very heavy) play.

Sichuan Earthquake

Above all from my time in China, I will remember the people I met in aftermath of the Sichuan earthquake of 12 May 2008.

There was Fu Xuezhong who laid down a flower on the ruins of the school in which his 12-year-old son Fu Tian and said, "Son, your Dad will love you forever."

A year later, an official investigation found that no-one was to blame for the mass collapse of schools in the earthquake. Fu Xuezhong tells us that he believes his chances of getting justice for his son have now gone.

Finally, I will remember 14-year-old Li Tangmo and his 7-year-old sister Qingyi, whose parents were killed in the earthquake. I met them at a shelter in a small stadium. They were being looked after by an uncle and were waiting to find out whether he and his wife would take them in for good.

Li Tangmo told us bravely that he and his sister would go somewhere else if their uncle and aunt didn't want to care for them. He sobbed as he spoke to us. Of all the stories I've covered in my time in China, theirs was the one which affected me the most. A year later, I don't know what's happened to the brother and sister - but I think of them often.

These, then, are the fragments of three years in China.

PS. Thank you for all your comments on this blog over the last year and a bit. I've really appreciated your thoughts.

Over the last year or two, a number of extremely well-edited videos kindly pointing out my many alleged failings as a reporter have also been posted on various websites.

The latest video - posted on China's version of YouTube - takes a slightly more comical angle of our recent encounter with Chinese security forces guarding Tiananmen Square...

I've just come back to Beijing following a few days in the UK. As our flight came in to land, the cabin crew handed out H1N1 health forms issued by China. These forms asked us to list our seat number and our contact numbers in Beijing. We also had to answer the question: "Have you had close contact with pigs within the past week?"

When we landed, we were told to stay in our seats. A team of Chinese health inspectors wearing masks then boarded the plane. The inspectors proceeded slowly down each row, pointing what I can only describe as a temperature gun at each passenger's forehead (we made their jobs easier by politely tilting our foreheads to the inspectors as they went by).

A few minutes later, the inspectors escorted one passenger in an orange t-shirt off the plane. He looked pretty embarrassed.

Inside the airport terminal, we passed through a further two checkpoints staffed by guards checking for anyone with a fever.

Leaflets warned us: "It is the responsibility of every citizen to self-monitor at home for seven days after coming back from abroad."

In case that man with the orange t-shirt is diagnosed with H1N1, the Health Ministry has enough information to track us all down and put us all into quarantine for a week.

At 2.30pm on 12 May 2008, pupils at the Xinjian primary school in Dujiangyan would have been outside in the playground. But the Sichuan earthquake came two minutes earlier - at 2.28pm - while the children were still inside their classrooms.

Their school buildings collapsed on top of them, killing more than 400 pupils.

But every other building nearby stayed standing. The parents believe their children were killed by bad building work - by negligence not natural disaster.

Fu Xuezhong lost his 12-year-old son Fu Tian - his only child. At a ceremony held at the ruins of the school three weeks after the earthquake, he carried a framed picture of his son and laid a single flower in the rubble.

"We want justice for our children," he said. "We won't rest till we get justice."

But, a year later, you won't find news of the parents' campaign. The official legend of the Sichuan earthquake does not have any inconvenient chapters.

National Story

China is, famously, a state without a God. But over the last 60 years, the Communist Party has created its own kind of religion - a national story or mythology in which everyone here can have faith.

In this story, the Party united the country against foreign enemies. Its leaders are benevolent, even god-like, figures. Natural disasters are trials to be overcome.

The Sichuan earthquake has now taken a prominent place in this national story. The government's response was portrayed as quick and compassionate. The Premier, Wen Jiabao, was cast as the noble hero - the leader who cried with the bereaved and who promised that fallen towns would one day rise again.

This is the official legend of the earthquake. It's what ordinary Chinese people are told - and it's probably what most of them genuinely believe as well.

On a hilltop overlooking the ruins of the town of Beichuan, hundreds of Chinese tourists now queue up to buy pieces of this legend. Vendors sell picture books and DVDs of the disaster, incense and candles to be placed on memorials.

"This national tragedy has made us build a much stronger nation," says one tourist. "The government is deeply concerned, ordinary people work hard - all obstacles are overcome."

Campaign Silenced

But these tourists know almost nothing of the parents' story. Since early June 2008, the Communist Party has banned the Chinese media from covering the parents' campaign.

Over the last year, local officials have harassed, sometimes even attacked the parents in an effort to keep them quiet.

A year on from the earthquake, Fu Xuezhong looks much older. He and his wife live in a temporary home provided by the government.

His hopes for justice have now gone. The remains of his son's school have been cleared away. Any evidence of bad building work has disappeared. A recent government inquiry has found that no-one was to blame for the collapse of this school or any other.

"It's not just the earthquake that made the building collapse," insists Fu Xuezhong, "but the government can't acknowledge that fact. It would bring out a lot of other troubles. They will never acknowledge it."

He concludes: "There isn't much hope for justice anymore, I think it's hopeless."

He Deming listens to Fu Xuezhong. His 11-year-old son He Jie died when the school collapsed.

"We want to petition," He Deming says, "but how can we do so? We get stopped, we can't even walk out. I won't give up not until I get justice for my child."

Artist Campaign

These parents are not alone. The artist Ai Weiwei, who helped to design the Olympic stadium in Beijing, has led a campaign for disclosure and justice.

In the absence of an official tally of dead schoolchildren, Mr Ai sent 50 volunteers to Sichuan to compile their own toll. (In early May 2009, the government finally issued its own number: 5335 pupils were missing or dead.)

Ai Weiwei says that his attempts to discover the truth have routinely been impeded by government officials.

"It's a tradition for China not to reveal any public information," he says. "This earthquake relates to too many issues - such as wrongdoings in the construction. And also some policy mistakes after the quake such as aid distribution and the humanitarian effort."

Cemetery

The children who died in the Xinjian school have been buried in a special section of the Bao Shanta cemetery. Fu Xuezhong takes us there, along with two other fathers.

"This is it," says Fu Xuezhong as he points to his son's grave. "These three kids are buried together because they were good friends."

Moments later, an official guarding the cemetery stops us from recording and he calls the police. Officers from a special unit set up to deal with the parents are called in. They ask us for our press credentials.

Fu Xuezhong and the two other fathers quietly walk away down the hill.

In the official legend of the Sichuan earthquake, there is no room for the parents who want to know why their children were killed.

The victim - Luo Caixia - lost her identity when a classmate stole her scores in the national college entrance exam. This exam can be the most important single moment in a young person's life - what you get in this test decides whether or not you can get into university. So, if you get cheated out of your results (and your identity as well) you'll probably be pretty angry.

Here's a range of comments we've translated from Chinese websites...

"Well, if you want to start investigating all the faking problems created by the powerful and the rich, there's too many to check."

"This is nothing. Two of my high school classmates didn't get good enough scores, but they managed to fake their results so that they could be accepted by universities. Could it be better than this? This is a world that belongs to the powerful people."

"I'm sympathetic to what Luo Caixia is going through, but I don't think she should seek revenge and push the other family. The official already said sorry, why does she have to push them off the cliff? The university graduates nowadays are just about revenge, it doesn't solve any problems."

"If someone really looks into this, I bet there're people who just do this as a profession, faking people's identity."

What do you think? ]]> tag:www.bbc.co.uk,2009:/blogs/thereporters/jamesreynolds//118.81497 2009-05-05T07:34:56Z 2009-05-05T07:36:24Z