Material compiled by Zhang, our editor for the Chinese region

This photo was taken by ‘Ah yuan’, who posted this comment on his blog: “We respect this old woman for her courage and resistance, but we're sad to see the lack of social security in our country.” The woman pictured, who could be in her 80s, has to continue working to stay alive. She’s been selling newspapers in the Haidan district of Beijing for the last ten years.

Material compiled by Zhang, our editor for the Chinese region 

For hundreds of years the central authority in China has allowed citizens to file a petition if they feel a local official has wronged them. The citizen must go to Peking to ask for reparations related to expropriation, police brutality, and unjust verdicts, or to denounce corruption. Over the years, these thousands of dissatisfied people have formed a village in an area south of the capital, where they live sparsely, while waiting for their case to be heard by the petition office. Some of them have been waiting for over ten years.

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However, the day before the seventeenth congress of the Communist Party, the authorities decided to get rid of the petitioners. On 12 October, police forces entered the petitioner village and expelled all its inhabitants. Now, keeping in mind the ancestral tradition of petitions, some petitioners use the Internet to air their grievances. For example...