It's early morning and Wang Hou'e is making breakfast in her brick home in a dusty back lane of the suburban village of Xiashuixi, Shanxi province. Wang is 48 years old but her sunken cheeks and wispy hair give her the look of a woman well into her 60s. Her knitted cotton top is stretched out of shape and hangs loosely from her small angular frame
She pours tea into two enamel mugs and places them next to a tin bowl of plain steamed bread. Then she pulls up a plastic chair and produces a slim wallet of photos.
The first picture is of a meek-looking teenager on a bicycle. Then there is a shot of the same boy but younger. Shyly, he is standing to attention in a brightly coloured marching-bandsman's uniform that is far too big for him. After that comes a school photograph with the boy peering sheepishly from the back row.
'My darling child,' Wang sobs. Her bony chest heaves and a tear trickles from the corner of one eye.
In the autumn of 2008, Zhang Xuping - the boy in the pictures - confessed to stabbing to death Xiashuixi's village chief. He was tried on November 26 last year and is now awaiting sentencing. Youths in the mainland have been executed for far less but Zhang has one thing in his favour: a growing tide of public support, which first made him a local legend and is now threatening to turn his case into a national scandal.
Zhang's tale is one of corruption, murder and a gang of criminal thugs headed by the village's Communist Party secretary. This man was a burly individual named Li Shiming, the fourth of six brothers in a powerful family. For a decade the whole village lived in fear of his rapaciousness and violence, until events came to a head in September 2008.
MOUNTAINOUS SHANXI is the mainland's coal-mining heartland and its capital, Taiyuan, lies in the broad valley that bisects the province from north to south. Xiashuixi is in the district of Lishi, 130 kilometres to the southwest of Taiyuan, in Luliang prefecture.
