Two hours into Mr. Lai’s second shift, the building started to shake, as if an earthquake was under way. There was a series of blasts, plant workers said.

Then the screams began.

When Mr. Lai’s colleagues ran outside, dark smoke was mixing with a light rain, according to cellphone videos. The toll would eventually count four dead, 18 injured.

At the hospital, Mr. Lai’s girlfriend saw that his skin was almost completely burned away. “I recognized him from his legs, otherwise I wouldn’t know who that person was,” she said.

Eventually, his family arrived. Over 90 percent of his body had been seared. “My mom ran away from the room at the first sight of him. I cried. Nobody could stand it,” his brother said. When his mother eventually returned, she tried to avoid touching her son, for fear that it would cause pain.

“If I had known,” she said, “I would have grabbed his arm, I would have touched him.”

“He was very tough,” she said. “He held on for two days.”

After Mr. Lai died, Foxconn workers drove to Mr. Lai’s hometown and delivered a box of ashes. The company later wired a check for about $150,000.

Foxconn, in a statement, said that at the time of the explosion the Chengdu plant was in compliance with all relevant laws and regulations, and “after ensuring that the families of the deceased employees were given the support they required, we ensured that all of the injured employees were given the highest quality medical care.” After the explosion, the company added, Foxconn immediately halted work in all polishing workshops, and later improved ventilation and dust disposal, and adopted technologies to enhance worker safety.

In its most recent supplier responsibility report, Apple wrote that after the explosion, the company contacted “the foremost experts in process safety” and assembled a team to investigate and make recommendations to prevent future accidents.

In December, however, seven months after the blast that killed Mr. Lai, another iPad factory exploded, this one in Shanghai. Once again, aluminum dust was the cause, according to interviews and Apple’s most recent supplier responsibility report. That blast injured 59 workers, with 23 hospitalized.

“It is gross negligence, after an explosion occurs, not to realize that every factory should be inspected,” said Nicholas Ashford, the occupational safety expert, who is now at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “If it were terribly difficult to deal with aluminum dust, I would understand. But do you know how easy dust is to control? It’s called ventilation. We solved this problem over a century ago.”

In its most recent supplier responsibility report, Apple wrote that while the explosions both involved combustible aluminum dust, the causes were different. The company declined, however, to provide details. The report added that Apple had now audited all suppliers polishing aluminum products and had put stronger precautions in place. All suppliers have initiated required countermeasures, except one, which remains shut down, the report said.

For Mr. Lai’s family, questions remain. “We’re really not sure why he died,” said Mr. Lai’s mother, standing beside a shrine she built near their home. “We don’t understand what happened.”

As American consumers ogle over shiny new gadgets at this week’s Consumer Electronic’s Show, the workers that make those products are threatening mass suicide for the horrid working conditions at Foxconn. 300 employees who worked making the Xbox 360 stood at the edge of the factory building, about to jump, after their boss reneged on promised compensation, reports English news site Want China Times. It’s not like this is the first time working conditions at Foxconn have made news outside China. But iPhone and Xbox sales surely haven’t lagged in the wake of those revelations and neither Apple nor Microsoft has done much of anything to fix things. 

Instead of the raise they requested, these workers were given the following ultimatum: quit with compensation, or keep their jobs with no pay increase. Most quit and never got the money. That’s when the mass suicide threat came in. The incident actually caused a factory wide shutdown, reports Record China. 

Xianiezhuang Village, China (CNN) — On most days, Zhang Huanzhi doesn’t look the part of a fighter for justice. Whenever she catches a break between tending the cornfield and feeding livestock, the 67-year-old farmer from northern China goes to court.

“I bike to the closest bus stop and then take a two-hour ride to the Hebei provincial high court,” Zhang said, as she thrashed sorghum in her courtyard one afternoon, her disabled husband sitting nearby.

“I’ve been doing this for the past six years — and as long as I can still move, I’m not giving up.”

Her only son, Nie Shubin, was executed in 1995 — when he was 20 — for raping and killing a woman. A decade later, another man confessed to the same crimes.

Since then Zhang has made countless journeys to the courthouse in the provincial capital of Shijiazhuang — 320 kilometers (200 miles) southwest of Beijing — with one simple yet futile appeal: retry the case to exonerate her son.

With more details emerging from domestic news coverage, many have viewed Zhang’s plight — and Nie’s case — as an egregious example of the flaws in the Chinese criminal justice system, including the use of torture, deficient due process and lax review of death sentences.

Zhang is now back in the public spotlight, as the government proposes major revisions to its criminal code — the first in 15 years — ostensibly aimed at better protecting its citizens and preventing a recurrence of situations like what happened her son.

Her fight nevertheless continues to hit a wall and even the People’s Daily — the official newspaper of the ruling Communist Party — ran a scathing commentary in September that asked: “In a case where someone was clearly wronged, why has it been so difficult to make it right?”

“Rehabilitation means little to the dead, but it means a lot to his surviving family and all other citizens,” it added. “We can no longer afford to let Nie’s case drag on.”

A mother’s dogged pursuit

Zhang now seals her most treasured possessions in a Ziploc bag: two old photos and several legal documents.

“He was about 19 and it was taken right here in our courtyard,” she recalled, pointing to the fading color prints of her shy stuttering son — a square-faced teenager wearing a blue tank top in one picture and shirtless in the other — beaming for the camera.

Nie was taken into custody not long after the photos were taken and would never see his mother again. Zhang said local police, during their several visits to question the family and search the house, never told her why they had detained her son. Court documents cited “tips from local residents” but did not elaborate.

Authorities tried Nie behind closed doors and barred the parents from the courtroom, but Nie told a lawyer hired by his family that he was beaten into a confession on his sixth day in jail. Zhang was convinced that Nie was a victim of torture, after seeing her normally healthy son walk with a limp into the courthouse before the first trial.

Seven months after he was first detained, the government executed Nie in April 1995 — without notifying his parents. After the initial shock, Zhang had to endure more agony to locate her son’s remains and deal with a failed suicide attempt and subsequent half-paralysis of her husband, who was crushed by Nie’s execution.

Living off her husband’s monthly pension of $150, Zhang learned to take care of the family by herself. Her daily routine, however, was disrupted in 2005 by a sudden influx of Chinese reporters, who revealed to her that a man named Wang Shujin had just confessed to the same crimes Nie was executed for a decade earlier.

Carefully laying the contents from her Ziploc bag on a table, Zhang described each legal document as she recounted her six-year lone quest for justice: a copy of the verdict against Nie that detailed his “crimes;” a 2007 letter from the Supreme People’s Court in Beijing, in which the nation’s highest court instructed the Hebei high court to “process” her appeal; and most importantly, a printout of a written statement by Wang’s lawyer on his client’s confession.

The lawyer, Zhu Aimin, confirmed to CNN that Wang has admitted to the crimes Nie was convicted of — with corroborative details. Ironically Wang, sentenced to death for four other murder and rape cases, is now receiving a reprieve, as his connection to the Nie case has delayed the completion of his second trial.

Officials from the Hebei high court in Shijiazhuang and the Supreme People’s Court in Beijing never responded to CNN’s requests for comment despite repeated phone calls and faxes.

“The cold reality doesn’t offer us ordinary people much hope — so why do I keep pursuing?” Zhang said. “I don’t want to hold anyone responsible, I don’t want government compensation, and I don’t want the judge to bring back my son alive — but one thing I must have is his innocence.”

New law, old problems

In recent years, state media have exposed an increasing number of wrongful convictions in China. At least five death row inmates — most reportedly tortured during police interrogation — were set free, either because their “victims” turned up alive years after the alleged murders, or the real perpetrators were caught.

Such cases could be prevented if the new Criminal Procedure Law takes effect next March as scheduled, the Chinese government has argued, because the proposed changes strengthen the rights of defense lawyers while barring the practices of forcing suspects to incriminate themselves or coercing their families to testify against them.

The current draft also incorporates earlier government pronouncements, including those making evidence obtained through torture inadmissible in court and limiting the use of the death penalty. China executes more people than all other countries combined, according to the London-based Amnesty International human rights group, which estimated the figure — considered a state secret — to be in the thousands last year.

Many lawyers and legal scholars call the revisions mere window dressing. With the government more concerned about maintaining social stability in the wake of the Arab Spring unrest, they depict an increasingly repressive environment for ordinary citizens and lawyers alike.

“The authorities do whatever they want — detention, surveillance and harassment — it’s just too arbitrary,” said Zhang Sizhi, a prominent lawyer in Beijing who was once assigned by the government to defend Chairman Mao Zedong’s widow.

He and others note the draft law does not include the long-proposed right to silence for suspects or abolition of forced labor camps. Yet it does include a clause authorizing police to detain citizens for up to six months in certain cases without having to inform their families.

One aspect the revisions largely ignore is the appeals process, experts say, leaving ordinary people — like Zhang Huanzhi — who are trying to overturn a court ruling trapped in the legal labyrinth.

“They have nowhere to go — who will listen to them?” said Jerome Cohen, a New York University law professor and an internationally recognized authority in Chinese law. “It requires far more reform than this draft to address these issues.”

During the just-ended month-long public comment period on the draft, the government received more than 72,000 responses. Cohen says enough negative feedback may prompt the authorities to shelve this version and start anew later.

Back in Xianiezhuang Village, Zhang has heard about the proposed new criminal code and simply wishes the government would do whatever it takes to protect other families from the kind of anguish she has suffered.

As she sat on a stool to winnow grains, her husband started wailing uncontrollably while reading a newspaper profile on her titled, “A Mother’s Race Against Time.”

“I’ve talked to my son several times on his grave,” she said, wiping tears. “I told him: Son, you have to fight for justice in your world and mom will keep fighting for you in mine.”

“He would thank me because he knows a mother can’t live without her son.”

Click here for video.

Newsweek Magazine: Aug 28, 2011 10:00 AM EDT

Beijing is two cities. One is of power and of money. People don’t care who their neighbors are; they don’t trust you. The other city is one of desperation. I see people on public buses, and I see their eyes, and I see they hold no hope. They can’t even imagine that they’ll be able to buy a house. They come from very poor villages where they’ve never seen electricity or toilet paper.

Every year millions come to Beijing to build its bridges, roads, and houses. Each year they build a Beijing equal to the size of the city in 1949. They are Beijing’s slaves. They squat in illegal structures, which Beijing destroys as it keeps expanding. Who owns houses? Those who belong to the government, the coal bosses, the heads of big enterprises. They come to Beijing to give gifts—and the restaurants and karaoke parlors and saunas are very rich as a result.

Beijing tells foreigners that they can understand the city, that we have the same sort of buildings: the Bird’s Nest, the CCTV tower. Officials who wear a suit and tie like you say we are the same and we can do business. But they deny us basic rights. You will see migrants’ schools closed. You will see hospitals where they give patients stitches—and when they find the patients don’t have any money, they pull the stitches out. It’s a city of violence.

The worst thing about Beijing is that you can never trust the judicial system. Without trust, you cannot identify anything; it’s like a sandstorm. You don’t see yourself as part of the city—there are no places that you relate to, that you love to go. No corner, no area touched by a certain kind of light. You have no memory of any material, texture, shape. Everything is constantly changing, according to somebody else’s will, somebody else’s power.

To properly design Beijing, you’d have to let the city have space for different interests, so that people can coexist, so that there is a full body to society. A city is a place that can offer maximum freedom. Otherwise it’s incomplete.

I feel sorry to say I have no favorite place in Beijing. I have no intention of going anywhere in the city. The places are so simple. You don’t want to look at a person walking past because you know exactly what’s on his mind. No curiosity. And no one will even argue with you.

None of my art represents Beijing. The Bird’s Nest—I never think about it. After the Olympics, the common folks don’t talk about it because the Olympics did not bring joy to the people.

There are positives to Beijing. People still give birth to babies. There are a few nice parks. Last week I walked in one, and a few people came up to me and gave me a thumbs up or patted me on the shoulder. Why do they have to do that in such a secretive way? No one is willing to speak out. What are they waiting for? They always tell me, “Weiwei, leave the nation, please.” Or “Live longer and watch them die.” Either leave, or be patient and watch how they die. I really don’t know what I’m going to do.

My ordeal made me understand that on this fabric, there are many hidden spots where they put people without identity. With no name, just a number. They don’t care where you go, what crime you committed. They see you or they don’t see you, it doesn’t make the slightest difference. There are thousands of spots like that. Only your family is crying out that you’re missing. But you can’t get answers from the street communities or officials, or even at the highest levels, the court or the police or the head of the nation. My wife has been writing these kinds of petitions every day, making phone calls to the police station every day. Where is my husband? Just tell me where my husband is. There is no paper, no information.

The strongest character of those spaces is that they’re completely cut off from your memory or anything you’re familiar with. You’re in total isolation. And you don’t know how long you’re going to be there, but you truly believe they can do anything to you. There’s no way to even question it. You’re not protected by anything. Why am I here? Your mind is very uncertain of time. You become like mad. It’s very hard for anyone. Even for people who have strong beliefs.

This city is not about other people or buildings or streets but about your mental structure. If we remember what Kafka writes about his Castle, we get a sense of it. Cities really are mental conditions. Beijing is a nightmare. A constant nightmare.