Officers sat with cabbies on the two-day drive back home. For hours, the silence was broken only by sobbing. But as they traversed the winding, snowy roads of the Qinling Mountains, some cabbies began a morbid chant, rooting for the vehicles to tumble off a cliff. "If we die, the problem is solved!" shouted Yuan.
Liu tried to comfort the others, but she felt defeated, too. "I was thinking that when we got back, I would definitely be arrested," she recalled. "Having suffered the hardships of Beijing, I had come to a profound realization, and I was very disappointed. I didn't know where to go to find justice."
Liu Yu and her husband, Liu Feng, spent their life savings to buy a taxi permit in Dazhou, China. When the city decided to revoke all permits and require cabbies to buy new ones, they were among the hundreds who fought back.
(Philip P. Pan -- The Washington Post)
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The cabbies in Dazhou tried to free their colleagues when they arrived. Some taxis attempted to cut off the buses, and one woman lay on the highway to block their way. Later, a mob of hundreds surrounded the police academy where the cabbies were taken and staged a minor riot, smashing windows and tearing down an iron gate.
Police restored order without using violence and released most of cabbies the first night. They kept Yuan and Liu and nearly a dozen of the other representatives a day longer. Then they released everyone but Liu and three other cabbies.
Over the next two weeks, the city put pressure on the cabbies to buy the new permits. Those who did so early received discounts, and those who drove with the old permits faced fines. Police released Liu after 15 days in jail, immediately after her husband agreed to pay for a new permit.
A few weeks later, Yuan called Liu and told her the cabbies were going to Beijing again. The younger woman thought someone in the capital might still help them. At the least, she said mischievously, Beijing might punish Dazhou's party leaders if the cabbies kept going to the capital.
Liu was torn about whether to go. Her mother and her mother-in-law pleaded with her to stay. Her husband offered to go in her place but couldn't find anyone to drive his cab. Then her 8-year-old son asked what would happen to him if she was imprisoned for good. Liu decided to give up the fight.
Out of Options
The cabbies' second trip to Beijing ended like the first. After a month, police forced them onto buses and took them home. Upon their return, several cabbies were detained. Yuan said police jailed her for nearly a month, releasing her at the end of March after her husband agreed to buy a new taxi permit.
By then, almost all of the cabbies had agreed to pay for the new permits. That plunged many of them deep into debt, but it raised $10 million for the city. Yu Longhai, a city spokesman, said some of the money has been used to build roads, install new street lamps and repair gas and electrical lines.
"For the benefit of a large number of people, the reform sacrificed the interests of a small group of people," he said. "Some of the cab owners were just stirring up trouble."
The cabbies did not give up. About 350 of them put $10 to $50 each into a legal defense fund. They said they used the money to hire lawyers to sue the city and pay the travel expenses of state journalists they coaxed into visiting them this past summer.
But the money was not well spent. The journalists published only two articles, neither of which had much impact. And the lawyers were too scared to pursue the cabbies' case aggressively. One refused to speak at all during a September court hearing. And when court officials challenged another to identify himself, he claimed to be a cabbie.
Researcher Zhang Jing contributed to this report.
