Lawyer Li and the goon squad

"Hello, Sergeant Chen," said Li, waving at a middle-aged man in a civilian black polo-neck and black slacks.

"Hello," said Chen, reluctantly, cracking an embarrassed smile at the approach of a foreigner. The sergeant's two colleagues, in a white stripy polo and a trendy Diadora windcheater, stared hard and said nothing.

In a silver Volkswagen, a man in a red T-shirt and shorts was asleep in the front passenger seat. He was from the State Security Bureau and he was on his lunch break. Sprawled across the back seat of a taxi parked next to it, a fifth member of Beijing's Finest was having his own post-prandial Sunday snooze. We decided not to wake them.

Working in shifts 24 hours on and 24 hours off, hence the slightly less than razor-sharp turnout, these men and their alternates have been Li's inseparable new friends since the week before the Olympics. The taxi, driven by one of the sleeping policemen, is his own personal transport for the duration of the Games. "They said: 'You can go anywhere you like but you have to go in our car with us driving it,'" he says. "They took me in a police car at first, but it wasn't good to arrive at the office in one of those. I managed to persuade them to get the taxi."

Li Heping is a lawyer and persuasion is his business. To the great displeasure of the authorities, he branched out from his safe practice in intellectual property to start representing environmentalists, political dissidents and members of the banned religious sect, Falun Gong, on the still rather rare occasions when the state brings them to court. "I am interested in the sensitive cases because there are principles involved," he says.

Mr Li, a small, dapper figure in a white linen shirt and chinos, is not supposed to be in Beijing at all this week. On 29 September last year, two days before China's national day, he was abducted as he left his city-centre office, hooded and bundled into a car without a licence plate. "I thought: 'Now it has finally happened. I'm in their hands now. Anything can happen.'"

What happened was that he was driven to an underground cell, stripped naked and systematically beaten by a group of about eight men. "It was a room about 10 feet by six," he says. "They were wearing civilian clothes. The only piece of furniture was a table with a rubber truncheon on it. At first they used a bottle full of mineral water to hit me over the face. Then they picked up the truncheon and used that. Then they gave me electric shocks on my private parts."

The men told Li he should sell his car, stop practising law and get out of Beijing for the duration of the Olympics. He has refused all three demands. "I told them I had to make a living," he said. After four or five hours, he was dumped in the street, minus the contents of his laptop's hard disk. Just to show he wasn't intimidated, he reported the incident to the police. Li, smiling, said: "The desk sergeant was genuinely shocked. He said: 'How can something like this happen in our capital city?' He promised it would be investigated. Well, I haven't heard back from them yet."

Li's career in "sensitive" law started with the case of a young woman Falun Gong activist named Wang Bo. Having sent Wang for re-education, the authorities thought they'd scored a result. She had even been shown on Chinese state television as someone who had recanted her forbidden faith. But when Wang saw the TV interview, she was enraged. She recorded her own film making clear that she still supported Falun Gong and placed it on the internet. That landed her in court, charged with "disturbing the enforcement of law".

Li found himself on the Wang Bo case when the previous lawyer, a friend of his, was placed under house arrest for representing Wang. Any day, he knew, the same could happen to him. It didn't - although he got lots of threatening phone calls, and his assistant was taken away for questioning. Instead, and for the first time, a lawyer was able to make the case in open court that Wang's treatment, and by implication that of other Falun Gong practitioners, was in direct contravention of the guarantees of religious rights written into China's own constitution.

If this was Hollywood, Li's performance would have been enough to secure Wang Bo's instant release. But since it is China, Wang got five years. It was, however, still a milestone. "We didn't expect to win, it's almost impossible to win, but we were very pleased to have been able to use the constitutional argument in public," says Li. "Almost every Falun Gong practitioner knows about it now."

The life of a human-rights lawyer in China is a little different from his or her counterparts in Britain. Trials are not always held - often your clients just disappear into some camp, and occasionally you do, too. Sometimes there is a trial but you may find that your clients have been executed before you learn the verdict - as happened in one of Li's cases, involving apparent revenge killings in a religious sect.

When you go to file complaints for your clients, as another Beijing human rights lawyer, Wang Lin, did, you may be physically assaulted and threatened by the court officials. When you are travelling to a case, as the lawyer Li Jinsong did, you may find that your bus is stopped on the highway, and you are pulled off and beaten with metal pipes by anonymous men in unmarked cars who do not say a word the whole time.

But the existence of people like Li Heping - about 20 lawyers in Beijing now take Falun Gong cases - is proof, he says, of the way the state's power is eroding.

As the economy and entrepreneurship develops, Chinese life becomes more complicated. "It is no longer possible for the central government to regulate everything. It is already losing control," he says. "That will not necessarily lead to democracy but it is the only way China can make progress. People are better and better off, with better access to information. They will seek further values, such as dignity. The internet plays a vital role."

In an odd way, Li's police bodyguards symbolise not just the increased repression brought about by the Olympics but also its slight decay. "They are getting very tired of looking after me and their standards are starting to slip," he says. They did not, for instance, walk after us to the Korean restaurant around the corner from Li's house where we had lunch.

When the Standard confronted him afterwards, Sergeant Chen still seemed rather sheepish. He tried to insist that he wasn't a cop at all, merely a volunteer protecting the neighbourhood. "Stop your bullshit," he growled at Li. "We don't even know you." But then he switched back to his policeman role.

We often imagine that dictatorships are omnipotent and ruthless. In reality, like governments and bureaucrats everywhere, they are often confused and inconsistent, with different branches of the machine acting on different impulses and issuing contradictory orders. People like Li are sometimes able to slip through the cracks.

Yet, of course, the state's power is still huge. Sergeant Chen and the others sometimes come into Li's office, interrupting meetings and scaring away the business clients he needs to maintain his living. "They can create quite a big atmosphere of threat," he says. "I try to hide it from the business clients but I've lost quite a few. They don't like all that stuff with the cops."

Before the Olympics, when Li was still using his own car, he was deliberately rammed by a police vehicle as he drove his eight-year-old to school. On 1 August, his first day of being compulsorily chauffeured, a not-so-bashful Sergeant Chen beat him up and threw him to the ground for initially refusing to travel in the police transport. And these tactics have worked, in a way.

"My experiences have made me more cautious," admits Li. "I understand that they could do anything. I regret now that I fought back against the cops because I got hurt." But for someone under constant police surveillance and routine police harassment, he still looks remarkably perky.

Why is he so cheerful? "I'm cheerful because God tells me to be cheerful," he says. Li is one of Beijing's 100,000 Christians, something that is central to his philosophy and outlook. He is a believer. "The Bible says that if you ask for justice, justice will come sooner."

Was it a risk meeting a foreigner? "We live in a global village, what's wrong with one of the villagers meeting another?" he deadpans. Will there be consequences? "That's for them [the authorities] to decide." In fact, as the abashed reaction of his minders shows, his meetings with foreigners probably confer a measure of protection.

In line with its economic growth and development, China has been modernising its courts, opening dozens of new law schools and training thousands of new lawyers. Most have obeyed the orders of the vice-minister of justice that "lawyers must support the leadership of the [Communist] Party at all times".

But not all. As with other things about the new China, a Pandora's box may have been opened. For the moment, as Li admits, the state holds most of the cards. There is no real separation between it and the legal system. "The institutional injustice, the framework, remains," he says. "Everything is decided by the Party."

Time will tell whether Li and his colleagues are mere gadflies in an apparatus of still effectively complete state control or whether they are the first buds of an independent court system. Li, of course, is an optimist.

Li Heping, and the others like him, are, in one sense, very rare exceptions to the general rule of a cowed legal profession. In another sense, they are rather typical of this country - one more small group pushing and prodding at the limits of repression, skating quite consciously on thin ice and sometimes falling through.