The mountainous and underdeveloped province of Guizhou is notorious for its local officials manipulating or breaching laws to protect each other or vested interest groups at the expense of the great majority.
The last time the backwater western province attracted such notoriety was in June last year when the suspicious death of a girl led to riots in Wengan county, where government offices and police cars were torched, shocking the leadership in Beijing and leading to a national review of how to handle complaints from the aggrieved.
Now another scandal is brewing in Xishui county, about 330km from Wengan, which has the potential to trigger more social unrest.
It concerns a child-prostitution trial last week involving local officials and a lawmaker allegedly having sex with under-age girls. The state media reports in the run-up to the trial have already sparked a national outcry about the moral decay of government officials and glaring loopholes in the legal protection of children.
The 16-hour trial ended last week without a verdict, and the county court promised to announce the verdict in about a week's time. The fact that more than 1,000 people, some of whom travelled from other provinces, gathered outside the court on Wednesday, the day of the trial, showed the depth of the anger.
The case first came to light in August last year when internet chat rooms, rather than the official media, began to mention under-age girls being forced to have sex with government officials. The mother of an abused girl reported the case to the local police bureau on August 15, according to state media reports.
The local police apparently did not report any progress until two months later when comments from an internet chat room caught the attention of top officials in Guizhou. They ordered police in Zunyi city, which has jurisdiction over Xishui county, to send an eight-member team to undertake an undercover investigation in the county for 10 days. By the end of October, seven people were arrested on charges of organising and forcing 11 girls (three of whom were under the age of 14) into prostitution.