By the time Zhao Liang's camera framed the severed hand of an elderly peti¬tioner torn apart by a passing train I was utterly transfixed. Petition (Shangfang, 2009) is one of those films I could feel searing itself into my memory on first viewing with an emotional heat that has not lessened since. The setting for that first look was the pressroom of the Hong Kong International Film Festival in 2009, but the small television screen did nothing to reduce the film's impact, which was like a bright flash of recognition that left me reeling. For I had seen the people on screen – or at least people just like them. I was living in Beijing at the time, and I passed petitioners every day squatting outside the gates of various ministries and government offices as I cycled through the streets on my way to work. I had always wondered who they were, since the people who travel to the capital from all over China seeking redress for injustices are a subterranean population living below the mainstream life of the capital. Locals mostly ignore them and the Chinese media barely acknowledges their existence. Their dull, traumatised eyes in the morning light told something of their situation, but until I watched Zhao's film I had no idea just how dire their predicament was.

That first viewing in the cramped confines of the film festival pressroom was a revelation. Here was a world I had sensed playing out around me during the two years I had lived in Beijing, but had never seen acknowledged, let alone discussed, on Chinese television or in the cinema. It took a trip to Hong Kong to begin to gain access to a filmic realm in which their views and experiences were being represented.

I ended up living in China from 2007 to 2011, and was as seduced as anyone by the glittering skylines, pace of change and sheer energy of a nation opening up after decades of isolation. But the longer I stayed in Beijing, the more I kept glimpsing another reality that never seemed to appear on the nightly news bulle¬tins. I was working as a magazine journalist, initially for a state-owned monthly, and the gap between the unrelentingly upbeat tone of the articles I edited every day and much of what was happening on the streets seemed more profound the longer I stayed.