Weihai, China - Every evening in a little village near this coastal city, peasants gather in a private home and do something that used to be dangerous. They pray.
They are Christians gathering in a little "house church," reflecting a religious boom across China. But their story also underscores another trend: the way the legal system here offers hope of chipping away at the Communist Party dictatorship.
The tale begins a year ago when the authorities in Shandong province raided this house church and carted 31 Christians off to the police station. Such crackdowns are the traditional way the Communist Party has dealt with house churches in rural areas, and some Christians have even been tortured to death.
But this incident ended differently.
Tian Yinghua, a 55-year-old evangelical Protestant who runs the church in her living room, was outraged after she was ordered jailed for 10 days.
"We had done nothing wrong at all," explained Tian. "We weren't criminals."
So Tian contacted a prominent Christian and legal scholar in Beijing, Li Baiguang, who traveled to Shandong province to do something that once would have been unthinkable: Sue the police.
Even more unthinkable, Tian won. The police settled the case by withdrawing the charges. The police also formally apologized, paid symbolic damages of 1 yuan (a bit more than a dime) and promised not to bother the church again.
It was a historic victory for freedom of religion in China - and, even more important, for the rule of law.
"The police don't bother us at all," said another church leader, Wang Qiu. "They just stay away."
That seems to be a growing pattern. The central government's policy toward religion is much more relaxed than a few years ago, and in coastal areas the government usually lets people worship freely.
"In most places, it's no problem today," said Li, who himself was imprisoned for more than a month two years ago for his legal activism. "It's just a problem in backward areas, or if you directly attack the Communist Party."
Li, who enjoys a bit of protection because President Bush invited him to the White House last year, says that last year he filed suits like this one in eight provinces. The others he lost, but even in those cases the authorities were shaken enough that they have stopped harassing Christians, he says.
"On the surface we lost," he said. "But in reality, we won in every case."
Han Dongfang, a Chinese labor activist now exiled to Hong Kong, says he has also found that suing the authorities is often an effective way to increase labor protections. Han was a leader in the Tiananmen protests of 1989, but now he is trying to bring about change from within. "I believe this is the way to develop a civil society, not through a revolution," he said.
Of course, the legal system is still routinely used to oppress people, rather than to protect them. China imprisons more journalists than any country in the world, and one of them is my Times colleague Zhao Yan. Judges never go against the Communist Party; what they can do is rectify local injustices where the higher party officials are indifferent.
Moreover, even when lawsuits are allowed to go forward, many Chinese police and judges are so corrupt that they sell themselves to the highest bidder.
A common saying, which I even saw in an illegal poster pasted on a government building in Beijing, goes: "The bandits used to hide in the hills. Now the bandits are in the courthouses."
Still, the rule of law has gained immensely since the 1980s, when a defense attorney was imprisoned for having the temerity to claim that the police had arrested the wrong man and that his client was innocent. If the Chinese government continues to nurture the rule of law, China could increasingly follow the path of South Korea and Taiwan away from autocracy toward greater democracy.
Easing the repression could also change the religious complexion of China. Estimates of the number of Chinese Christians vary widely, but the number may be approaching 100 million, many of them evangelical Protestants who aggressively recruit new believers. And with the more relaxed policy, the numbers are soaring.
"In 20 to 30 years China will have several hundred million believers," said Li, the lawyer who helped the Shandong church. "That will make China the biggest Christian nation in the world, with more Christians than the entire U.S. population."