From the early 1980s, custody and repatriation (C&R) centres were one of the cornerstones of the Party-State's control of China's burgeoning migrant workforce. Originally established in 1982 with the purported aim of helping beggars and the homeless in urban areas, by the beginning of the following decade, these centres targeted anyone without proper residence or work permits. The police were granted enormous power, and could arbitrarily detain migrants without papers and subject them to all types of abuse. Criticism of this institution came to a head in 2003. In March that year, a young graphic designer named Sun Zhigang was stopped by police on a street in Guangzhou, where he had arrived just a few weeks earlier. He came from a village in Hunan Province, but had recently graduated from the Wuhan University of Science and Technology. Since he did not have his identity card and residence permit with him at that time, the police officers suspected him of being an illegal migrant and took him to the police station. All attempts by his friends to secure his release were in vain. The following day, he was transferred to a C&R centre, where, two days later, he died, allegedly of heart failure. As the authorities refused to look into the circumstances of his death, a progressive newspaper in Guangzhou took up Sun's cause and started an in-depth investigation. The truths revealed by the journalists, combined with pressure from online public opinion and legal activism, would cause a public uproar that eventually led to the abolition of the C&R centres.