Beijing's City Police Clean Up Their Act
The Age
Tuesday August 19, 2008
While many things have not changed in China, there is growing pressure on the Government for more public accountability.
IN THE dying days of the Cultural Revolution, eminent sinologist Pierre Ryckmans, who would later supervise Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's honours thesis at the Australian National University, wrote an inspired and devastating account of China's military-bureaucratic dictatorship. Ryckmans was confident his observations would stand the test of time because "totalitarian regimes have very little capacity for change"."In handbooks on Chinese traditional painting, an advice commonly given to the artist who wishes to learn to paint trees is to sketch them in winter, for then, without the seductive yet confused and blurry effect of their leafy masses, through their stark nudity they can best reveal their inner structure and specific character," wrote Ryckmans in the foreword to his 1976 English edition of Chinese Shadows, under the pen name Simon Leys.China has since changed in ways that were unimaginable to Ryckmans. And yet, in 2008, the country has returned to a political winter that reveals that much of its inner structure and character remain unchanged.The manifestations of this political winter are nothing like the economic policies that starved rural China 50 years ago or the political struggles that convulsed the cities during the Cultural Revolution 40 years ago. New branches are growing that make the Government far more accountable and responsive to its people.But it is striking to see clearly the core political structure described by Ryckmans during the time of Chairman Mao.Few things are more confronting to Western visitors than the security-beautification rituals that Chinese leaders observe during high-pressure events, such as these Olympic Games, to project an image of power and control. Millions of migrants from other provinces have been cleared out of the city as if they were little more than unsightly scum obstructing the view of the Government's Olympic pageant.The impact is more acute in other parts of north and west China that lack Beijing's sophistication and media scrutiny.A month ago, this newspaper's Good Weekend magazine published an account of a retrenched soldier called Zengxue who had defied the Government's orders to shut his pancake vending cart until after the Olympics. He survived by lurking in the roadside shadows late at night, with the help of a community of scouts to look out for the dreaded cheng guan, or city administrative police.I sent a list of questions to the Beijing Government about the basis for and nature of Zengxue's shabby treatment. The fact I received a reply at all is a marker of progress.The answers were couched in officialese. But they reveal a lot about how the Chinese Government is responding to pressures for reform."On the basis of earnestly summarising past experiences, we seek further innovations in the concept of law enforcement, in order to realise the transition from law enforcement management to law enforcement services, from rigid law enforcement to that which combines rigidity with flexibility, and from after-the-fact law enforcement to prevention," wrote the Propaganda Centre of the Beijing Municipal Law Enforcement Bureau of Comprehensive Administration. The reply talked about "putting people first" and penalising only "serial offenders or those who are impervious to persuasion". Officials in the Beijing Government are now talking like they are accountable to the people they govern as well as their superiors.This particular chapter in China's governance evolution dates back two years to a man named Cui Yingjie who, like the pancake vendor Zengxue, had tried to make a living as a Beijing food vendor. Cui had found work at one of Beijing's ubiquitous karaoke bars but his boss never paid him. So he bought a shiny new tricycle cart to peddle hot sausages in the high-technology district of Zhongguancun.What happened next was shown in a Beijing local court, courtesy of video footage shot by a TV crew invited along to a raid by the city administrative police. The footage showed Cui on his knees begging the cheng guan to let him keep his cart, his vehicle to survival, which he had bought with borrowed money the previous day.But the officers judged that Cui's cart "did not agree with city's image". They were rough and Cui fled. They chased him down an alley and Cui twirled and struck one of them in an artery with his sausage knife.Tens of thousands of food vendors across China received this kind of treatment every day. But Cui's trial for "premeditated murder" created an internet and domestic media sensation. Why, they asked, were Government officials hounding a retrenched soldier who was trying to scrape an honest living? Cui was given a suspended death sentence, which means he will probably escape with his life.Before the Beijing Government sent its replies to my question, an official rang to say he could not or would not answer the question about why mobile food vendors were banned in the first place and whether there was any way in which they could obtain a licence to legally operate.The cheng guan continue to make life miserable for Beijing's downtrodden and self-employed, without any reason beyond making the city look orderly in the eyes of its leaders. But they are also transforming themselves from ruffians to civilised, law-abiding municipal officers.China's state-controlled but market-driven media, its vast but heavily policed internet, and its nascent legal system combined to pressure the Beijing Government to mend its ways. None of these branches of public accountability existed when Ryckmans sketched the inner structure of the Chinese state 35 years ago.
© 2008 The Age