Excessive Force by China's Street Police Triggers Outburst

By Matthew Robertson
August 2, 2011

Strangled vendor is latest incident to serve as flashpoint for smoldering public anger at regime.

After a one-legged street vendor was strangled to death by “urban management officers” in broad daylight in a small city in Guizhou Province last week, mayhem erupted.

The 52-year-old Deng Qiguo had been a familiar sight in the small city of Anshun for a decade, where he peddled fruit from his cart, which he pushed while hobbling on a crutch. An altercation with the street police—called “chengguan” in Chinese—ended in his death on July 26.

For many, the chengguan are the lowest-level representatives of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Their open disregard for human life in Anshun provoked an explosion of pent-up anger at the regime, drawing over 10,000 protesters who threw rocks at police and turned over police vehicles.

The authorities rolled out tried-and-true methods of crowd suppression, mobilizing nearly 1,000 riot police to put down the protest. Xinhua, the state mouthpiece, gave low-ball estimates of 30 protesters and 10 policemen suffering minor injuries.

But firsthand reports gathered on Sina Weibo, a Twitter-like microblogging service, and by Chinese-language media outside China indicate that police used fire hoses, tear gas, and possibly even machine guns. Cleaning trucks then came in to clean the blood off the road.

While the strangling (or beating, reports differ) took place in the early afternoon, crowds were still present late into the night.

Social Media

Almost all of the firsthand accounts about the incident were published through microblogging platforms like Sina Weibo. While posts there were soon deleted, much of the video footage and images produced by witnesses were copied widely, including to Chinese-language websites outside China.

Wang Keqin, a well-known investigative reporter, followed developments closely. He referred to parts of an article in the Oriental Morning Post that had been deleted by censors. Someone in the crowd had said, in part: “It’s like a submachine gun. … I was not far from the bullets. When I saw him loading the gun, I thought they were loading the gun to shoot up in the air. I didn’t expect them to shoot people. Do you know? I didn’t expect that the first shot was firing toward us. We started to run.”

Liu Wei, a human rights lawyer, is recorded by Radio Free Asia (RFA) as saying: “The incident has grown bigger and bigger. It is out of control now. There were constantly sounds of gunshots at the scene, and tear gas is everywhere. It’s reported that anti-riot police tossed smoke grenades to disperse the crowd, and fired on them. Many people were injured or even killed. Now the streets are blocked by police. … Cleaning cars are cleaning the blood off the road.”

“There were so many onlookers,” wrote one user of Sina Weibo. “Blood and dead bodies were everywhere. The riot police rushed to the sidewalk. … The riot police kept on rushing to the sidewalk, and onlookers almost knocked me to the ground. The street-side stone bench was covered in blood; there were two corpses on the road.”

Recently, Chinese users of social media are reporting more aggressively on events that show the regime in a bad light, such as the riot in Anshun or the Wenzhou train crash. This, along with the proliferation of access to these technologies, is particularly concerning to Party apparatchiks, according to Zhong Weiguang, a Chinese dissident and commentator who now lives in Germany.

“This is coming out more and more now because of the Internet and Weibo,” Zhong said in a telephone interview. As connectivity among the population increases, people are able to see that individual phenomena are not isolated. At the same time, he said, “The conflicts that allow these things to happen are becoming more and more common, and the methods the regime is using are becoming more and more gangster-like.”

Covering Up

Anshun City government published a small note on its website acknowledging the death of the vendor. It was the first step in the Party’s efforts to cover up what really happened.

The local Party committee said they will “quickly investigate the facts,” “strictly deal with matters according to the law,” and “thoroughly do well with mass work.” This refers to propaganda saturation after “mass incidents”—large, violent protests that are suppressed by force—meant to restore disaffected citizens’ faith in the regime.

What local authorities would not permit, however, was an independent investigation of the incident. Lu Chaoguo, a reporter from the Shandong-based Qilu Evening News, attempted to conduct interviews in Anshun the day after the beating and was ambushed by public security forces.

He was approached by four or five men who declined to identify themselves. They grabbed him around the neck, pinned him to the ground, and then carried him to a minivan. He was then beaten about the head until he was unconscious. His cell phone and shoes were taken. Interrogations followed, and finally he was released with “bruises all over my arms and neck.”

Local newspapers, including the Oriental Morning Post and Guiyang Evening News, said at least a dozen people were in hospitals from some form of blast (possibly referring to tear gas or bullets), and that 30 were otherwise injured, the youngest being a 4-year-old.

Indoctrinated in Brutality

The chengguan have been implicated repeatedly. Officially their job is to enforce street ordinances and prevent beggars and street vendors from setting up shop in certain areas. But they frequently resort to brutal means, and they are often corrupt.

Zhong Weiguang says their cruelty stems from being indoctrinated in CCP strong-arm tactics. “The chengguan act on behalf of the regime to control the streets,” he said. “They don’t put the people’s interests first, they put the government’s interests first.”

A training manual for chengguan was leaked online in 2009. It explained how violence can be deployed to greatest effect, and included such lines as “make sure that no blood is visible on the face, no wounds are observable on the body, and no witnesses are around. … You should not leave any trails. Once you decide to go ahead, you must act cleanly without any hesitation. You must apply full force.”

Other parts said “Do not consider … whether you will harm the subject. … Become a resolute law enforcer staunchly protect the dignity of city administrative regulations.”

Interviews with chengguan in the Chinese press indicate that a cascading “responsibility system” is used. A chengguan who does not keep vendors off the street will be heavily fined, making the issue “one of life and death,” in the words of one street officer. Responsibility systems such as this are frequently used by the CCP to push downward the pressure to complete certain tasks, while enforcers are given leeway in how they get things done.

“Their main purpose is to suppress people,” Zhong says. “This is the lowest level of the one-Party dictatorship in action. Their tactics are not limited by law.”

Mass riots like the one in Anshun are a danger to the Party’s rule. It has shown an increased awareness of the danger, with editorials about “representing the interests of the masses” and preventing “contradictions” between the Party and the people. The events in Anshun, however, the latest in a string of increasingly extreme anti-regime incidents, indicate that the “contradictions” between the Party and the people are only getting worse.

A large riot broke out in Guangdong last month when chengguan reportedly beat to death a 20-year-old pregnant migrant worker. The month before, China was racked by bomb explosions, including ones directed at administrative and public security buildings by people who had given up seeking justice by any other means. And most recently the public has been openly contemptuous toward the authorities, after the collision of two high-speed trains and the authorities’ bungled attempts at a cover-up.

Unofficial figures indicate that the number of mass incidents in China has doubled over the past five years, reaching 180,000 in 2010. Commensurately, the regime has boosted funding to its domestic security apparatus to exceed that spent on its military.

Zhong says these incidents are not to be understood merely as local instances of anger, but as a general expression of animus toward the ruling Party.

“It’s fury at the darkness of Chinese society,” Zhong said. “It’s not just an issue of the vendor, or the Railways Ministry, but the system as a whole. People are saying ‘we don’t want the CCP.’”

Source: The Epoch Times.
Link: http://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/china-news/excessive-force-by-chinas-street-police-triggers-outburst-59894-all.html.