China’s chengguan, or urban-management officers, handle nonpolice matters such as enforcing sanitation rules and keeping sidewalks clear. A reputation for violence has made them a lightning rod for public ire, particularly in the smartphone era when accusations often come with visual evidence.
The central government put regulations into effect last week requiring chengguan officers nationwide to keep their own recordings of enforcement actions to help settle responsibility in case of a conflict.
The nod to transparency comes as the ruling Communist Party, under pressure from slowing economic growth, seeks to address sources of popular discontent and reclaim its reputation as a defender of the poor.
Of the range of security agencies in China—public or secret, uniformed or plainclothes—the urban-management force is the one that ordinary people are most likely to confront on a regular basis.
The chengguan are managed directly by cities rather than the Ministry of Public Security, which manages the police, making them a natural priority for a government trying to centralize control over law and order.
“ ‘Chengguan beating people’ is practically a part of everyday vocabulary,” said a commentary posted to the website of the state-run Sichuan Daily newspaper. “Recording an entire enforcement action is not just being responsible to the masses, it’s also being responsible to the chengguan themselves.”
Chengguan officers contacted by The Wall Street Journal argue that incidents of violence are few and often initiated by the public, not the officer. Neither the Beijing Office of Urban Management nor China’s Ministry of Housing and Urban Development, which introduced the new rules, responded to requests for comment.
China is following a similar path as the U.S., where many police departments have equipped officers with body cameras in response to rising public anger over police shootings.
The chengguan were set up to maintain order in China’s urban areas in the late 1990s, when downsizing of the state sector led to widespread unemployment and an explosion in street commerce.
They have developed a reputation for rough treatment of unlicensed street peddlers, beggars and other urban poor.
Criticism of the agency mounted in 2013, after state media said chengguan in central China’s Hunan province had killed a watermelon vendor by kicking him and hitting him with his scale.
A steady stream of incidents since then has continued to feed public outrage. Searches in Chinese for the phrase “chengguan beating people” turn up links to thousands of videos on YouTube and the Chinese search engine Baidu, though it couldn’t be determined how many separate videos were available.
Chengguan officers contacted by The Wall Street Journal said they are themselves victims of violence and are criticized unfairly on the basis of a few extreme incidents. At least one officer has worn Google Glass while on duty to prove that point.
Du Wei, a 30-year-old chengguan officer in the city of Xuchang, in Henan province, said she is glad to be wearing a body camera. “It’s great. If you’re on duty and there’s a conflict, at least now you have evidence,” she said.
Footage shot by the palm-sized body cameras can’t be edited or deleted, according to Ms. Du, who says officers in her unit turn on the cameras, which can film for four hours before needing to be recharged, whenever they go into the streets to work.
In April, rumors circulated online that chengguan in the eastern province of Anhui had beaten an elderly vegetable seller. City officials later posted video from a body camera that showed the vendor had initiated the aggression after having her goods confiscated, at one pointing biting an officer.
The Communist Party is more sensitive to domestic criticism over incidents involving regular people than it is to international criticism about other alleged abuses, such as mistreatment of activists and human-rights lawyers, said Maya Wang, China researcher at Human Rights Watch.
“Violence on the street against an ordinary individual that goes viral dents the credibility of the government much more than the hidden torture of dissidents,” Ms. Wang said. China’s Foreign Ministry says it treats activists in accordance with the law.
In Beijing, a scrap-metal collector said he wondered whether officers would turn the cameras off when it suited them. Dismantling a eye-exam chair on a patch of dirt behind China’s Foreign Ministry, he said, “It’s a good policy, but it still depends on the chengguan actually doing it.”
Several street peddlers and migrant workers said the chengguan had grown gentler, though perhaps not shirking from their role. A hairdresser in the capital’s Jiangtai neighborhood said chengguan officers recently took part in bricking up the entrance to his small hair salon—part of a campaign to push low-income migrants out of the city—but he wasn’t worried about violence.
“We have cameras, and now they have cameras,” he said.
Source: Wall Street Journal by Josh Chin
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