Policing China

Street-Level Cops in the Shadow of Protest

Suzanne E. Scoggins

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781501755583, 9781501755583
• eBook ISBN: 9781501755590
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia cinese

In Policing China, Suzanne E. Scoggins delves into the paradox of China's self-projection of a strong security state while having a weak police bureaucracy. Assessing the problems of resources, enforcement, and oversight that beset the police, outside of cracking down on political protests, Scoggins finds that the central government and the Ministry of Public Security have prioritized "stability maintenance" (weiwen) to the detriment of nearly every aspect of policing. The result, she argues, is a hollowed out and ineffective police force that struggles to deal with everyday crime.

Using interviews with police officers up and down the hierarchy, as well as station data, news reports, and social media postings, Scoggins probes the challenges faced by ground-level officers and their superiors at the Ministry of Public Security as they attempt to do their jobs in the face of funding limitations, reform challenges, and structural issues. Policing China concludes that despite the social control exerted by China's powerful bureaucracies, security failures at the street level have undermined Chinese citizens' trust in the legitimacy of the police and the capabilities of the state.

1

POLICING CHINA

Demographics, Mission, and Funding

Who are the Chinese police? How does policing in China work? Who oversees the police, and how are the police funded? Before diving into a deeper investigation of how the police in China excel at managing protest while falling short with regard to almost everything else, we must first answer the who, what, and how questions of policing in today’s China. Unfortunately, much of this information is scattered and sometimes contradictory. The academic literature remains underdeveloped, leaving gaps in our knowledge about how frontline policing actually functions, and media or scholarly accounts of single events in specific locations can be misleading. Sometimes the Chinese police appear remarkably strong, as they did in foreign media reports about a broad-sweeping order for the police to monitor nearly seven thousand foreign organizations.1 News coverage of this change gave the impression of a powerful, coherent public security force that was capable of implementing such an endeavor, focusing on the far-reaching effects of the policy on foreign organizations while ignoring questions of whether or not local forces beyond major metropolitan zones such as Beijing would actually have the manpower and organizational wherewithal to meet the law’s requirements. At other times, the police in China appear hopelessly feckless. In one tragic example that made international news, a Shanghai traffic officer was dragged to his death after trying to stop a driver from making an illegal turn.2 Although the driver was heavily criticized, netizens also questioned why the police officer refused to let go of the moving vehicle until it was too late. With such disparate accounts, it is hard to know what to think about the Chinese police and their enforcement capacity.

The literature on frontline policing in China gives us insight into the jobs, motivations, and institutional constraints of the police, but it remains a developing subfield. Scholars have told us much about local crime prevention campaigns (J. Xu 2015, 2014, 2012, 2009), station relationships with businesses (J. Xu 2013), frontline dissatisfaction (Scoggins and O’Brien 2016), and police tactics for managing groups like petitioners (Deng and O’Brien 2013) or prostitutes (Boittin 2013). There is also a growing body of literature on frontline police perceptions, such as how officers view police culture and their role in society (Z. Chen 2016a, 2016b, 2016c), how police perceive and manage expectations about social service provision (X. Wang 2015, 2014), and how station supervisors view their work and report job satisfaction (Sun, Liu, and Farmer 2016). Moreover, several studies have analyzed the occupational attitudes of police cadets (Sun et al. 2009; Sun et al. 2010; Wu, Sun, and Cretacci 2009; Cuvelier, Jia, and Cheng 2015). In the more distant past, Fredrick Wakeman’s Policing Shanghai provided a detail-rich description of police activity in the city over a ten-year period between 1927 and 1937 (Wakeman 1995). These works have opened up the world of frontline policing in China and given insight into officer motivations, frustrations, and expectations, but there is still much to be said about how police work influences and is shaped by broader political phenomena.3 A wealth of information about the issues that the police bureaucracy faces can be found in Chinese-language materials in national journals like Gongan yanjiu (Policing studies) and regional police college journals. Chinese policing scholars cover a wide range of topics related to frontline work, including stability maintenance (Ye, Xiao, and Liu 2006; P. Li 2008; J. Liu 2005), psychological health and distress of frontline officers (Zhang, Zou, and Tong 2012; Wei 2011; Hu 2009; Hu and Ren 2006), corruption (Yin 2013; Lu and Qiao 2006; Guo 2003; G. Wang 2002), crisis management (X. Meng 2013), self-defense (W. Meng 2006; Ding 2002), and frontline police training (Zhou 2010), to name a few. Available only in Chinese, these articles tend to be more practice-oriented than theoretical and often focus on policy recommendations or editorial assessments. They nevertheless remain excellent sources of empirical information for specific topics.4

To fully understand the Chinese police, however, we must piece together the existing literature with accounts from actual police officers as well as other publicly available data from the Ministry of Public Security, individual stations, social media accounts, and reports in the popular press. From there, we gain a more comprehensive picture of who the Chinese police are, to whom they answer, and what they do on a daily basis. Doing so systematically addresses common misconceptions about issues such as police funding or the command structure. These essential facts are important for evaluating frontline policing efforts in China, and they set the stage for larger discussions about how resource constraints, ministerial reforms, and variation in control over the local police weaken security response on the ground in nearly every area of policing except response to public protest.

Who Are the Chinese Police?

Descriptions of the Chinese police can vary dramatically. Sometimes frontline police are depicted as automatons of the Chinese state and local governments.5 Sometimes they are seen as protest crushers and fearsome enforcers of state control.6 And sometimes they are described as corrupt, brutish thugs who demand bribes and mete out justice with little regard to national laws or basic human rights.7 Yet at other times, Chinese police are portrayed as incompetent dolts, whose ignorance can be both humorous and alarming.8 Often these reports raise more questions than they answer about China’s frontline agents of state control. Who are the Chinese police?

Starting with basic factual data: the Ministry of Public Security employs approximately two million officers nationwide.9 By global comparison, this is a relatively small per capita force, and those numbers, which are especially low in less populated areas, often cause trouble for enforcement efforts on the ground.10 All police officers within the PSB are part of the Chinese civil service (gong-wuyuan), a distinction that affords officers a higher social status and is sometimes referred to as an “iron rice bowl” for frontline officers, “silver rice bowl” for provincial level officials, and “golden rice bowl” for central police officials. With civil servant status come more desirable benefits than those available to other frontline security forces such as the auxiliary police (xiejing) or urban law enforcement management officers (chengguan). These benefits include higher salaries, pensions, health care, and—for some officers—housing. Official police also carry a badge and can be identified by their police number (jinghao). The vast majority of officers in China do not carry guns unless they are taking part in a special mission that has been authorized by both their station leaders and the relevant city or county officials. Regarding demographics, police officers enter the force as early as age eighteen and retire at sixty; but much like other civil servants in China, older officers begin reducing their workloads around age fifty-five, even though they collect a paycheck until age sixty.11 There is a distinct divide between older officers, many of whom cut their teeth as PLA soldiers in the 1970s and 1980s, and younger officers, who often have little or no military experience.

This generation gap is the result of professionalization reforms that began in the 1990s as a move to improve recruitment standards and attract more-qualified individuals. At that time, the force was mostly stocked with men who had military backgrounds but little formal police training or education. Higher-ups were concerned that a lack of standardization allowed unqualified individuals to don the uniform, leading to problems of corruption, misconduct, and abuse of power (Ma 1997, 119). Article 26 of the 1995 Police Law was the first major step to improve recruitment and set basic qualification standards for incoming officers.12 These new standards have changed the face of frontline police and resulted in a more educated force with less military training. Police leaders have mostly welcomed the changes, but professionalization of the force has come with certain costs. One official from the provincial ministry who was serving as an assistant county station chief at the time of our interview noted that many of the younger officers lack the real-world experience of older generations, much to the chagrin of station leaders.13 “The officers born after 1980 are only children who are used to being served by their parents and grandparents,” he explained. “These workers are more difficult to deal with and often look down on certain types of work. . . . Their lack of experience makes it hard for them to do their jobs.”

Policing in China is also a highly gendered profession. The overall proportion of female officers working in the PSB is at least 10 percent or higher, but the distribution varies dramatically across divisions.14 Patrol work is generally not considered suitable for female officers in the areas where I conducted research. Instead, women tend to work in the stations, answering calls or managing household registration (hukou) duties. Often women working in police stations in smaller cities are young, and many eventually quit their positions once they marry or have children, resulting in a high turnover rate.15 Women in larger cities with a higher cost of living are more likely to continue working and gain some seniority, but they rarely get the opportunity to work outside the office.16 A smat tering of cities in China maintain female horseback patrols. The phenomenon began in 1994 in Dalian, where the city’s program has grown to over sixty-five officers with one hundred horses, and subsequently spread to other cities.17 The patrol forces are not charged with catching criminals, and one ministry official explained that stations like to send female officers out on patrol because police leaders believe women are “better at resolving disputes” than their male counterparts.18 At the provincial level, women make up roughly 30 percent of the force, but they too are more likely to work in internal positions (neibu) and take fewer trips to the field.19

Official police are sometimes confused with other frontline workers who wear similar uniforms or perform overlapping functions. This book focuses solely on official frontline police and their superiors, but it is nevertheless important to outline the differences between police and other frontlines agents, since even seasoned China hands get confused over who is a police officer and who is not. An article in the Atlantic, for example, referred to chengguan officers from the City Urban Administrative Law Enforcement Bureau as “police” and “cops,” despite the fact that the much-hated chengguan are not police.20 While some functions of the chengguan, such as dealing with unlicensed street vendors, may be similar to jobs police elsewhere perform, the chengguan are a distinctly separate security force.21 Xiejing also cause confusion. Xiejing are a class of auxiliary police sometimes referred to as fujing, which can be translated as assistant or supplemental police.22

Xiejing are not official police, even though they work alongside official police and often perform the same functions. One duty for some xiejing is watching dissidents. These are the hired “thugs” who receive media attention for beating, harassing, and detaining activists and their families.23 But most xiejing are involved in more mundane matters. The older men with the words “POLICE” or “警察” (jingcha) emblazoned across poorly constructed uniforms who are sitting or standing on the side of the road at busy intersections urging pedestrians not to cross illegally are usually xiejing, as are many of the men stationed at the small, temporary police sheds erected on the streets of some Chinese cities. Xiejing wear the characteristic light blue shirts and dark slacks that are the uniform of China’s police, but most do not have badges.

Finally, there are the People’s Armed Police, which are no longer official police but instead a paramilitary force composed of somewhere between 660,000 and 1.5 million men and women.24 The PAP is most famous for riot control, but it also protects the borders, national forests, and state-owned gold mines. Teams can travel in detachments of up to five hundred men, although they usually go out in groups from one hundred to two hundred.25 In addition to responding to riots, the PAP also handles terrorist situations and other violent altercations. Depending on the city, a PAP officer explained, they may also be brought in for small demonstrations if the protesters “have a conflict with another group . . . have become violent . . . [or if] local police do not have enough people to manage the problem.” At the time of data collection for this book, the PAP was jointly governed by the Ministry of Public Security and the People’s Liberation Army, but on January 1, 2018, President Xi Jinping brought the PAP ...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Death of Xiao Hu
• 1. Policing China: Demographics, Mission, and Funding
• 2. Uneven Resources and Manpower Concerns
• 3. Limitations of Police Reforms
• 4. Controlling the Local Police
• 5. Politicization and the Boundaries of Authoritarian Resilience
• 6. Poor Policing and State-Society Conflict
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index