Word: chengguan
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Dates: during 2009-2009
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...Management Hell It's precisely because the Chinese bureaucracy's idea of an ideal city doesn't include peddlers and street vendors that the chengguan developed into such a powerful institution. One need only look at Beijing during the 2008 Olympics, when most temporary food stalls, pedicabs, illegal taxis and beggars were banished, to get a sense of how China wants its cities to appear. "Some government officials are oblivious to reality, and aim to build a vendorless city as their political achievement," He says...
...side. The decline of China's state-owned enterprises in the 1990s precipitated the breakdown of the danwei system. At the same time the country grew increasingly urbanized, and millions of migrant workers poured into big cities. "The traditional system could no longer manage," Zhou says. "The chengguan were established to handle the problems of the urban environment...
...chengguan ended up with enforcement powers for a broad range of regulations in Chinese cities. Officers were often drawn from the ranks of laid-off workers from state-owned enterprises and given little training in law enforcement, Zhou says. While Chinese police have also been accused of abusing suspects - the government recently ordered police to undergo a five-month retraining program because of an alarming number of high-profile deaths of prisoners in the nation's jails - the violence attributed to the chengguan is seen as more galling because of the pedestrian nature of their responsibilities. Yet they themselves face...
...many cases the chengguan act with impunity, and anyone who tries to intervene does so at great risk. In January 2008, a construction-company manager in the town of Tianmen in the central province of Hubei came upon a group of bureau officers. They were shutting down a small protest against a garbage dump planned for the area. When the construction boss, Wei Wenhua, began filming the clash between the chengguan and protestors, the city-management officers turned on Wei and beat him to death. On the Chinese Internet there were widespread calls for the officers to be harshly punished...
...killers were handed sentences ranging from three to six years in prison. Wei's widow, Zeng Jingfang, calls the verdicts an injustice. And she notes that even after her husband's death, little has changed. "Similar cases of chengguan violence continue to happen," she says. The "deep concern and reflection" only led back to the sanguinary status quo. But as the economic slowdown puts further pressure on the chengguan, China's city-management officers may finally be forced to manage themselves...