China: Who are the chengguan?

UPDATE: more on the Wei Wenhua story here, including reaction from Chinese netizens.  

Several thousand people gathered outside the municipal government buildings in Tianmen city, in the central Chinese province of Hubei Wednesday, RFA’s Mandarin service reports. They were demanding redress for the beating to death by an urban management official (城管 – chengguan) of a construction company executive after he recorded a street-side fracas with his mobile phone. The story has had a lot of attention in domestic Chinese media. Xinhua said 24 people had been detained and were being questioned in connection with the incident.

An eyewitness surnamed Zhang told reporter Yan Xiu: “There were a lot of people there today. Several thousand, I’d say. A lot of them were just watching to see what would happen, or just followed along with the rest of the crowd.”

Several beatings-to-death have been reported across China by the chengguan in recent months. So who are they?

Chengguan (城管), is an abbreviation for Chinese City Management Administration and Implementation of Law (城市管理行政执法局. It is a new government agency that has been established in every city in the People’s Republic of China. These “Urban Management” officials are responsible for cracking down on unlicensed migrant workers. In general the Chengguan serve as an official agency employed by cities across China “to tackle low-level crime.”^[1] However, the agency is widely disliked by the Chinese due to their alleged abuses of power.

— Wikipedia

Often manned by demobbed People’s Liberation Army soldiers, the chengguan are self-financing, according to Yao Lifa, a vocal democracy activist and former local people’s congress deputy who posted an open letter to the local district people’s government condemning the government’s handling of the Taishi recall campaign:

“The use of unnecessary brute force by urban management officials to oppress people is a fact of life across China. The beating to death of an innocent citizen…is truly unthinkable,” Yao told RFA in a recent panel discussion.

“A lot of chengguan are demobilised soldiers. That’s one factor. Another factor is that they are all very well-connected. Some of them in military circles and some of them in non-military circles. They don’t get their salaries from the municipal budget. They are self-financing through fines and so on. That is their source of income”

“The other question–says Yao–about the chengguan is who they are really working for. Are they really working for the city, for the people, to manage the urban environment, to preserve the good image of the city? I don’t think so. They are really working for the local Chinese Communist Party officials. Whenever there is a big meeting, or a major police conference going on, the chengguan will be extremely busy. Their job is to keep the streets clear of beggars and hawkers.”

“Whenever government officials want to go anywhere, they enlist the help of the regular police, the traffic police and the chengguan. The problem is that out of all these three kinds of law enforcement officials, the chengguan have the lowest status and the lowest pay. They feel the difference, and so they take it out on ordinary people.”

Yao was commenting on the Tianmen city incident, but there were many more reported last year in China. The case, for example, of Yin Xiaoyun, who died after getting into an argument with a female chengguan officer, who called the police. From Cantonese service reporter Fung Yat-yiu:

Yin Xiaoyun was a hawker from Wantouqiao township, near Shaoyang city in Hunan province. She went to the market in Wugang city to sell fruit. She paid a fee of 49 yuan to the chengguan to set up her stall. Later the same day, a female chengguan asked her for a further 10 yuan for ‘blocking the road’. They got into an argument and the female chengguan attacked Yin, who refused to get involved. Then the chengguan called the police, who took Yin to the local police station and locked her up in manacles. That evening, the police informed Yin’s family that she had committed suicide outside the police station. Yin’s grown children went to enquire at the police station and were told her body had already been sent to the hospital morgue. When they saw it, it was covered in blood and battered, leading the family to suspect Yin had been beaten to death in the police station. The family were offered 180,000 yuan in compensation by the city government, but they insisted on pursuing the case and those responsible.

“They cleared everyone back about 100 meters [from the hospital], then they took the body away,” an eyewitness surnamed Zhang said. He said the body was taken straight to the municipal crematorium, where it was burned right away, without the consent of the family.

An officer on duty at the Yingchunting police station denied any beating had taken place.

And in Yibing city, Sichuan province, the death of a hawker after a beating by the chengguan sparked a “mass incident”.

Zhu Yipin, who has run for local People’s Congress elections in the city, said a lot of people had spoken to him about the incident.

“I heard that it started when the mayor of Caiba township told the police and the municipal management people to go and threaten the hawkers, and later he told them to go and beat them. They did this, and they killed this person. The local people were very upset, of course, and told him so to his face. This sparked a mass incident.”

The local government responded with a total media ban on reporting the incident, to which more than 400 police were reportedly sent.

“Did you see this on the Internet? There are errors in these reports,” a local government official said.

“The man did die, but he died suddenly of a heart attack. We didn’t ‘seal off the area’. We were preserving social calm, because there were some people there who wanted to make trouble. They had blocked the entrance to the police station and were preventing the situation from being resolved normally.”

Asked about the media ban: “What was there to report, if they had misunderstood the situation? The media just came here looking for a story. But from a legal point of view you have to grasp the real reason why he died.”

An eyewitness to the beating said:

“There was a journalist at the scene. When I took him to video the scene, the guy was still alive. They were still trying to save him. The journalist captured all this on his video camera. Then his equipment was snatched away by the police as soon as they saw him filming.”

The eyewitness said the hawker’s death was caused by the beating he received at the hands of police and municipal management officers.

Video: Crowds gather in the central Chinese city of Zhengzhou June 6, 2007, in protest at the beating of a student by the chengguan. They are calling “Come out!” to local officials. Supplied to RFA’s Cantonese service by an eyewitness.