This year began with a notable clash between people and the police in China’s northwestern Shaanxi when protests turned violent.
At issue was the death of a student. New York–based Human Rights In China said that “the family of the deceased student was prohibited from checking their child’s corpse for any traumatic injuries, and were told the school’s surveillance system was damaged after demanding to see security footage.”
It is interesting how cover-ups follow the same formula no matter where they occur.
This was the most widely publicized case of police brutality since 2013, when a street vendor and his wife were victimized.
A “56-year-old farmer named Deng Zhengjie and his wife arrived in the town of Linwu, Hunan Province, in order to sell watermelons they had grown on their farm. Within a few hours, the municipal police approached them and asked them to move to a designated vendor area. The couple complied. But later, according to eyewitnesses, a scuffle broke out between Deng, his wife, and the police. Multiple policemen began beating the couple, eventually leaving them for dead. Deng’s wife survived the attack. Deng did not.”
News of this incident circulated on social media and eventually made it into the foreign press. In fact, bystanders in Red China have often taken the passive role of simply filming police transgressions, maybe shouting at them.
Enforcement
Thus, in late 2022, “A video widely circulating on Weibo—China’s version of Twitter—appeared to show uniformed police stomping and kicking on the head of a street vendor pinned to the ground, with another vendor pleading with them to stop. Local media reports the incident occurred in Suzhou, a city northwest of Shanghai. Many people who were part of the crowd that gathered at the scene documented the incident on their phones. Bystanders appeared to yell at the officers, telling them not to hit the man.”
These were the days of COVID as well, and not so long ago. “Law enforcement in China…frequently resorted to physical violence and public shaming for violating zero-COVID protocols…. This includes spraying people who refuse to wear masks with irritants or beating people who complain about quarantine conditions.”
Municipal police work out of “local public security stations” and report up a chain leading to the central government’s Ministry of Public Security. They are monitored from Beijing. But they are budgeted locally, which leads to variations in pay and conditions.
Beating street vendors and COVID scofflaws falls into the remit of a lower paid tranche of municipal constables called “chengguan.” As the Atlantic put it, “Separate from conventional police forces, the chengguan are responsible for managing more quotidian aspects of urban life, such as regulating street vendors and unlicensed construction sites.” Established in 1997, the chengguan system “appears to operate with little oversight.”
Among the (conventional) police duties are counterintelligence, which can be performed with the same abusive panache dished out by the chengguan.
By then, surveillance was nothing new for the Yang family in rural China, snared in an intricate network based on U.S. technology that spies on them and predicts what they’ll do.
Their train tickets, hotel bookings, purchases, text messages and phone calls are forwarded to the government. Their house is ringed with more than a dozen cameras. They’ve tried to go to Beijing 20 times in the past few years, but masked men show up and grab them, often before they depart. And last year, Yang’s wife and younger daughter were detained and now face trial for disrupting the work of the Chinese state—a crime carrying a sentence of up to a decade in prison.
Yet the Yangs say they are not criminals. They are simply farmers trying to beg Beijing to stop local officials from seizing their 1 1/2 acres of land in China’s eastern Jiangsu province.
In a remarkable 2013 paper entitled “China’s Unhappy Police,” two researchers interviewed local cops and learned about “heavy caseloads, administrative drudgery, and low pay; China’s street-level police are frustrated. Front-line officers from six cities report that discontent encourages shirking, corruption, and waste. Grievances and feelings of powerlessness have not been reduced by recent reforms, and give us cause to rethink the image of police as effective arms of a highly securitized state.”
The study paints a picture of police hanging out in stations avoiding the hassle of patrols, legal constraints, and the risk of disciplinary action.
And yet there still seem to be enough go-getters to make life miserable for the people.
The People’s Police
An attorney recounts his experiences with a drunk driving checkpoint in July 2025:
I believed I had the right to demand that they present documentation authorizing the roadblock and checkpoint. Furthermore, if I were to submit to a breath test, the officers were obliged to identify themselves, salute, cite the specific legal grounds for their actions, and provide a factual basis for suspecting me. The law clearly stipulates that drunk driving checks target only those reasonably suspected of an offense—not every passing driver. Absent these prerequisites, ordering me to blow into the device was an unlawful act—one I had every right to resist.
A lawyer who believes in the law. It’s heartwarming. But this is Red China.
I stood my ground and calmly repeated my requests. This only enraged them further. Seething with anger, they lunged to drag me out of the car by force. I reached for the door lock, but it was too late. In a single violent motion, the two furious officers wrenched the door open. Though my seatbelt briefly held them off, they still managed to pull me out, all the while shouting, “We are the People’s Police!”
Indeed. And the People whose Police they are sit in Beijing. Hats off to the attorney for trying. □
James Roth works for a major defense contractor in Virginia.
Also see:
Asian Survey: “China’s Unhappy Police”
China Change: “Passing Through Luhe Traffic Police Brigade and Songzhuang Police Station—A Nightmare on the Tail of the 10th Anniversary of the 709 Crackdown”
