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Law and order in China
Chinese cops are overworked, underpaid and miserable
IN THE southern province of Fujian last year, a 43-year-old police officer shot himself in the dormitory of the station where he worked. His suicide note said that he could no longer cope with the pressure of his job. Wang Kun, a 24-year-old rookie in the same province, understands what he went through. “What really gets me,” he says, “are the long hours and lack of sleep. People don’t understand what we do and often think we’re out to get them. The pressure is huge.”
Such stresses are common across China, according to a new study by Suzanne Scoggins and Kevin O’Brien at the University of California, Berkeley. They argue that a policeman’s lot is “filled with uncertainty, hardship and feelings of powerlessness”. The authors conclude that one must “rethink the image” of the much-disliked police in China’s authoritarian state.
Heavy caseloads, administrative drudgery and low pay are constant grievances. “At the paichusuo [local police station] I sometimes go 36 hours without rest,” says a junior officer in Shaanxi province in the west. “My girlfriend wishes I had never become a policeman.” Police are supposed to respond to every request (in party-speak they are the “people’s police”). One who worked in a rural part of Hunan province in the south says he has looked for stray cows in the middle of the night and helped people who had forgotten their online passwords.
As cops move up the pecking order, their gripes change. A supervisor in Hunan grumbles about interference by political appointees. “We know what needs to be changed but [the leaders] don’t listen. They have no experience.” An officer in Shaanxi complains that colleagues over 50 find it hard to get training. “We old guys get left behind.” Another officer in Hebei, a province surrounding Beijing, recounts police lore about the old days when citizens were more in awe of the law. “In the 1980s,” he says, “one officer could catch ten bad guys by walking into a restaurant and yelling ‘Stop!’ These days it takes ten of us to catch a single criminal.”
Low morale has consequences. Like disgruntled workers everywhere, China’s police goof off. Patrol cars filled with somnolent officers are a common sight. Many police are also corrupt. Few respondents in the survey were willing to talk about this. But one detective described some of the gifts he took, only for his wife to protest: “His colleagues accepted far more! We wouldn’t have been so poor… if he had been truly corrupt.”
China’s public-security services are not among the world’s more transparent organisations. The researchers nevertheless managed to study them through long interviews with 31 serving or newly retired police. This is a tiny sample but the method enabled the researchers to drill down into the officers’ daily lives. Their conclusions are consistent with research by Chinese academics. A study last year in the Journal of Shandong Police College found that 16% of officers in the province showed signs of depression or other mental-health problems.
China’s domestic security services are vast. There are 2m policemen and women and their esprit de corps matters. They are still capable of suppressing political dissent when the party orders them to. But the party also needs day-to-day maintenance of law and order. An aggrieved, overburdened police force does not seem the best way of ensuring this. Unhappy police make for an unhappy police state.
adj. 侦探的
n. 侦探
