36 China The EconomistSeptember 5th 2020
F
or a businessthat flouts the law in a police state, Mrs Hu’s pan-
cake cart is not hard to find. A tiny, unlicensed kitchen on
wheels, her pushcart appears each night between 11pm and dawn
on a road junction in central Beijing, between a centuries-old tem-
ple and a bus station. Neither summer heat nor snow deters Mrs
Hu. Only rain keeps her at home, because it clears the streets of
customers. On a recent night, diners munching her egg and onion
pancakes, perched outdoors on low plastic stools, ranged from
young hipsters to a bus driver still in her uniform.
It is not the romance of the night that inspires Mrs Hu’s hours.
Working by day would increase the risks of trouble from the cheng-
guan—poorly paid, widely disliked city-management officers who
enforce local regulations in urban areas. In Beijing the rules are
ever-less tolerant of street food, deemed unhygienic and unwor-
thy of a capital city. There has been one positive change: less than
five years ago chengguan were often violent, grabbing stallholders’
goods and demanding money. Now chengguan shoo vendors away
but do not hit them. Mrs Hu ascribes their improved manners to a
government campaign for “civilised law-enforcement”.
A migrant from central China, she remains an outsider with
few rights although she has lived in Beijing for 24 years. She and
her husband once worked legally from a rented market stall. Then
two markets in a row were demolished in the name of modernity,
forcing the couple onto night-time streets with separate pancake
carts. Worldly wise, the pair stayed calm when the prime minister,
Li Keqiang, suggested this summer that encouraging street traders
might boost a covid-battered economy. Food carts may be wel-
comed by smaller cities but not in Beijing, says Mrs Hu. Indeed, the
capital is currently closing markets and sweeping away vegetable-
sellers from its streets. So she and her husband survive by keeping
their heads down and working hard. Like many, they live on the
margins of society, navigating an authoritarian system that wields
its powers more selectively than outsiders may suppose.
There is nothing kindly about that security machine, which
crushes all hints of political, religious or ethnic dissent or open
challenges to the Communist Party. The machine is bent on abol-
ishing privacy, with surveillance cameras on every corner and cen-
sors and algorithms scouring the online world for forbidden ideas.Yetwhenpublic-securityagencies encounter non-political rule-
breakers or even protesters, they can be unexpectedly willing to
turn a blind eye or make concessions to offenders.
Such haggling is common at the lowest levels of law-enforce-
ment, where the chengguan work. As luck would have it, a remark-
able documentary about these para-police has just secured a limit-
ed release in Chinese cinemas. “City Dream”, directed by Chen
Weijun, follows chengguan from the central (and, since then, vi-
rus-hit) city of Wuhan, as they match wits with Wang Tiancheng, a
70-year-old street trader with a genius for staging the sorts of noisy
protests that win the sympathy of a watching crowd, while humili-
ating officers sent to demolish his sprawling, unlawful street stall.
Cities created chengguan in the late 1990s to tackle non-crimi-
nal forms of disorder, after the dismantling of the planned econ-
omy left urbanites less dependent on the state and triggered a wave
of rural migration into cities. The documentary begins in 2014,
shortly after Wuhan announced a revolution in city management
as part of a development drive. At the time chengguan had a grim
reputation across China, following a number of deaths caused by
officers as well as fatal attacks on them as they were carrying out
raids to demolish homes or clear informal markets.
High-ups in the city-management bureau loathe “Old Wang”, as
everyone calls him. “Close the gates! Old Wang is on his way!” they
yelp, as the former farmer heads to the chengguan offices, barrel-
chested, shirtless and demanding to see the boss. Sure that he
makes more money than he lets on, officials send patrolmen to spy
on his fruit sales (an undercover officer returns in tears, after Old
Wang grabs his notebook). A senior chengguan declares that the
street trader, who moved to Wuhan 14 years earlier from the central
province of Henan, should be renting a clean, respectable shop.
“That’s the real life of a city dweller,” the officer sniffs. In contrast,
street-level chengguan are grudgingly impressed by Old Wang’s
flair for drama. During several raids on his stall, the trader tells
gawking onlookers about his disabled son and cancer-stricken
wife. He slaps a chengguan, tears up legal notices, accuses officers
of taking bribes to leave his competitors alone, threatens to com-
mit suicide and—in an astonishing moment—appeals to his tor-
mentors as fellow outcasts at the bottom of society. “Where is your
conscience?” Old Wang asks chengguan who have penned him
within a square formed of their riot shields. “A second ago you
were just like me. A man with no job.” None can meet his gaze.The power of the powerless
At one point Old Wang’s son compares his father to a hen, frantical-
ly trying to protect chicks from an eagle. It is a revealing image. In
the end Old Wang loses, for he is thrashing around in the grip of a
much stronger beast. But he gains a concession, too: the city’s help
to stay and work in Wuhan for three more years, until his grand-
daughter, a good student, finishes secondary school. The price is
apologising in writing for his earlier defiance. Later a chengguan is
rebuked by a superior for suggesting that the Wang family are sin-
cerely grateful. Their emotions are not of interest, snaps the offi-
cial: “What we want is their obedience to our management.”
This brilliant film explains a seeming puzzle: the hard men
who run China are capable of both brutality and pragmatism. The
key is their obsession with social stability. To buy peace, China’s
autocrats tolerate and even reward some forms of disobedience, so
long as the game ends with displays of deference to their authority.
Their goal, though, is the maintenance of power. Like an eagle ad-
justing its grip, the party is not guided by mercy. 7Chaguan Keeping a grip
What a lowly, unpopular law-enforcement agency reveals about China’s version of dictatorship