You can sigh a million times, but until this country reforms its chengguan system, which allows urban management officers to lord over and abuse small business owners and street vendors, videos like this will continue to surface.
On March 9, according to China Daily, a street vendor in Gulangyu, a scenic island off Xiamen, Fujian province, was knocked to the ground and kicked by a pack of chengguan. More law enforcement officers rushed to the scene, some sternly shouting, “Haven’t died before, have you?
Onlookers began to intervene on the vendor’s behalf. “Stop hitting, acting like this is repulsive,” they said, and, “How can you act like bandits? Bandits!”
“Looks like gangsters,” one netizen wrote.
That’s just how it is. “Law enforcement” means something entirely different than upholding the law. It means being the law, like characters from American lore. We’re outraged, maybe, for a day or two, but then we forget and move on as if nothing happened, until the next incident, when we’re reminded anew that the system has always been this fucked.
