Nearly 1,000 outraged Chinese besieged a group of urban management officials in an eastern city on Saturday, smashing their vehicle with bricks and windows, beating them bloody and unconscious, and then flipping over the ambulance that came to provide medical treatment.
It was a dramatic and violent reversal to the usual order of events when notorious urban officials, called chengguan in Chinese, get into conflicts with street vendors and pedestrians. Though their official job is to enforce local street ordinances, chengguan have gained a reputation for their arbitrary brutality across China over the years.
On April 19, a group of chengguan in Cangnan county, part of Wenzhou City in Zhejiang Province, were seen to be bullying a street vendor. A passerby, 36 year-old Mr. Huang, began taking pictures of the encounter with his cell phone. One of the officials told him to delete the pictures. He refused. A flurry of abuse, kicks, and punches followed.
The crowd saw Mr. Huang being attacked, and decided to intervene. Online rumours then rapidly proliferated that "someone was beaten to death by chengguan," which intensified public anger and drove more people to the scene, according to the Chinese newspaper Southern Metropolis Daily.
"Such tragedies have happened again and again in recent years," said Duan Xingyan, a user of Weibo who identified himself as a police officer. "The root reason is the severe lack of rule of law in our society." |