An 18-year-old youth in Beijing recently won 5 million yuan (about $604,000) in a sports lottery.
Known only as ”Mr. Yang,” however, his identity was withheld by the media for fear of exposing him to the capital’s criminal fraternity, ever on the alert for promising kidnap victims.
This is one small sign of changing times and social mores in China, as violent crime soars in answer to late paramount leader Deng Xiaoping’s declaration a decade ago that ”to get rich is glorious.”
This, in turn, is breeding a growing awareness of the need for better personal protection, which is doing wonders for the profit margins of the Shanghai-based Dongwei Body Armor Co.
”Business is better than it’s ever been,” beams a salesman surnamed Chen. ”The rise in sales is definitely connected to the growing public security problem.”
Dongwei’s bullet-proof vests, designed by top Chinese scientists, are claimed to protect the wearer from bullets fired from pistols and even machine guns. Besides, outfitting security guards and policemen, Chen also supplies nervous businessmen who have become more concerned about their own safety.
For 2,000 yuan, the worried executive can buy a little peace of mind in the snappy Execuvest waistcoat, one of Dongwei’s best sellers.
”There are more robberies than ever before, and many famous cases have been reported that heighten public awareness of the dangers of life today,” Chen explains.
Few have been bloodier than the case of 34-year-old gangster Zhang Jun, whose murderous trail climaxed with eight deaths in a bungled bank robbery in Changde, Hunan Province, last year, that resulted in both bank guards and innocent customers being gunned down.
That incident seemed to spawn copycat attacks. Three months after Zhang’s career came to an end with his arrest and subsequent execution, gunmen in the Jiangxi provincial capital of Nanchang killed three people as they robbed a bank of 500,000 yuan.
Meanwhile, in Nanjing, a German business executive, his wife and three children were knifed to death when an attempted burglary of their suburban villa went badly wrong. The would-be robbers turned out to be poor farmers.
In many cases, the killings seemed to occur because the robbers operate on the principle of removing any possible witnesses who might later be able to identify them.
The kidnapping of rich businessmen, or their children, also often end badly, as the kidnapers either panic if there is a delay in obtaining the demanded ransom, or, even if they get the money, decide to kill the victim in a witness elimination policy.
Guo Si, an editor at China Public Security Magazine, described the phenomenon as the end of China’s innocence.
”Society is less safe now, but this is inevitable,” she said. ”Before, when everyone was poor, there was nothing to steal from one another. But, now, the country is more developed and people have grown richer…”
Guo leaves her sentence unfinished, but the meaning is clear enough in the advertisements for crime-busting technology that pack her glossy bimonthly. The dream of a simple egalitarian society has evaporated. The gap between rich and poor grows wider.
According to the Public Security Ministry, 894 police officers were slain in the line of duty between 1949 and 1977 — about 32 a year. The average figure is now over 400 a year, and in both 1998 and 1999, more than 500 policemen were killed.
In the past, when controls on society were much tighter and spies were everywhere, it was almost impossible for an ordinary citizen to do anything without being observed.
Now, there are massive population movements, with millions of impoverished peasants moving to the cities in search of better jobs. It has become harder to monitor them and their activities in the huge, impersonal urban conglomerations.
At the same time, economic reforms are creating a widening gap between rich and poor and creating a temptation for the latter to cut corners to acquire wealth.
There is also a diminishing sense of respect, or fear, of the public security authorities than in the past.
In a typical case, producers of fake Volkswagen components in the city of Yixin, Jiangsu Province, beat off police and assorted antifake investigators with the aid of powerful water hoses. One investigator was knocked black and blue as most of the confiscated fakes were retaken by their makers.
In a similar case in Guangdong Province, street traders beat up police and reclaimed the fake goods the latter had just confiscated from them.
This occurred a few days after the central government had convened a nationally televised conference calling for a concerted effort to fight fakes. The government, it seems, can decree, but it cannot always enforce its will.
Public unease about the growing crime wave is not eased by the lurid diet of real life crime that now dominates the popular end of the published media, which has decided that murder and robbery sells better than turgid Communist Party propaganda.
