China's 'thuggish' chengguan security condemned
Human Rights Watch says security agencies used to augment police exist in disciplinary and supervisory 'black hole'
Unchecked abuses in China's cities by shadowy security officials condemned by many Chinese as arbitrary and thuggish are intensifying social strains and undermining stability, Human Rights Watch has warned.
It says in a report that China's chengguan agencies are an often overlooked yet malign and relatively unsupervised component of China's public security apparatus, and that their actions are often directed at disadvantaged sectors of society.
It says the agencies' influence had grown in recent years, causing resentment at grassroots level.
The chengguan – or urban management law enforcement, units – typically augment police in tackling low-level urban crime. The report says they tend to be poorly supervised and lack a solid legal framework to check and govern their powers, resulting in a reputation for excessive force and impunity.
"The chengguan have become synonymous among some Chinese citizens with arbitrary and thuggish behaviour," the report said, citing interviews with 25 victims of alleged chengguan abuses in six cities.
"They're really sort of this black hole in terms of monitoring, surveillance and discipline," said Phelim Kine, the author of the report.
The chengguan have been called "the epitome of the evils of public power" and derided as lawbreaking "X-Men" by Chinese state media and on microblogging sites.
While the scale of chengguan operations is difficult to gauge accurately, Human Rights Watch says there are at least 6,000 chengguan personnel in Beijing alone, with hundreds of thousands spread across the country's urban centres.
The chengguan have no legal authority to detain suspects, and no regulatory framework exists to lay out the permissible scope of their duties or to investigate complaints and abuses.
Many victims of chengguan activity were migrant street vendors who had been beaten, had their goods confiscated or been illegally detained or evicted, Kine said.
"This is a substrata of the population which is taking, to a large extent, the brunt of the brutalities … They're really at the sharp end of the chengguan spear."
As the Communist party leadership gears up for a leadership transition after the upheavals linked to the dismissal of the Chongqing party boss, Bo Xilai, the abuses of the chengguan have done little to uphold the social stability the party seeks to promote.
In 2011, there were riots in the city of Zengcheng in the southern province of Guangdong, outside the booming provincial capital of Guangzhou, after chengguan personnel manhandled a pregnant migrant street vendor. Migrant workers set fire to police stations and cars in disturbances lasting several days.
"We have been seeing increasingly more violence and increasingly larger scale public protests and public reactions to perceived chengguan malfeasance and malpractice," Kine said.
Human Rights Watch urged China's leaders to crack down on chengguan use of excessive force and to develop mechanisms, including new laws, to prevent abuses and punish perpetrators.
SOURCE: guardian.co.
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