The Siege

27th June 2007

Well, I was wondering what to blog….and then, this being China, an incident occurred quite literally on my doorstep. It took place on Friday, and it was a siege that lasted six hours until the authorities realized it was about to escalate into a diplomatic incident, at which point, everyone left to have dinner. I should explain that we live in a walled compound, or what in some countries is called a gated community, and that some of the buildings are occupied by embassies and diplomats.

This is what I wrote on Friday:

As I write, there are about 30 people gathered outside my house. Not because of anything to do with me – although several of the men involved are taking a rest on our garden wall – but because of a dispute between a neighbour and the builders who renovated his house. I don’t know much about the dispute. But we hear of such confrontations, big and small, occurring all over China, and what is interesting about what’s happening outside my front door is this insight into how such rows are – or are not – resolved in China.

These people – 20 builders, 4 representatives of the compound’s management office, and 3 police officers – have been gathered there since late this morning. A while ago some of the construction workers started bashing on my neighbour’s gates with hammers, yelling at him to come out.

I went out to find out what was going on, and to point out that there was no way my neighbour was going to come out to negotiate with twenty people waiting for him, some armed with hammers, and that perhaps the thing to do was to discuss the issue one on one. The two police officers were arguing the same thing. They seemed to be bending over backwards to avoid confrontation. I didn’t see them attempt to disarm the man with the hammers, although they did try to calm him down.  

A few of us stood in a circle and discussed the problem. A furious woman from the renovation company insisted that there was no other way to get money she said was owed to her. There was talk of lawyers, but the angry woman said they were no use. The police officer shook his head and said the police had no power to intervene in economic disputes.

‘But this isn’t an economic dispute any more,’ someone pointed out. It was true. It was surely a crime to hold a man hostage inside his house, and the police officer looked uncomfortable. Still he had clearly been ordered not to escalate potentially violent situations, but rather to try to persuade protesters of the error of their ways.

‘Look, if we do anything, we’ll have to protect the man inside there,’ the police officer said to the angry woman, ‘so you’ll be worse off than before.’

I said that my children were going to come home from school soon, and it wasn’t acceptable to have demonstrators armed with hammers blocking the street outside our house.

‘Well, you can’t do anything about it,’ said the angry woman.

‘What about the police?’ I asked the police officer.

‘They can’t control us,’ the angry woman said dismissively, ‘we’re going to stay until we get our money.’

‘Is it true that you can’t control them?’ I asked the police officer.

‘Well,’ he said sheepishly, ‘we’ll do our best.’

We seemed to have reached an impasse. The police officers retreated to their car, lit up cigarettes, talked on their mobile phones and fiddled with video cameras that they pointed half-heartedly in the direction of the construction workers. Eventually a second police car arrived. The angry woman took to her mobile phone. The managers of the compound where we live took to their mobile phones. The construction workers picked up bottles of water from a crate their boss had thoughtfully provided and sat back down on the kerb. After a while, one of the feistier of them started lobbing the empty bottles and lunch boxes over my neighbour’s gate, and the man with the hammers started bashing on my neighbour’s gate again…