I’ve decided I’m going to blog more about crime in China. When I talk about my crime novels to groups of people in Beijing or back in England, I often get asked, ‘Do you feel safe if you’re out on your own at night in Beijing?’ and of course the answer, by and large, is yes. Not only yes, but safer than I’d feel in the city centre of most British towns on my own late at night. But there is crime here, plenty of it, and although it may be different from British or American crime and although it’s not much reported, it’s just as interesting, and very revealing about all manner of social and political issues.
Just to pluck a crime pretty much at random. This is a story picked up by the South China Morning Post on December 1st:
Boss Illegally Imprisons Employee
A man was illegally imprisoned by his employer for eight days in Baoding, but city police refused to help and told his wife to seek help from their home country police, Hinews.cn reports. A Baoding police station chief said they had seen the man in the employer’s home but did not rescue him because they thought it was just a dispute. The employer threatened to torture the woman’s husband if she did not pay him.
It’s that phrase ‘it was just a dispute’, which is interesting to me. It reminds me of the day that our neighbour was besieged in his house for several hours by a gang of builders. He had hired them to renovate his house, and then fired them when he was dissatisfied with their work, but the builders said they were owed cash, and effectively kept him hostage in his own home, bashing on his gate with an iron bar, yelling, and throwing trash into his garden. The police arrived…. and did nothing. When I asked the officers why they weren’t taking action to disperse the angry crowd, they replied: ‘because it’s an economic dispute, and it’s not our job to intervene in an economic dispute.’ The fact that the gang was keeping our neighbour inside his house against his will seemed to be irrelevant, just as it did in the Baoding case. Presumably, if the employer had carried out his threat to torture the woman’s husband, it might then have become a police matter. But by then, of course, it would be too late. Does anyone know whether this police reluctance to get involved in economic disputes has any basis in law? And if it does, then who IS supposed to police economic disputes when they turn into hostage-taking? Because from what I hear, economic disputes do have a tendency to turn into kidnappings…