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Authorities in southern China say they will be sending local officials and volunteers to intervene in people’s marital troubles and to mediate disputes between neighbors in the wake of this week’s fatal car attack that had left at least 35 people dead.
Monday night’s fatal car ramming in the grounds of a sports stadium in Zhuhai by a 62-year-old man surnamed Fan who was reportedly angered over a divorce settlement.
“We must thoroughly and meticulously investigate and resolve various conflicts and disputes, including within marriage and families and between neighbors, as well as legal, land, consumer finance and property disputes,” Guangdong provincial Communist Party chief Huang Kunming told a meeting convened following urgent orders to deal with the case from President Xi Jinping, according to reports on the provincial government’s website.
The incident appears to have sparked a fresh round of security measures, amid growing concerns in Beijing over the political fallout from a growing number of “social revenge” attacks by disgruntled members of the public.
Huang said local officials, who have at their disposal an army of paid “grid workers,” local militias and unpaid volunteers, must “make the work of security and stability maintenance their top priority.”
That means identifying people with potential grievances before they reach breaking point, and working to ensure they can’t harm others, either through talking them into compliance with “ideological work,” helping them to resolve disputes with others, or suppressing them through preemptive surveillance.
Managing daily lives
Neighborhood committees in China have long been tasked with monitoring the activities of ordinary people in a certain area, but the recently expanded “grid management system” allows the ruling party to manage the daily lives of ordinary people even more closely. It also gives indicators of possible dissent at an early stage.
Officials and departments should “work together to make Guangdong even safer, so that people can live and work in peace and contentment amid an overall situation of safety and stability,” Huang told officials in an emergency Nov. 11 meeting.
Zhuhai party chief Guo Yonghang told a separate meeting that local officials should “strengthen prevention and control of risks at source,” and start getting deeply involved in marital, family and neighbor disputes, as well as stand-offs and protests over land appropriation, financial and investment schemes and property.
They should use emergency services, grid management teams and “other forces” to prevent extreme actions, Guo said.
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A Zhuhai resident who gave only the surname Guo for fear of reprisals said the mass investigation of local disputes had already begun in residential compounds, shopping malls and in the parking lots of government agencies.
She said security measures have been stepped up, including placing barriers in certain locations to prevent vehicles from driving into government or public spaces.
“There were issues with prevention at the stadium,” Guo said. “Why were there no obstacles in place between the road and the stadium? The safety measures just weren’t in place.”
A Zhuhai resident who gave only the surname Li for fear of reprisals said local officials are also calling on local people to stay vigilant in the wake of the attack.
“This is pretty common in China,” he said of such warnings.
‘Four No’s' and ‘Five Losses’
The new security drive will target people categorized as the “Four No’s” and the “Five Losses,” according to details posted to WeChat in recent days.
The Four No’s refer to “no spouse, no children, no job or stable income and no assets,” while the Five Losses refer to people who have experienced “failed investments, frustration with life, relationship conflicts, mental health issues or severe mental illness.”
Zheng Kai, a Shenzhen resident who just returned from a visit to Zhuhai, said he has seen these categories spreading among groups on WeChat.
“I sent it to our local state security police officer, and he didn’t deny it,” Zheng said, but appeared to think the target of the campaign was overly broad.
“Pretty much everyone except primary and secondary school students falls into one of the Four No’s or the Five Losses,” Zheng said. “In today’s China, even the members of the Central Committee have bad relationships.”
In Beijing, the Ministry of Public Security has started pumping out propaganda about the benefits of mass surveillance and interventions by concerned citizens.
In China, this is known as the “Fengqiao Experience,” a reference to the mass mobilization of citizens to police people on the basis of “class struggle” during the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution.
Political commentator Hu Ping said the Nov. 13 meeting in Beijing was likely called as a way to show compliance with Xi Jinping’s orders, who called on officials to seek out the root causes of the attack and prevent such incidents from happening again.
“The basic idea is that if they bring social pressure to bear in a timely manner, they could avoid such extreme incidents,” Hu said. “But extreme actions like that aren’t preventable when they happen.”
“But this campaign will lead to a strengthening of social controls,” he said, adding that he wasn’t sure if it would be effective. “Actually, things like that can be more likely to happen in a tightly controlled society.”
Not genuinely concerned
Current affairs commentator Wang Jian said the Ministry is only concerned with maintaining stability, not with offering genuine dispute resolution or justice to disgruntled people.
“Ultimately, no one is safe, because you never know what could happen,” he said.
U.S.-based rights lawyer Wu Shaoping said the use of citizen volunteers to try to prevent such violence ignored the fact that much of the pressure people are under is the result of current government policies.
“Actually, the so-called Fengqiao Experience [of mass intervention] is one of the things that drives conflicts and disputes between people today,” Wu said. “It’s all about informing on people, and using a kind of dictatorship of the masses to deal with social problems, which leads to the distortion of social values.”
“When people’s psychology is distorted in that way, then even more are likely to be driven to retaliate,” he said.
Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.