Often China & Japan Related.
A couple weeks ago Chris and I were talking to some Chinese friends about the 城关， cheng2guan1 in China. This is one of those words in Chinese that there is no equivalent for that I know of. According to my Chinese friends a chengguan and Danwei it is an inspector who patrols the city. They are city employees. The only thing I have ever seen them patrol is areas with a lot of street vendors. Usually they are giving vendors a hard time about how far they can be in the street, if they are within the lines which in some cases have been drawn on the sidewalk or if their product is outside of the appropriate area allowed. Our friends asked us if the United States has chengguan and were surprised to find out that the police are in charge of removing people who are selling goods without a permit (like in the subways, parks, etc).
We have had quite a few live viewings of chengguans in action in Nanjing. A few months ago Chris and I were walking through Nanjing Normal’s campus and as we approached the back gate we heard a lot of yelling and screaming. At first I assumed there had been a fender bender and a lot of people had gathered around to watch them hash it out. This is normal. When we got closer I saw a huge dump truck full of 3 wheel bikes and vendor stands. The chengguan had come and confiscated every vendor at the back gate’s property and the vendor’s were not happy. The yelling and screaming went on for a while until finally the truck just drove away. Needless to say, the vendors are rarely at this location any more. A week or two after this incident there were four or five out and Chris and I stopped to by some egg bread. While we were there a chengguan drove by and the vendors fled up back alleys, some literally running and hidings their carts. Chengguans and the city government justify doing this for various reasons - they block traffic, they make the streets too dirty, etc. This is the reason the Mayor of Nanjing gave when closing down the extremely popular night market on 马台街, Matai Road on May 9. We took a walk down the street on May 10 to see if it really happened and there were over 100 police officers and chengguan lining the at least the first 100 yards of the street. They stretched on after that but were thinned out quite a bit. I am not exaggerating on the numbers, it may actually be an underestimate.
Because of this incident, the new property laws and the increasing speculation on if chengguan’s actually have the right to confiscate personal property in China or not, Chris and I were discussing the situation with a friend who is a Master’s Criminal Justice student in China. He told us a few interesting things about the situation. One was that as an undergraduate he had surveyed street vendors and asked what their opinions were of the chengguan. He said he would get one of two reactions from nearly everyone: they would either go off the handle and start yelling about how terrible they are or “their faces would turn white” and they would say nothing because it was too sensitive and even painful for some of them to discuss it. So they wouldn’t say anything at all. You have to remember, confiscating a street vendors fruit cart or bread making cart is basically taking away their only means of feeding themselves and their children.
Aside from this general discussion he also told us this great joke:
When Mao Zedong died and was in heaven, he still wanted to know what was going on in China. After the economic reforms started he would always ask everyone who died and came up how were things going down there. Were the reforms working? What was it like? Were things good or bad?
And the people would always answer, “Really good, but I think that all of the evil people turned into chengguan.”