THE FRUIT seller in Shanghai was so badly beaten he remains almost paralysed. His crime was to illegally stack 10 watermelons on a kerbside in China’s biggest city and the incident has caused outrage in China.
The attack was the latest example of over-the-top reaction by city inspectors, municipal enforcers whose job it is to apply city regulations and codes but who often overstep the rules and attack street vendors and other small businesses.
In January, one of these urban management officials was sacked following an incident in the central province of Hubei, in which a man who tried to film a conflict between local paramilitary police and villagers was beaten to death.
The government, keen to keep a lid on dissent and unrest as economic growth slows, is reacting with some very public displays of its tough line on public corruption.
They have been swift to punish municipal officials over the actions of the enforcers, known as chengguan in Chinese.
Beijing is nervous about protests or challenge to single-party rule, especially with the 60th anniversary of the founding of Communist China looming on October 1st.
A big emphasis has been placed on doing something about graft, particularly among Communist Party cadres, because it is seen as a primary threat to single-party rule in China.
“I cannot remember the people who bribed me with money, but I do remember the ones that didn’t,” was the line Xu Guoyuan, former mayor and vice party chief of Chifeng City in Inner Mongolia. He and his wife concealed more than €200,000 in bribes in a safe deposit box in a Buddhist temple, hiding the key in the ear of a statue of Buddha.
Mr Xu is accused of taking bribes of €3.3 million, which works out to nearly €1,500 a day during his six years at his post.
Two weeks ago, the former chairman of Sinopec, Asia’s largest oil refiner, was given a suspended death sentence by a Beijing court over corruption charges involving 195.73 million yuan (€20.4 million).
The Beijing No 2 Intermediate People’s Court ruled that Chen Tonghai, a former mayor of Ningbo city, accepted bribes during his time at the company in various senior roles from 1999 to 2007.
While stepping up efforts to rein in corruption, the government is still working to stop corruption.
In an escalation of Beijing’s ongoing crackdown on non-governmental organisations, Xu Zhiyong, a legal scholar and organiser of a legal help group that was shut down earlier this month, was taken away by a group of uniformed policemen and plainclothes officers from his residential compound.
Authorities have also been swift to contain ethnic tensions in Xinjiang province, where nearly 200 people died in the worst violence in China since the Tiananmen Square crackdown on democracy demonstrators.
Police in Urumqi, the provincial capital, said they had arrested 253 more suspects in connection with the riot, on top of 1,400 detained earlier.
The police also released a most-wanted list of 15 people it is seeking for their alleged roles in the violence.
The riots in Urumqi left nearly 200 dead, most of them Han Chinese who have moved to the region and whose presence is resented by the ethnic Muslim Uihgurs, who once dominated the province.
The government said it intended to train officials to handle riots and natural disasters after the recent outbreaks of ethnic violence in Xinjiang and Tibet, as well as incidents of unrest over corruption and pollution.
Zhu Lijia, a professor from the Communist Party administrative school that will host the one-week course, said training would “help grass-roots cadres better handle emergencies and avoid lax and worsening management,” the Southern Metropolitan Daily reported.
Security services registered 80,000 “mass incidents”, China’s term for protests involving more than five people, in 2007, the most recent year for which state media have published a figure.