The following is a translation of an editorial first published on April 23 in Southern Weekly.  The original can be found here.

Civil rights should not be stopped by the obsessive need to keep the streets clean
By  Xiao Shu
 
 
Violence committed by urban management officers [城管] is nothing new.  There has been a public outcry about this for years, which has been rekindled due to the recent surfacing of an official training manual titled “The Practice of Enforcement of Urban Management.” [城管执法操作实务]  One part of the manual was devoted to not losing a handle of the situation when “using violence to quell violence.”  It said that urban management officers should not allow blood to be seen on the face; there should be no visible injuries to the body; and there should be no witnesses.  It also stressed that the situation should be brought to an end once and for all through a rapid series of actions, leaving nothing unfinished.  Once this course of action has been taken, it must be done cleanly, without hesitation and using the full amount of force.

Words like this leave people dumbstruck, but it is not necessarily fair to leave this inhumane and mad behavior completely on the shoulders of the officers.  We have to recognize that those enforcing city code often do so in an extremely hazardous environment.  Requiring them to act as merciful bystanders smacks of hypocrisy.  It takes away any power of persuasion they might have.  Are they not people too?  Does their safety not deserve to be protected?
 
To put them into a potentially violent situation without the ability to use force will turn urban management into a seemingly endless circle of violence on the streets. The problem is not whether their behavior is inhumane or mad but why this happens.  This partially describes the reason for having “The Practice of Enforcement of Urban Management.”  Why are there so many people involved in enforcement of city codes? The answer in the manual says: “Since there is no complete social safety net in place, some people rely on illegal business to make a living.” This is to say that urban patrols are cognizant that they face resistance and many of those who do resist are driven to do so for their survival.
 
Bread comes first, so whatever need for law and order stops before the need to remain alive. A certain level of disorder and an unkempt environment can be tolerated in the name of survival.  This is a necessary compromise to support the subsistence of the poor and it is a cost that must be borne by urban society.
 
This is not a problem of enforcement of city codes.  Rather it is a problem with urban policy makers.  As long as you have rapid urbanization without space made for rural and urban poor who are left to fend for themselves, you are going to have repeated violence wherever there is code enforcement in order to maintain a pristine city landscape.  And wherever this notion occurs, you’re going to have urban policy makers with a strange obsession with keeping the streets clean [管制洁癖].

Instead of saying low income families are being driven away by these officers, it is more accurate to say they are being driven away by an overzealous need for clean streets.  Those who enforce the rules are merely props, but this kind of cleanliness is deadly.  It pits the tolerance of the city against the right of survival of low income earners, and in the end creates violence on the street.  This is resistance for the sake of survival, so any impulsive or aggressive actions are to be expected.  In this sense it is both the officers and the lowest level of society that suffer.  It is the obsession with clean streets that forces them both to suffer the brunt of the harm.
 
What is most worth keeping watch on is this deadly excessiveness, which does not exist solely on the physical level of social control.  The recent cases of Wang Shuai in Lingbao City, Henan and Wu Baoquan of Inner Mongolia show this.  Public statements by two netizens have stated that the local governments’ were perhaps unfair, accusing them of slander and putting them in prison.  This is not just using urban management officers to protect on the physical level; it is also direct use a despotic machine as a psychological safeguard.  This kind of obsessive control has already reached an extreme state.
 
In the final analysis this excessive control has its roots in the inability of some officials to accept the situation.  The stability we really need is stability through changes and development. Just as the undersecretary-general of the CPPCC Sun Huaishan said recently, normal societies always have contradictions and conflicts.  Social harmony can not be faked or forced, but rather it is realized through the normal expression of interested parties and legal maneuvering during times of change.  However, some who are tasked with maintaining order are overly sensitive and won’t brook even a sign of a disturbance.  In a situation without proper checks and balances, their own psychological state can been equated with the government’s, frequently using official power to protect their personal feelings. It only serves to cause conflict between the government and people and increase the cost of governance.
 
This is undoubtedly a sickness.  How to keep this sickness in check has already become an important item on the agenda of our society.