Following an outbreak of unrest in China’s south-west, the ruling Communist party has been at pains to show that it is taking no chances.
The party secretary in Tibet has called on security forces to step up surveillance measures, while authorities in neighbouring Xinjiang said last week they would hire 8,000 more police officers for the restive north-western territory.
The announcements came after police shot dead at least two Tibetan protesters in Sichuan province last week. Despite sustained crackdowns in both regions, unrest in Tibet, as well as Xinjiang, has repeatedly caught security forces by surprise. In addition, the party is preparing for a leadership succession later this year, a once-a-decade event for which it puts the whole country on alert.
But difficulties with security are by no means limited to China’s restive western fringes, or the current sensitive period. The latest steps expose much broader problems that have left the authorities struggling to properly police the country.
Despite a steep ramp-up in spending on internal security, riot control forces remain stretched thin, and structural problems continue to plague the security apparatus.
“Official rates of crime and social unrest have risen much faster than the size of the public security forces over the past three decades,” says Murray Scot Tanner, a China analyst at CNA, a research company in Virginia.
Following China’s adoption of market reforms, its police force grew only slowly from 680,000 officers in 1978 to 863,000 in 2003, according to Kam Wong, an expert on the Chinese police at Xavier University in Cincinnati.
Over the past ten years, the numbers have jumped. Since last year, state media have put the total number of police officers at around 2m. That puts the country’s police force at 150 officers per 100,000 people – just half the world average according to a 2005 UN survey.
In addition, the party leadership has pushed for a more proactive approach to security. Both Hu Jintao, China’s president and party chief, and Zhou Yongkang, the party’s top security official, called for “innovative social management” in major speeches last year, demanding security staff and local officials look to pre-empt conflict through more active early-stage mediation at the community level and stronger grassroots intelligence gathering.
“Every attempt is to deploy police staffing and decision-making to the frontline,” says Mr Wong.
But China’s police force remains crippled by huge regional disparities and institutional weaknesses.
“There is a tremendous gap in the number of public security police per capita and the per capita law enforcement budgets of China’s largest cities and richest provinces and its poorer, interior provinces,” says Mr Tanner. In 2008, Shanghai spent twice as much per capita on law enforcement than Xinjiang, he adds.
Tibet and Xinjiang are believed to have strong deployments of People’s Armed Police, a highly mobile force directly under central government orders, which is in charge of riot control and border protection.
The 700,000-strong PAP force is deployed all over the country but is stretched thin over the huge territories of Tibet and Xinjiang.
“The number of hotspots [in the recent Tibetan protests in Sichuan province] are increasing, and some of them are unexpected,” says Robert Barnett, director of the modern Tibet studies program at Columbia University.
“You can assume that there wouldn’t have been any troops, not even PAP, involved in Drango because there wouldn’t have been any on the ground. There are now, but not [then],” says Mr Barnett with reference to the location of the first Tibetan protest last week.
That leaves local authorities with much more responsibility to handle emergency situations that exceed their capabilities. “To shoot, and shoot to kill, is really an extraordinary thing,” says Mr Barnett. “It looks like they have different rules of engagement on the ground in Sichuan and Qinghai.”
China’s internal security forces have another crippling weakness: Official police under the Ministry of Public Security are complemented by often much larger numbers of other security staff.
This includes the shady state security force mostly in charge of surveillance of political dissidents, the chengguan, or “city management” brigades responsible for keeping streets clean and orderly, who have become notorious for beating up small traders.
“A huge portion of the security work is now being done by units that are not formally government employees, and probably have little or no legal training,” says Mr Tanner.
