[Zhang Fei]

I think a fair number of people at FR are predisposed to believe that China is a police state like North Korea, and don't realize that it is a police state, but not like North Korea. This is why China has a fast-growing economy despite an authoritarian government - the lack of a suffocating and extremely-manpower intensive and expensive North Korean-style police state. If you've been fomenting rebellion or even spreading negative views about the government or personalities in the government, the security services will land on you like a ton of bricks.

Otherwise, the security presence - at the street level - in China is extremely non-obtrusive. Which is why street crime rates - burglaries, snatch thefts, robberies at knifepoint - are extremely high, by New York City standards. A dozen people I know have had motor vehicles stolen from them in the past several years, or been the victims of home break-ins. Cops in China are both rare and worthless at controlling street crime.

[wrench]

Cops in China are both rare and worthless at controlling street crime....................................................................................

China doesn’t have a monopoly on this, just look at Chicago today.

[compound w]

I constantly watch my wallet here (and in Shanghai as well). The police did come to our apartment one day to check our status. They were polite but serious.

One thing that I know will be provocative, but I may as well say it. After visiting Shanghai, this thought occured to me: If Ayn Rand woke up one day in the Bund or Pudong, if she could walk around and see the enterprise about her, she’d probably ask something like, “when were the Communists defeated?” Then we could tell her the more complicated story.

[ApplegateRanch]

Cops in China are both rare and worthless at controlling street crime.

Maybe sombody should just explain to them that damgaing or destroying government property is the most heinous of all heinous crimes (true from the perspective of ANY government); and that the people the criminals prey upon are the ultimate in government property.

For that matter, also explain that the criminals are a defective, malfunctioning part of "The China Machine" which must be repaired or replaced.

[Happy Rain]

China is too big and overpopulated to be policed efficiently at the street level without a a general faith-based morality carried in the hearts and minds of the people.
A faith-based morality that the socialist athiest ChiComs have been deleting for,as of 2008,sixty years.
(The Peking Olympics and the 60th Anniversary of the destruction of Democracy in China at the same time—one almost chokes on the macabre symbolism)
Thus the ChiCom jack-booted thugs concentrate on taking as many “political prisoners” to the Gulags as they can and to heck with controling the common miscreant.
And as all who know even a little about evil totalitarian regimes—such arrests are done quietly and out of public view.
“Nacht und Nebel” is a police state specialty and the ChiCom SS have been doing it for—well, sixty years.