April 10, 1996

Crime, Corruption Infest China's Richest City

ERIC ELLIS, Shenzhen

IT HAS been called the Road Warrior City, a place where there is nothing to do but eat, buy sex and do business. Ten years ago it was a sleepy border post to Hong Kong of barely 10,000 people; today it is China's richest city with a population estimated at nearly four million people.

Sound like Capitalist Heaven? Or more like Capitalist Hell? To China's impatient leaders, their booming southern city of Shenzhen is more than heaven; it's the model to launch China's economic supremacy of the world. It is to Shenzhen that China's leaders like to go to exhort the masses on to greater achievement. President Jiang Zemin came twice last year, once with Cuban President Fidel Castro and last week Premier Li Peng and his economically inclined deputy Zhu Rongji were there together.

National People's Congress leader Qiao Shi was also a recent visitor to complete the foursome who most covet the mantle as China's paramount leader from the senile Deng Xiaoping, who kicked off Shenzhen as a "special economic zone" in the early 1980s and visited four years ago to give it another boomtime.

But if Shenzhen is to be the model of 21st century commerce, many might say roll on the Armageddon.

It's a place where the pollution is such it's often difficult to tell if the sun is shining.

Beggars wash in stinking, open drains and possibly the world's most aggressive prostitutes ply the scores of gleaming Mercedes newly in from neighbouring Hong Kong, in whose image it is modelled.

Shenzhen's buildings, factories and sweat shops churning out low-level consumer items, clothes and pirate compact disks often fall or burn down, usually with people in them.

Anywhere else that would a tragedy. In Shenzhen it tends to be seen as another opportunity for developers, or a new job for the thousands of itinerant labourers who arrive daily at the chaotic railway station.

It is in Shenzhen that Mayne Nickless has had a problem keeping standover toll collectors men away from the trucks that unloaded at their cold store.

And Shenzhen's mayor has problems keeping the peace, even from his own front door.

Barely a month after he announced new measures to fight the rampant crime and corruption in his city, his wife and her chauffeur were dragged from their car by two men who had blocked its passage.

When the mayor's wife complained of the rough handling her chauffeur was getting, the two men turned on her, grabbed her by the hair and knocked her head against the front of her car.

Making matters worse was that the two men were ranking officers of the People's Armed Police, the body re-armed up by a paranoid leadership after the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing. Compounding their error in beating up the mayor's wife was the fact that they were assistants to the son of a former Vice-Premier, who fled the scene with his thugs when someone told him who they were roughing up.

"I cannot even protect my wife, so how can I protect the citizens of Shenzhen," asked the mayor Li Zibin in a rare open letter to President Jiang Zemin and senior communist party officials.

Although situated in the heart of Cantonese-speaking Guangdong province, Shenzhen's lingua franca is the national Mandarin Chinese - because it's the only tongue the millions of floating labourers drawn to Shenzhen by the prospect of easy money can understand each other in.

And barely a word of this makes it to China's official press, which prefers to concentrate on Shenzhen's status as China's richest city ($US443 per month per household) with the most spacious living conditions (one room for one person).

Mayor Li says he needs a staggering 6,000 more policemen to cope with the crime problem and that he would happily relinquish the job to anyone who could solve it.

But crime is just one of Shenzhen's legal problems.

Party hardliners in Beijing are concerned at the widening gaps between rich Shenzhen and China's poor but populated hinterland, where most of Shenzhen's new workers have come from illegally.

They are pushing for Shenzhen's special status to be downgraded and proposals are before leaders that would make Shenzhen and the four other SEZs not unlike anywhere else in China.

Although the recent high-profile trips from party leaders are partly designed to allay foreign fears about the SEZs, already Shenzhen has lost some of its allure for foreign investors, with fast-increasing costs, over-mobile labour and chronic infrastructure strains with power and transport.

Foreign investment fell 40 per cent last year and more and more firms are pulling out or scaling back, such as the once-trumpeted Olex Cables operation of Pacific Dunlop.

Another reason is that Shenzhen's wealth has made it arrogant, and sometimes reluctant to do what far-away Beijing says. That hints at Beijing's worst-case scenario - the possible break-up of China, a paranoia on display in its recent belligerence towards Taiwan and Hong Kong.

The view from Shenzhen is not a pretty one and perhaps it's just as well that Deng Xiaoping is, from all reports, laid out on his death bed, barely able to see, hear or comprehend anything.