Just Following Orders

“At the end of the day,” Eric, a member of Yangzhong, China’s police team says slowly, “my job is to just follow orders.” Maneuvering around the question, Eric chose not to give explicit answers when asked about the morality of his team barring workers striking for their stolen wages.

Eric Yang, 35, is an ex-member of Yangzhong, Jiangsu Province’s PD’s special forces team. While there is no direct American-equivalent for Eric’s role (te qin), the main focus of their forces’ tasks is to maintain peace and stability. Still distinct from the general police force, who maintains order by finding and arresting criminals, his role is best thought of as a civilian peacekeeping position. One main way this is achieved is through stopping large-scale civilian riots and demonstrations. Eric and his team are experienced with and have all received training with common riot control gear such as helmets, shields, batons, vehicles, and in rarer cases, chemical (such as tear gas and pepper spray) and armed weaponry. “Sometimes the higher-ups or other parts of our patrol team would spot something, and we would be asked to shut down whatever was going on.”

“Most of the time,” however, “we’re pretty free,” Eric admits. Working in a small town, riots don’t occur very often, possibly a few times a year at most. In fact, Yangzhong, known for their seafood such as crawdaddies and pufferfish, is actually an island-town embedded in the middle of the Yangtze River. Hence, “whenever we’re not called out to perform special operations, we just drive around in our patrol cars and make sure everything is going well,” the other main objective of his special forces team.

Yet although Eric’s job may appear positive at first, complications begin to arise when taking in the surrounding content of present-day China. In recent years, the People’s Republic of China, and specifically the government behind it, has faced increasing criticism for its authoritarian nature; what China may deem as a protest necessary to shut down may “for maintaining public order,” Eric says, are, for others, speech and protest protected by the First Amendment. “When we’re called out to duty,” he says–almost too calmly–“most of the time we’re asked to stop demonstrations.” Specifically, around 80% of protests are demonstrations, as measured in statistics and told from his personal experience. But these demonstrations aren’t the violent riots led by belligerent citizens clambering for the downfall of the CCP, as the historical collapse of the Soviet Union or other authoritarian countries would make you believe, nor angry revolutionaries running through the streets, inciting unrest amongst the population and raising support for their cause as studied in the American Revolution. Instead, employees cheated out of their wage “during the final days before returning to their families,” he says, a province, two provinces away. Families whom they hadn’t seen for months while working away from home for those wages to feed their children. “We’d bust the strike and try to get them to calm down.”

Such scenarios have become a common occurrence for Eric–“it’s something that occurs multiple times a year,” he states. But when taking into account China’s past history with workers’ rights (and more specifically, the lack thereof), the prominence of these situations begins to make more sense. While undeniable progress is being made, many problems still appear in the system, especially within the construction industry. One commonly employed by CEOs of construction companies is multi-layered subcontracting, thus obscuring accountability when projects are completed. Statistics show that the construction sector accounts for a tremendous 99% of wage disputes in China, which an enormous half of construction workers have faced at some point. This problem extends to immigrants, a majority from Southeast Asia, with 25% of migrants reporting being underpaid. All these problems are compounded by an inefficient enforcement and legal regulation system. These problems haven’t been new–in fact, they were extensively, extensively documented by trusted Eastern media sources, but unfortunately failed to grab the attention of a majority of the Western population, both European and American.

Furthermore, according to Eric, withheld wages and their corresponding demonstrations occur “especially frequently before important holidays in China.” Examples include Chinese New Year, the National Holiday, and the Mid-Autumn Festival, all inadvertently amplified by  the culture of the Chinese work calendar and wage contracts. “The employers always try to run or escape paying before the holidays because they know if they can withhold pages until New Year, they’ll run away with a lot more and will have trouble being caught,” he says. Starting with the former, although workers and students often receive differing times off for Lunar New Year, it typically varies between the range of one week to over a month. This is the biggest time in the year where production amongst workers halts to a standstill and almost all forms of work are dropped (summer does not count because work in most industries continues throughout that entire season). 

As such, making the wage process easier and wanting to send workers off to their homes with some extra money before the holidays, Chinese employees lump a sum of pay, alongside end-year bonuses, to give to the workers before Lunar New Year–a practice not uncommon with Westerners, who usually receive a sum of money between Christmas or the Western New Year. This problem is exacerbated by the culturally-accepted practice of wage-delays. Bosses state that the company is falling behind on production and promise to make it up to their workers–at the latest, before Lunar New Year–and doing a rugpull on the final days leading up to the holiday, amounting to much more than a month’s worth of wages in the process.

Such problems aren’t resolved even with the justice system’s aid. Courts operate in a heavily reduced capacity in the weeks around Chinese New Year, and shady wage contracts are often used and linked in a way that makes it hard to track down the kingpin of such rugpull operations.

The blame can’t be fully placed on Eric. In spite of the questionable practices his team undergoes, not all of their actions come from a place of malice. Peace is still a priority. In their free time, they drive around in their patrol cars and do mundane safety-keeping activities, such as making sure old ladies or young children are safe and stepping in if necessary. And the team is prepared if any serious scenario arises. “I rarely get involved,” Eric adds, with his tone conveying that he preferred it that way. A more relaxed position was why many chose to be in the special forces in the first place.

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Yet what might have felt like a personal choice in career–an admirable one, at that–is perhaps indicative of a deeper, systematic issue within Chinese society. 

While China has shown exceptional growth in countless fields in the past decades, the country still suffers from overpopulation. One eminent instance of this issue can be seen in China’s education system. Only by scoring in the upper 50th percentile across high school entrance exams (the 中考--literally “middle exam”) are students even allowed to enroll in a formal, academic high school. Another cohort out of those lucky enough to attend high school are again barred from continuing on and receiving a formal education in China’s notoriously competitive college entrance exams: the 高考 (similarly, literally the “high exam”). 

Although not delving deep into his personal history, Eric stated that he joined the army at seventeen. It’s implied that, due to some reason or the other, he hadn’t had the opportunity to attend college. The army was “the way out,” and it would later serve as his pipeline for joining the special forces team. Societal issues combined with obligations to fulfill force people to take undesirable occupations. For Eric, this may very well be the case. 

This notion isn’t new to China. In the US, there have been concerns raised over the general police force over their abuse of power. Many people point to the fact that because the occupation offers control and power over others, it ends up attracting the wrong crowd: bullies, those who couldn’t find a job anywhere else, and other ill-fit people fill the positions of police rather than those devoted to justice. 

***

Throughout history, authoritarian regimes have depended on ordinary individuals—police officers, soldiers, and special units—to enforce the will of the state, often under the guise of preserving stability. Nazi Germany lacked the capacity to round up eleven million Jews and other targeted groups without the systematic machinery of the Schutzstaffel (SS). The Soviet Union relied on the Narodnyy Komissariat Vnutrennikh Del (NKVD) and, later, the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti (KGB) to maintain an iron grip on its people. During the Armenian genocide, the Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa functioned as an extension of Ottoman authority, carrying out state-sanctioned atrocities under the banner of “national security.” In each case, immense repression and violence were made possible not by faceless abstractions, but by the actions of individuals convinced—or compelled—that they were serving order.

Of course, Eric’s role is not directly comparable to these histories of systematic violence. Yet examining them helps clarify the mechanisms of authoritarianism and the way ordinary men and women become its enforcers. His task, like theirs, was framed as one of obedience and service: to “maintain peace.” But unlike ensuring that protestors received the wages they were owed, or following up on their well-being once the demonstration ended, this peace was defined by the interests of the state, not the needs of the people. What appears as neutrality—simply following orders—thus risks reinforcing a system where justice is secondary to control.

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And perhaps this is what makes Eric’s predicament so precarious. I have no qualms in my mind that Eric has no malicious intentions. But a question must be raised, especially after taking into account that the CCP are the ones who call the shots: when an occupation is meant to maintain peace amongst those who were wronged, should the apathetic, the ones who secured the job for the sake of having a job, be the hands behind enforcing society’s justice?