Steven Mace
05-13-2002, 05:43 AM
Chinese load up on guns for profit and protection
Boom in homemade arms reflects distrust of police
By Frank Langfitt
Sun Foreign Staff
Originally published May 11, 2002
LOWER YUAN FAMILY VILLAGE, China - When a feud between villagers here and a neighboring community turned violent, people didn't turn to police for help but took matters into their own hands.
The villagers made guns.
Police, after all, are distrusted because of their tendency toward corruption, and local officials can be all too easily influenced by personal connections. Better, the villagers decided, to protect themselves. Pooling together $5,000 and working from their homes, farmers here manufactured about 40 shotguns and more than 100 hand grenades.
As word of the private arsenal spread, the rival villagers backed off.
Officials here in central China's Jiangxi province seized the cache of weapons last spring and jailed the ringleaders. Villagers say officials confiscated the guns not only because they were illegal but because authorities worried the weapons might one day be aimed at the government. There had already been arguments over taxes. Would authorities be the next target?
"They were afraid we would turn against them," said Yuan Shenggen, a 75-year-old farmer and former soldier in the People's Liberation Army.
Gun ownership is virtually banned in China, but the country is awash in firearms. Last year, police seized 1.34 million guns and cracked more than 100,000 criminal cases involving guns and explosives, according to China's state-run press.
Scholars say firearms are helping drive the nation's violent crime rate, which is low by U.S. standards but rising. Between 1995 and 2000, reported robberies nearly doubled. Although the government does not provide comprehensive statistics on legal gun production, the number of firearms in society has soared in the past decade.
"Since the early 1990s, it has become a big, big problem," said He Jiahong, a law professor at People's University in Beijing who estimates firearms may have increased tenfold. "Today, we really don't know how many guns are in the hands of people."
Hundreds of villages make guns for profit and protection. Some weapons are smuggled from Hong Kong, Vietnam and Myanmar; others are made by rogue military factories, stolen from police or sold by security forces on the black market.
Zhang Jun, China's most infamous bank robber, was blamed for killing more than 20 people before he was executed last year. His arsenal of weapons included at least 13 shotguns obtained from a military doctor who bought them from a military factory in Hunan province.
Government control of armories is notoriously lax and the nation's police famously careless in their work. Last year, China's Public Security Bureau issued a directive reminding officers not to drink while armed.
Officials might have had Yang Zaisheng in mind. Yang, a policeman in southwest China's Guizhou province, collapsed in a drunken stupor one evening in a karaoke bar in 1999. When he awoke on a couch the next day, his pistol was gone.
In some of the country's poorer regions, such as Guizhou, homemade guns have proven a lucrative cottage industry. Industrious villagers can make copies of People's Liberation Army pistols for as little as $5 each and sell them for nearly $100 to neighboring counties and provinces. In the mid-1990s, police confiscated 8,772 guns - including six submachine guns and 18 cannons - from farmers in Guizhou's Songtao County.
What farmers don't sell, they sometimes use against each other.
Thirty-three people died and 210 were injured in gun battles in Songtao between 1992 and 1997, according to Southern Weekend, China's most aggressive newspaper. In neighboring Hunan province, villages used three homemade cannons in a 1996 battle that left four dead and 20 injured.
The lawlessness of some villages does not fit with the image the Communist Party projects overseas, but it is in line with the country's chaotic reality.
Under Mao Tse-tung, the party ran a totalitarian state sealed off from most of the world. After more than two decades of market reforms, the government has lost most of its control over daily life.
The party has responded to rising crime with crackdowns known as "Strike Hard," campaigns in which authorities arrest thousands of suspected criminals and courts swiftly sentence hundreds to death. Critics say such efforts exhaust local law enforcement officers and ignore deeper causes of crime, including economic dislocation, lack of faith in government and police corruption.
China passed its first comprehensive gun law in 1996, setting stiff penalties for offenses such as the illegal manufacturing of firearms. But enforcement hasn't been easy. Local officials often tolerate gun manufacturing because of the money it produces for poor economies.
"Generally speaking, the local officials will close at least one eye, so long as you don't make trouble there," said He, the Beijing law professor.
Yuan is a two-hour drive from Nanchang, the capital of Jiangxi province. The village lies along a rutted dirt road that crosses flooded wheat fields filled with grazing water buffalo and muddy haystacks. About 1,000 people live in the village, a carefully built grid of gray brick homes with matching tile roofs and attached pigsties.
Farmers grow sugar cane, cabbage, spinach and potatoes. Almost everyone is named Yuan. A family of six earns $480 to $600 a year.
Villagers say they made guns for protection against the rival Du family village, about four miles away. The feud began in 1996 when a Yuan villager crashed his bicycle into a Du villager and then beat him up.
Du villagers demanded $1,200 in compensation. Yuan villagers refused to pay more than hospital expenses.
Du villagers responded by ambushing Yuan farmers when they visited the market in nearby Small Harbor Township. When a Yuan girl traveled to the Du village to marry a boy there, Du villagers attacked her entourage.
"Ever since then, we realized we should develop some guns to protect our basic interests," said a Yuan villager, who did not give his name. "We would not even dare go to town."
Yuan farmers bought three shotguns on the black market, used them as models for manufacturing others and began building the arsenal. Villagers contributed various skills.
Jiangxi is famous for its firecracker industry. Yuan Deliu, an elderly farmer who made firecrackers in his house, manufactured more than 100 hand grenades to throw at Du villagers in case of attack. Two of the grenades exploded in 1997, killing Deliu in his home workshop.
Quality control was a problem. The barrels of some weapons were made with steel pipe, and many guns had a range of only 150 feet. So, just in case, villagers went out and bought two more shotguns, three high-powered rifles and 400 rounds of ammunition.
The farmers stored the weapons in the village's ancestral temple, a two-story, gray-brick building with a red tile roof that flares up at the edges like a ship's prow. Villagers spread word that they were heavily armed.
Beatings at the hands of Du villagers stopped.
Last year, a Yuan farmer with a grudge against village officials informed police about the weapons cache, and the township government seized the guns. Three Yuan officials who had supervised the manufacturing were sentenced to prison terms ranging from four to six years.
Yuan villagers insist they had no choice but to arm themselves. Like many rural Chinese, they have little faith in police to resolve disputes fairly. They note the pervasive influence of personal connections in Chinese culture and the predilection of police for corruption.
"Everyone has some relationship with the police station," said Zhao Shengshu, who teaches Chinese and math in the village's elementary school.
"There are no officials in my family," added Huang Caizi, whose husband, "Tiger Cub" Yuan, is serving four years for his role in making guns. "If we had one, my husband wouldn't be in jail."
Surrounding communities were relieved when police disarmed the Yuan village. Farmers in nearby Seven House village had engaged Yuan villagers in mud fights over a disputed path. When they learned their opponents had guns, they, too, had retreated in fear.
The Yuan village's ability to fund and construct guns is, in some ways, a sign of China's increased prosperity and openness. Before market reforms allowed farmers to grow and sell what they wanted, peasants here were too poor and too busy to make weapons.
http://www.sunspot.net/news/custom/guns/bal-te.guns11may11.story
Steve Mace
Boom in homemade arms reflects distrust of police
By Frank Langfitt
Sun Foreign Staff
Originally published May 11, 2002
LOWER YUAN FAMILY VILLAGE, China - When a feud between villagers here and a neighboring community turned violent, people didn't turn to police for help but took matters into their own hands.
The villagers made guns.
Police, after all, are distrusted because of their tendency toward corruption, and local officials can be all too easily influenced by personal connections. Better, the villagers decided, to protect themselves. Pooling together $5,000 and working from their homes, farmers here manufactured about 40 shotguns and more than 100 hand grenades.
As word of the private arsenal spread, the rival villagers backed off.
Officials here in central China's Jiangxi province seized the cache of weapons last spring and jailed the ringleaders. Villagers say officials confiscated the guns not only because they were illegal but because authorities worried the weapons might one day be aimed at the government. There had already been arguments over taxes. Would authorities be the next target?
"They were afraid we would turn against them," said Yuan Shenggen, a 75-year-old farmer and former soldier in the People's Liberation Army.
Gun ownership is virtually banned in China, but the country is awash in firearms. Last year, police seized 1.34 million guns and cracked more than 100,000 criminal cases involving guns and explosives, according to China's state-run press.
Scholars say firearms are helping drive the nation's violent crime rate, which is low by U.S. standards but rising. Between 1995 and 2000, reported robberies nearly doubled. Although the government does not provide comprehensive statistics on legal gun production, the number of firearms in society has soared in the past decade.
"Since the early 1990s, it has become a big, big problem," said He Jiahong, a law professor at People's University in Beijing who estimates firearms may have increased tenfold. "Today, we really don't know how many guns are in the hands of people."
Hundreds of villages make guns for profit and protection. Some weapons are smuggled from Hong Kong, Vietnam and Myanmar; others are made by rogue military factories, stolen from police or sold by security forces on the black market.
Zhang Jun, China's most infamous bank robber, was blamed for killing more than 20 people before he was executed last year. His arsenal of weapons included at least 13 shotguns obtained from a military doctor who bought them from a military factory in Hunan province.
Government control of armories is notoriously lax and the nation's police famously careless in their work. Last year, China's Public Security Bureau issued a directive reminding officers not to drink while armed.
Officials might have had Yang Zaisheng in mind. Yang, a policeman in southwest China's Guizhou province, collapsed in a drunken stupor one evening in a karaoke bar in 1999. When he awoke on a couch the next day, his pistol was gone.
In some of the country's poorer regions, such as Guizhou, homemade guns have proven a lucrative cottage industry. Industrious villagers can make copies of People's Liberation Army pistols for as little as $5 each and sell them for nearly $100 to neighboring counties and provinces. In the mid-1990s, police confiscated 8,772 guns - including six submachine guns and 18 cannons - from farmers in Guizhou's Songtao County.
What farmers don't sell, they sometimes use against each other.
Thirty-three people died and 210 were injured in gun battles in Songtao between 1992 and 1997, according to Southern Weekend, China's most aggressive newspaper. In neighboring Hunan province, villages used three homemade cannons in a 1996 battle that left four dead and 20 injured.
The lawlessness of some villages does not fit with the image the Communist Party projects overseas, but it is in line with the country's chaotic reality.
Under Mao Tse-tung, the party ran a totalitarian state sealed off from most of the world. After more than two decades of market reforms, the government has lost most of its control over daily life.
The party has responded to rising crime with crackdowns known as "Strike Hard," campaigns in which authorities arrest thousands of suspected criminals and courts swiftly sentence hundreds to death. Critics say such efforts exhaust local law enforcement officers and ignore deeper causes of crime, including economic dislocation, lack of faith in government and police corruption.
China passed its first comprehensive gun law in 1996, setting stiff penalties for offenses such as the illegal manufacturing of firearms. But enforcement hasn't been easy. Local officials often tolerate gun manufacturing because of the money it produces for poor economies.
"Generally speaking, the local officials will close at least one eye, so long as you don't make trouble there," said He, the Beijing law professor.
Yuan is a two-hour drive from Nanchang, the capital of Jiangxi province. The village lies along a rutted dirt road that crosses flooded wheat fields filled with grazing water buffalo and muddy haystacks. About 1,000 people live in the village, a carefully built grid of gray brick homes with matching tile roofs and attached pigsties.
Farmers grow sugar cane, cabbage, spinach and potatoes. Almost everyone is named Yuan. A family of six earns $480 to $600 a year.
Villagers say they made guns for protection against the rival Du family village, about four miles away. The feud began in 1996 when a Yuan villager crashed his bicycle into a Du villager and then beat him up.
Du villagers demanded $1,200 in compensation. Yuan villagers refused to pay more than hospital expenses.
Du villagers responded by ambushing Yuan farmers when they visited the market in nearby Small Harbor Township. When a Yuan girl traveled to the Du village to marry a boy there, Du villagers attacked her entourage.
"Ever since then, we realized we should develop some guns to protect our basic interests," said a Yuan villager, who did not give his name. "We would not even dare go to town."
Yuan farmers bought three shotguns on the black market, used them as models for manufacturing others and began building the arsenal. Villagers contributed various skills.
Jiangxi is famous for its firecracker industry. Yuan Deliu, an elderly farmer who made firecrackers in his house, manufactured more than 100 hand grenades to throw at Du villagers in case of attack. Two of the grenades exploded in 1997, killing Deliu in his home workshop.
Quality control was a problem. The barrels of some weapons were made with steel pipe, and many guns had a range of only 150 feet. So, just in case, villagers went out and bought two more shotguns, three high-powered rifles and 400 rounds of ammunition.
The farmers stored the weapons in the village's ancestral temple, a two-story, gray-brick building with a red tile roof that flares up at the edges like a ship's prow. Villagers spread word that they were heavily armed.
Beatings at the hands of Du villagers stopped.
Last year, a Yuan farmer with a grudge against village officials informed police about the weapons cache, and the township government seized the guns. Three Yuan officials who had supervised the manufacturing were sentenced to prison terms ranging from four to six years.
Yuan villagers insist they had no choice but to arm themselves. Like many rural Chinese, they have little faith in police to resolve disputes fairly. They note the pervasive influence of personal connections in Chinese culture and the predilection of police for corruption.
"Everyone has some relationship with the police station," said Zhao Shengshu, who teaches Chinese and math in the village's elementary school.
"There are no officials in my family," added Huang Caizi, whose husband, "Tiger Cub" Yuan, is serving four years for his role in making guns. "If we had one, my husband wouldn't be in jail."
Surrounding communities were relieved when police disarmed the Yuan village. Farmers in nearby Seven House village had engaged Yuan villagers in mud fights over a disputed path. When they learned their opponents had guns, they, too, had retreated in fear.
The Yuan village's ability to fund and construct guns is, in some ways, a sign of China's increased prosperity and openness. Before market reforms allowed farmers to grow and sell what they wanted, peasants here were too poor and too busy to make weapons.
http://www.sunspot.net/news/custom/guns/bal-te.guns11may11.story
Steve Mace