Chaoyang Masses Continue Surveillance With Increasing Numbers

Red armband-wearing grannies will continue to stare at you in your neighborhood as new year-end statistics show the already mammoth volunteer organization the Chaoyang Masses continues to grow in size.

The neighborhood watch has now grown to 140,000 members, doubling their numbers from half a year ago. Although their numbers don't amount to a single percentage in Beijing's most populous district, there are so many members of the Chaoyang Masses that they can fill every square kilometer in Chaoyang with 300 volunteers, up from 277 last year.

Their large numbers are reflected in the 20,000 tips they report to police on a monthly average. However, despite this wealth of information, only 8,300 out of the annual hundreds of thousands of tips are deemed to be valuable, leading to 370 cases solved, 250 people detained, and 390 "hidden dangers" eliminated last year.

With expats openly touting the city as "extremely safe," the allocation of so many resources for such a small return may seem inappropriate. And yet, volunteer security personnel have only continued to increase in numbers throughout Beijing, making up four percent of the total population last year after a six percent increase.

Last year also saw the introduction of the Chaoyang Masses app where anyone can become eligible for a cash reward by reporting their neighbors, such as when one Beijing resident won RMB 3,000 for reporting in a "suspected foreign terrorist" who actually wasn't a terrorist at all.

But there's no stopping the Chaoyang Masses, dubbed the "world's fifth information gathering organization" (the others being the CIA, KGB, MI6, and MOSSAD) by proud netizens. The popularization of the group's cartoon meme (shown above) puts it on the fast track to reaching success like that of Luo Baobei (shown below), a cartoon once used as part of the "Civilized Chaoyang" promotion that was just recently signed as part of a multi-year IP licensing deal worth millions of yuan.

Will the Chaoyang Masses continue to get more massive? Which will run out first: public security volunteers, or red armbands? Who knows, but we may yet see a time when in a Kafkaesque Russian-doll layering of roles, public security volunteers are assigned to watch other public security volunteers.

Images: Baidu Tieba (tieba.baidu.com), Headline (toutiao.chinaso.com), NetEase (163.com)

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