Undercover 'Chengguan' Boss to Subordinates: You're Fired!

Sneaky surveillance of idle junior city management officers triggers exasperation, dismissals.

By Wang Lianzhang

In a mass firing that would have made former reality TV star Donald Trump proud, a senior city management officer dismissed 11 subordinates on the spot for being worthless layabouts.

According to a Friday report by Chinese Business View, a newspaper based in Xi’an, capital of northwestern China’s Shaanxi province, the director of a chengguan bureau in the city of Weinan turned up on the streets undercover only to discover that his team was doing little more than milling about and shooting the breeze.

Chengguan across the country are tasked with low-level law enforcement, including clearing the streets of hawkers, and as such are widely despised in China. The employees implicated in this latest incident were all chengguan xieguanyuan — junior-level or assistant chengguan who don’t hold permanent positions and don’t have actual law enforcement powers.

Dismissing a “real” chengguan is more difficult, according to one Shanghai-based chengguan surnamed Zhan who spoke to Sixth Tone.

Chengguan in some parts of the country have been taking steps — such as live-streaming their rounds — to improve their reputations and foster better communication with the communities they serve.

But when chengguan boss Tong Binzhou showed up unannounced and unrecognized on March 16, he discovered the group standing around, chatting. After watching them in disbelief for 10 minutes, Tong took photos as evidence of their sloth. Tong called his employees’ behavior “aggravating” and posted photos of the work-averse chengguan to messaging app WeChat.

The dismissed employees expressed dismay at their boss’s swift action. One employee, who was not named in the report, questioned the assumption that she and her comrades were engaged in idle banter. Instead, she claimed, they were in the middle of a heated discussion about construction work taking place nearby.

The junior chengguan explained that while she and her cohorts were being observed, there were street vendors occupying public space on the road. After some negotiation, she said, the hawkers agreed to move. 

“After we persuaded them, some of the hawkers began to pack up their stalls,” said another junior officer. “So we were just standing there.”

For his part, Tong the boss seems not to be entirely heartless: He said that any of the dismissed workers who accepted responsibility for their slacking-off, and who loved their work as chengguan “ardently,” could have their positions reinstated.

Several of the censured employees are already back on the streets, according to Chinese Business View. Others, who maintain they did nothing wrong, have refused the offer.

Editor: Colum Murphy.

(Header image: A city management official, or ‘chengguan,’ dons his cap before starting his shift in the streets of Shanghai, May 13, 2013. Liu Xingzhe for Sixth Tone)

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