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Shanghai tops nation in sense of security
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WHEN Lillian Sun was out for her late-night jog recently in Changning District at around 10:30pm, she saw six security guards on bicycles patrolling the street, two policemen riding motorcycles and two police cars within 40 minutes.
“I am not worried at all running alone late at night,” says the 30-year-old woman. “Because every time I go home around 11pm, I see at least several patrol cars.”
In fact, Shanghai ranks as the safest city in China, according to a survey jointly conducted by Insight China, a Party-run magazine in Beijing, and Tsinghua University, which ranked areas based on what residents said about their own sense of security.
It used a “Chinese safety index” of five major categories: social security, health safety, production safety, economy safety and psychological security. No definitions were provided for these terms.
Beijing was ranked second-safest in the survey of cities and provinces, followed by Hong Kong, Macau, Jiangsu Province, Zhejiang Province, Tianjin, Taiwan, Shandong Province and Hainan Province.
Six years ago, Sun left her hometown of Shenyang, capital city of Liaoning Province, for Shanghai. She’s never looked back.
“Shanghai is so much better than Shenyang,” she says, recalling that as a student, if she was cycling after school among hidden corners or in the dark, she feared encounters with unsavory people.
“I am not saying this happens a lot, but I’m sure it’s not rare,” she says. “Just a few days ago, my friend met a man with exhibitionism.”
Her mother back home never wears jewelry on the street or goes out late at night, she says.
For 33-year-old Luc D’Agostino, who runs a café in Shanghai, the city feels safer than Paris. Three years ago, he came to Shanghai and lives near Shanghai Circus World in Zhabei District.
“In Paris, when you go out at night you have to be a little worried, especially in some neighborhoods where hooligans or drunkards gather. But you have no such worries in Shanghai,” he says.
He also observes the city has more surveillance cameras in public areas than Paris.
According to the survey, Hangzhou ranks at the top when it comes to an index based on the ratio of police to citizens and the number of surveillance cameras in public and residential areas. Hangzhou’s safety index was 83.2, a step ahead of Shanghai at 82.7. Beijing was third (82.3), followed by Laiwu in Shandong Province (80.7), Xiamen (79.7) in Fujian Province, Chongqing (78.5), Guangzhou (77.7) in Guangdong Province, Nanjing (75.4) in Jiangsu Province and Tianjin (72.3).
However, for D’Agostino and most other people, food safety trumps street security as the major concern in China.
“I don’t think China has the stringent food-inspection standards as Western countries do,” he says.
That belief isn’t limited to foreigners. The survey shows that food safety is the biggest concern of Chinese — 77.8 percent of those polled said it was a serious issue. When asked another way, 59.6 percent of people insisted they couldn’t rest assured that their food was safe.
The most recent of many food scandals occurred in Shanghai, when a local TV station revealed that Shanghai Husi Food Co, a unit of US-based OSI Group LLC, used long-expired meat and falsified production dates.
Police in the city have detained six Shanghai Husi executives.
“This is not the worst case. With some food companies in small cities, you don’t even know what is going on,” says sociologist Yu Hai of Fudan University. “Though food-safety incidents have been reduced in recent years, scandals never stop emerging. It’s like a chronic disease of Chinese society that will take a long time to get cured.”
The requirements for opening a food company or restaurant in China are too lax, Yu says. The growth and profits of food companies directly affects the tax and fiscal income of the local government, so some governments just turn a blind eye to lawless behavior.
“Also, the punishment in China is so light that many people will take the risk. Meanwhile, if the company is fined a great sum of money and goes bankrupt, a lot workers will be unemployed,” Yu says, adding that the workers are likely to create social unrest or protest to the government.
This is another reason some governments don’t crack down too hard, Yu says.
Other problems that make Chinese people feel insecure include environmental pollution, named by 54.4 percent of people in the study; the gap between the rich and poor, at 30.3 percent; the uncertainty of quality health care (29.6 percent) and the leaking of information about personal wealth (29.1 percent).
Within a city
In terms of the most insecure places in a city, train station tops the list, followed by entertainment venues, rural-urban fringe area and bus station.
“The result is no surprise since many recent incidents of bus fires and railway station attacks have caused negative influence on people,” says Wang Hongwei, associate professor in public administration at Renmin University of China.
Crimes committed at train stations have increased since 2013, according to Beijing Procuratorate of Railway Transportation. In 2013, there were 101 cases, compared with 72 cases in 2011 and 65 in 2012.
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