Batons, night vision goggles for Beijing's new rural force

For some months now, rural brigades have been roaming the countryside monitoring farmers’ activities, as their urban counterparts do in the cities. Their action has sparked controversy, beginning with their heavy-duty equipment. For some observers, this is a sign that food security is high on the minds of China’s leaders.

Beijing (AsiaNews) – China has set up a new force under the command of the Ministry of Agriculture to monitor activities in the countryside, its members equipped with special tools, like night-vision goggles, signal jammers, stab-proof vests, and stun batons.

Thus fitted out, rural management agents have flexed their muscles and used violence as reported by farmers who had the unfortunate luck of coming into the crosshairs of these bullies.

According to some experts, the actual reason for this new force of control and coercion is the communist regime’s food security policies, aimed at producing by any means rice and wheat at the expense of other crops.

China's Rural Comprehensive Administrative Law Enforcement Brigades (unofficially known as rural management teams or Nongguan) are the rural equivalent of the Urban Administrative and Law Enforcement Bureau (or Chengguan).

Set up in January, they have already sparked controversy and elicited strong criticism, spilling over into the Internet. Some video footage and clips have been shared on social media, with users describing how these "agents" use force and directly interfere in farmers’ affairs.

In April, Chinese Internet users shared viral video clips showing rural management teams’ questionable and intrusive actions; in one, a farmer in Heilongjiang, a province in north-eastern China, is asked to clear corn planted around his fish-farming pond because it was “unsightly”.

In Jian Prefecture, Jiangxi Province, another team is seen catching free-range chickens to prevent them from defecating anywhere. In Jiangsu, a farmer complained that rural management agents forbade him from stringing a rope across two of his trees to hang clothes.

A video purports to show farmers in Yanshi, Henan province, forced to pass a test on basic agricultural skills, such as spraying insecticide.

These videos, many of which were quickly taken down from websites and social media platforms, generated a torrent of comments, with Internet users calling the actions "ridiculous" and overly invasive.

The teams’ equipment also came in for criticism since no one could figure out why the agents need stab-proof vests, night-vision goggles and batons.

The concerns also reflect public fears over the repressive policies enforced by the authorities in the past three years to fight COVID-19.

“The Chinese people have seen how the grass-root units became so powerful during the COVID-19 lockdown. A security guard can decide if you can leave your compound,” said Prof Alfred Wu, associate professor at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore.

Another factor that does not help the image of the new rural management teams is their uniform, which is the same as China’s urban teams.

Faced with increasingly negative attitudes in the population, China’s Ministry of Agriculture weighed in the controversy, spelling out the Dos and Don’ts of the new force.

Under new guidelines, rural teams will no longer be allowed, for example, to uproot tobacco plants as they did in Guangxi, destroy pepper plants that began to bear fruit to plant grain, or replace ginger plants (pictured) with rice.

Nevertheless, as some observers have noted, these measures betray a certain anxiety among Chinese leaders over food security, especially in the wake of the Ukraine war and the wheat crisis.

• china
• rural management teams
• social control
• repression
• intrusiveness
• farmers
• food security
• ukraine war
• wheat
• nongguan
• chengguan