A thief, me, and the PSB (Public Security Bureau)

I can’t prove this of course, but grant me the benefit of long experience with organisational behaviour in China.

By this time I was beginning to smell a large rat. My superficial wounds were bleeding again, my sprained ankles were beginning to hurt, and I wanted to go home and take care of my injuries (no offer of medical help in this police station, folks).

But there is a report to write they say: and I must remain until it is completed.

So I told them I would write my own report, adding that the translator would do a better job if he translated from the written rather than the spoken word. My reasoning was that a signed, written report would be regarded as an official document. There would be less room for “interpretation” of its content. This was one thing that I could control.

So I wrote my report, signed my name in English and in Chinese characters, and for good measure added an official red-ink thumb-print to the document.

Then they asked for personal information about me and my wife.

That’s when I got angry:

“Why is this police station, this room containing multiple uniformed and plain-clothed police, plus an interpreter and the station’s officer-in-charge, wasting time with me when you should be using all these available resources to search the riverbank and environs for a criminal. A thief - who by now has had more than enough time to make his getaway because of this absurd procedure here in this room”.

I told them that I would go with them now, right now, and show them where the crime took place, in which direction the criminal had escaped, and that surely that would be a more productive effort than detaining and investigating the background of a bleeding, foot-sore foreigner who was the victim, not the perpetrator, of a crime in their own backyard!

Silence.

“Their own backyard.”

I had unwittingly hit the nail on the head.