Good Cop, Grace Cop.
Drums outside of a Rest Area Gas Station.
We were on our way to a fairly remote Chinese village in Western Hunan province. I’ll write more about that tomorrow, but here’s an anecdote from the bus ride:
Our bus was stopped by a “routine” checkpoint on the Chinese equivalent of an Interstate Highway. Upon inspection, the police decided that our driver didn’t have the proper qualifications and that we were going to have to stop at the adjacent rest area. Rest areas in China are privately-owned and would be more like our equivalent of an “exit”—although (like ours) the Chinese rest areas don’t have access to a cross road.
In a rest area, you can expect to find a gas station, a restaurant or two (far from the gas station), and a small market as well as some restrooms that are well-kept by Chinese standards. I may be a bit cynical about this, but it seems that this particular rest area might have been in collusion with the police running the checkpoint. The police were funneling a LOT of buses into the rest area, which had been practically empty. The restaurant, however, had plenty of food available, even though they wouldn’t have had any customers if the police hadn’t been channeling buses into what amounted to a very large parking lot for one restaurant/market.
So it turns out that our driver DID have the proper qualifications, but the police refused to acknowledge it. They were saying that his license for driving a large tour bus didn’t qualify him for driving the small bus that we were using that particular day for our small group. (Our bus still held about 20 people comfortably.) A long debate ensued that we didn’t hear—actually, I don’t even know where they went. Eventually, they came back to the rest area and our group’s leader purchased a carton on cigarettes, but I don’t think these never changed hands.
Grace (When she's not shouting at corrupt police...)
So I’m chatting with some members of our group and my friend Grace says, “Thomas, come with me.” and walks toward the place where the four police cars were grouped together and the officers were talking with our group’s leaders. When we got there, I found myself watching a very heated argument between several members of our group and a bunch of cops that were in various levels of engagement with the argument: these levels ranged from passively watching to angry shouting matches with my friend Grace. It seems that Grace wanted me there to add pressure to their side of the argument. I was the only foreigner in the group and several people (including Grace) would mention or point at me occasionally. The conversation was way too fast for me to follow, but everyone in my group was calling their strongest contacts in order to put pressure on the police to let us leave. Grace thrust her telephone into the hand of the most aggressive cop and made him talk to (who I later found out was) the police chief of Changsha city.
I was trying to help by doing things like walking around the police cars, looking pointedly at the license plates, then writing in my little notebook (I was really writing notes for this essay). I tried my best to look angry, but I found the whole situation fascinating—and was especially interested in the police “leader” that was arguing with Grace. Will this policemen respond to my eye contact? (He actively wouldn’t make eye contact with me.) Will Grace’s friend be able to pressure this guy into letting us leave? (Not directly, but he seemed shaken.) Were Grace and our group leader consciously playing a game of “good cop, bad cop” AGAINST the actual cops?!? (It was really difficult not to smile at the irony.)
These guys were surprised by how fast the situation got heated up, which put them into a position where they had been “called” on their bullshit. The policemen were looking for a way to save face and to let us go. They got their wish when a second driver from our tour company arrived and drove our bus (with our more experienced driver as a passenger) for the rest of the distance we had to travel on the highway. In all, our trip was delayed for about three hours—but we got a nice little meal and an interesting experience to counterbalance our lost time.
Bonus Link: (I just read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.)
Tags: China, good cop bad cop, police, rest area