Editors --- "Postcard from China" [2000] AUFPPlatypus 2; (2000) 66 Platypus: Journal of the Australian Federal Police, Article 2

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Postcard from China

Brian Iselin is the AFP's first Liaison Officer in Beijing. Since joining the AFP in 1989 he has worked in Fraud and General Crime and Drug Operations, and in secondments to the National Crime Authority investigating Asian organised crime and the Attorney-General's Department in the Office of Strategic Crime Assessments. Before taking up his posting in Beijing in April last year he served in National Operations Intelligence and National Operations Policy. His qualifications include Modern Asian Studies, Strategic Studies and Police Management and he speaks China's national language, Putonghua, often referred to as Mandarin.

The Australian Federal Police established a liaison office in the People's Republic of China in April last year under funding from the National Illicit Drugs Strategy. It was officially opened the same month by Australia's Justice and Customs Minister, Senator Amanda Vanstone, while she was visiting in Beijing to reinforce law enforcement cooperation between Australia and key countries in Asia.

Situated in the Australian Embassy compound in the capital of the PRC, Beijing, the AFP China office is staffed by one senior liaison officer and one administrative assistant.

The Liaison Office in the PRC deals with a broad range of issues. It was established out of a need to engage China more closely for its strategic significance in the following areas:

• As transit country for a large proportion of Australia's heroin from the Golden Triangle.

• For the significance of ethnic Chinese in Australia's heroin trade.

• As a leading source of boat arrival illegal immigrants to Australia.

• Being increasingly a source of illicitly derived money being placed in Australia.

• As one of the region's biggest sources of crystalline methamphetamine or ‘ice'.

In conducting the work of the AFP in China, liaison office staff deal primarily with two bodies — the Ministry of Public Security (MPS) and the National Narcotic Control Commission (NNCC).

There are significant differences between the roles of the AFP and the roles of the Ministry of Public Security — the principal liaison counterpart of the AFP. The Ministry of Public Security comprises the policing mechanism of the PRC, with the addition of the People's Armed Police (PAP).

The Ministry of Public Security contains more than 1.5 million police across China. These police are functionally distributed across a range of departments including Forestry, Frontier Defence, Prison Administration, Fire Brigade, and Entry/Exit Administration. The MPS is the national or headquarters body, while in each province exists the local division, each called a Public Security Bureau.

The NNCC is a multi-sector committee established to provide China with a more concerted national capability against its burgeoning drug problems. It has representation from a number of portfolios including police, health and railways. It directly controls elements within each of those portfolios, for example, the NNCC is the direct line of control over the Narcotics Bureau of the Beijing Public Security Bureau.

The MPS is, unlike the AFP, a uniformed service — even headquarters staff wear uniforms unless their specific task requires otherwise. While the uniform is presently khaki, it is in the process of being changed to a New York Police Department style of blue/black. Criminal Investigations Division personnel are excepted from standard uniform rules.

The PAP is a hybrid organisation partly controlled by the military through the Central Military Commission and partly by the Minister for Public Security. It is essentially a paramilitary police force, providing significant strength in policing situations. One of its more visible roles, especially in Beijing's several Embassy districts, is the guarding service it provides for important buildings and diplomatic buildings. It is quite well equipped, with items such as armoured vehicles and helicopters, and is modelled on military lines in terms of rank and deployment. The PAP is estimated to number around 1.3 million members.

The principal role of the AFP's China office relates to drug trafficking. China is a significant transit country for Australia's heroin supply emanating from the Golden Triangle. China is also one of the region's largest sources of crystalline methamphetamine, known in Chinese as the ‘ice' drug. Because of the considerable overlap between heroin and methamphetamine production in Burma, China is also considered a conduit for tablet-form methamphetamine bound for the west. The significance of China in interdicting heroin and other drugs bound for Australia is clear and good cause for closer engagement and cooperation. It is only through enhanced cooperation between Australian and Chinese police when working against international drug trafficking syndicates that we will come to arrest more of the illicit drugs that would otherwise emerge on Australian streets.

The AFP China Office has been involved increasingly, in cooperation with the Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs (DIMA) both in China and in Australia, on people smuggling matters. In late 1998 there was a noticeable upsurge in not only people smuggling boat arrivals from China but also other forms of illegal migration including visa overstay and false or fraudulent applications.

A joint AFP/DIMA liaison trip to Fujian in 1999 impressed upon local authorities the seriousness with which the Australian government views this exodus and our genuine willingness to work with the Chinese police in trying to stamp out the problem. The source of many of the people being smuggled is Fujian Province, specifically Changle County is counted as a hot spot. Changle is marked by signs of the effort to stamp out people smuggling, with village walls throughout the county emblazoned with warnings against the perils of being smuggled by ‘snakeheads' (the Chinese term for the local organisers and facilitators who recruit potential travellers and arrange their ticket to ride).

One of the more interesting outcomes from visiting Fujian, and particularly the counties from which Australia's boat people originate, is the realisation that these are not poor areas of China. Fujian is a relatively wealthy and progressive province and the regions from which our boat people depart are also not nearly as poor as often suggested. Some of the housing in Fujian is positively opulent compared with most other parts of China, including many parts of Beijing.

In many ways the people ‘escaping' to Australia do so for reasons of economic pull, that is, they can make more money in Australia in a short period of time and then repatriate this cash to help their family gain respect and prestige, including providing better housing. Observing the construction booms in villages in these counties, there is a construction race of sorts between families and between villages to add extra floors to their already four-storey houses. These five story houses often signal that a family member is successfully ensconced overseas and remitting money to the family. For many of these families, sending family members overseas to earn hard currency is not so much an act of desperation or economic frustration as it is a tradition and a way of life.

But Australia is not just attractive for migration. It is also developing as a money-laundering destination for Chinese economic criminals, and possibly is even more attractive because these largely cash transactions may be a prelude to illegal migration. It is widely known that Australia doesn't extradite suspects or criminals back to China and that our system of immigration appeals can make deportation and visa cancellation a lengthy, drawn-out process. These facts and perceptions combine to make Australia an attractive place for China's economic criminals to deposit illicitly obtained funds and later seek to migrate.

Already the benefits to Australian agencies since the opening of the Beijing office have been tangible, with results obtained on many inquiries made of Chinese law enforcement authorities. The office can now, amongst other things, obtain call charge records, subscriber information, resident registration records, passport information, banking and corporations records, and criminal history checks.

Many things about the policing support mechanisms in China are very different to the comparable systems in Australia. Take, for example, criminal histories. In China there is no central repository of criminal records. Each citizen of China must by law register with a local police station as a householder in that police station's district. The police station where a citizen is registered is the only station that can provide a record of criminal history. Many people are excepted from registration, and a good many others live outside that system and are therefore not captured on it. Reports from China then, which may advise that a particular person has no criminal record, mean only that the district police station where that person is registered has no record.

This paucity of central records is one of the biggest challenges facing the China office and the Chinese police as well. Banking information, for instance, can also only be obtained by district. So even possessing an account number is insufficient without some indication of branch location. It is not possible from Chinese bank account numbers alone to identify a branch and therefore not possible to make inquiries on the account. Information that enables the Chinese police to be specific geographically is essential in facilitating inquiries. This applies with almost all other records in China — the more information which can be supplied about geography, the greater the chances of receiving a result.

An additional confusion with banking records arises from the ability of Chinese to open bank accounts in false names. Although the People's Bank of China (Chinese equivalent of the Australian Reserve Bank) is moving this year to close this loophole by regulation, it is still entirely possible for a Chinese citizen to have multiple bank accounts in numerous names other than their own.

Further complicating the issue of conducting record searches is the incompatibility of language symbols. Chinese records, obviously, are based on Chinese symbols or characters, not the roman characters of English and other western languages, and their record systems use Chinese Telegraphic Codes. Information for conducting searches then, must be supplied in the appropriate Chinese format.

From Beijing, the AFP's China office covers the entire PRC and the Republic of Mongolia. China itself is an impressive territory, ranging from Heilongjiang on the Pacific-Russian border and Mongolia in the north, to Xinjiang bordering Kazakhstan in the west, and from Yunnan bordering Burma in the south-west to Guangdong and Fujian in the south and east. The PRC has a massive area of around 9.6 million square kilometres (much larger in area than Australia at 7.6 million square kilometres) making China the world's fourth largest country by area after Russia, Canada and the USA. China has more than 22,000km of land borders to police as well as a 14,500km coastline. It is made up of 23 provinces, five autonomous regions and four municipalities (cities that are also their own state).

Although the PRC has a population of 1.25 billion (Australia's is 18.7 million), in an area as vast as China you may intuitively think it not too crowded. However most of the land area of China is mountainous or arid. As a result, 90 per cent of the enormous population squeezes into one-sixth of the land mass. The result is that to the observer China seems, and actually is, very crowded. It is one of the most enduring first impressions when you arrive in almost any city in China — people everywhere.

Beijing itself is the modern capital of China and has a population of about 12 million. Each day, however, this population swells with about 3–4 million outsiders flooding in to Beijing to join the casual labour market, seeking employment in Beijing's construction boom. This daily influx is part of the phenomenon referred to as the ‘floating population', of which there are now estimated to be more than 100 million displaced people in China.

Visually, Beijing is drab, its colours induced by dust, grey construction, and proximity to the desert. The best seasons in Beijing are spring (late April to mid-June) and autumn (late September until early November) where colours — well green at least — abound. Winter in Beijing is bleak and dry. Snow falls here around three or four times each winter, and it is at its driest when the wind sweeps in off the Mongolian steppes. Summer is hot and dry — the humidity generally being relatively low.

Beijing is located in the north of China, on a plain to the west of the Bohai Sea and fringed in the north and west by a string of mountains that separate it from the enormous Gobi Desert and the Mongolian plateau. Beijing has a remarkable temperature range, reaching 48 degrees last summer, to temperatures of a less-than-comfortable minus 27 degrees this winter. The winds off the Gobi Desert bring a further wind-chill value of between minus 5 degrees and minus 15 degrees on any winter day.

Beijing suffers from appalling pollution and haze — visibility on some days is reduced to several hundred metres. (It was only after two months in Beijing that I actually saw the mountains which fringe it). The air is decidedly unhealthy, with outdoor activity on particularly bad days being considered next to suicidal. The necessity for breaks from the pollution alone is good reason to take leave at regular intervals. It is no wonder the Beijing post has one of the strictest codes for its liaison officers and their families, requiring them to take leave of the city regularly.

Such pollution has created in Beijing what is known as a heat-island effect, where warm air is trapped in a bubble over the city, meaning the temperature is kept significantly warmer in winter than it otherwise might be. Its proximity to the Gobi Desert of course also means Beijing has an incredibly visible surplus of dust and sand, the construction boom helping to ensure the dust stays airborne and is relocated daily — not a great city in which to wear white business shirts.

Life for a foreigner in Beijing is not easy. As the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade Post Report tells:

“At first sight conditions of life in Beijing seem much less unusual than might be expected, and short-term visitors, particularly those who come in the more agreeable seasons of the year, are inclined to depart with the feeling that life in Beijing is not unlike that in many other parts of the world. However psychological pressures induced by the polluted atmosphere, congested and erratic traffic, unfamiliar language and culture do tend to have a cumulative effect.”

Traffic in Beijing is nothing short of deplorable. While on the average day there are an estimated seven million bicycles on the roads, it also seems there are as many cars out. There is a distinct lack of courtesy, coordination or cooperation between riders and drivers, making driving and riding in Beijing an exciting yet tantalisingly dangerous everyday activity. Simply driving to the supermarket is generally a white-knuckle ride.

Taxis are an altogether higher level of excitement mixed with justifiable trepidation. While taking a taxi in Beijing, it is easy to decide then and there to re-evaluate your life's priorities. Taxis in Beijing are mostly small red Chinese-made versions of a Daihatsu Charade, usually in an appalling state-of-repair, and with drivers who more often than not do not speak the mother tongue particularly well and, having arrived from places outside Beijing, also do not know Beijing at all. There are a dozen good reasons not to catch cabs in Beijing. But at the average price of 10 kuai (AUD$2) for a trip which provides you with both a unique perspective of Beijing and the value of your own life, it is an experience everyone should try — once.

China is a ‘category one' priority for the Law Enforcement Cooperation Program. This program has made possible many initiatives in China to enhance relations and foster closer cooperation between Australian and Chinese police. Some of them include:

• Placing Chinese police on Australian police training courses (including the Management of Serious Crime and the National Strategic Intelligence Course).

• Hosting delegations of Chinese police to examine the ways in which Australian police deal with specific tasks or issues.

• Donating equipment which would otherwise be lacking (and possibly hampering productivity) in Chinese police departments.

• Providing English Language Training to Chinese police.

• Bringing Chinese police to Australia on coursework or research scholarships to learn how Australian police conduct major criminal investigations and manage caseloads.

And as relations develop, so too the initiatives likely to be undertaken in cooperation with the AFP's Chinese law enforcement colleagues also will expand.