Gangs of Beijing

Students inspect an anti-crime display

This past summer, Beijing’s newspapers were filled with reports and commentary on the trial of the ringleader of “Hall of Princes,” a Haidian-based gang that drew its membership from local high schools. It had been set up by a man in his late twenties to help students defend themselves from bullies, but later drew police attention by getting involved in street brawls and clashes with local businesses.

Members of the “Black Clothes Gang,” another youth organization formed for much the same reasons as Hall of Princes, are in court on charges of assault.

An article in the Legal Daily describes the makeup and activity these gangs and suggests that rampant bullying and marginalization of misfit students is leading to a rise in youth crime:

Most of them were underachieving, marginalized students ignored by their parents, dismissed by their teachers, and looked down on by their classmates.

…

Some were underachieving students who dropped out of school before registering for college entrance exams, others were left to their own devices by their schools because they had no hope of getting into college, and still others had already been shunted off to technical and vocational high schools or privately-run training institutes. Students at these schools generally had poor academic records and came from families that were not affluent, and they probably had been repeatedly criticized by their parents and schools earlier in their educational career. Their self-image was negative, and they were depressed and susceptible to unhealthy cultural influences, making them likely to turn to crime.

Two things about the Legal Daily article are worth noting. The subhead “90s kids play a greater role” makes use of a generational label that conveys the sense that youth crime is happening at a younger age than in the past. But kids born in the 1990s could be anywhere from 8 to 18 this year, and as the article itself states, the ones involved in gang violence are generally at the upper end of that range. Vast quantities of inane and misleading analysis in the Chinese media about “post-80s” and “post-90s” trends could easily be avoided simply by substituting age ranges in for generational groups.

The close of the article also drags in media and the Internet — and their corrupting influence, which is treated as a given even though there’s considerable debate in China about the role of movie violence in the real world. It doesn’t provide any solutions, but calls upon parents, schools, and the larger community to find ways to better supervise wayward youth (movie stars have already gotten into the act).

Note: “Hall” (堂) in the article below is traditionally found in the name of special-interest organizations. In overseas Chinese communities, “tong” is the translation used and, like the two Haidian examples, their self-protection activities often have connections to crime and gang violence.

In June, Beijing media reported on the “Hall of Princes” gang, which consisted of between seventy adn eighty middle-school students born in the 1990s who, under the leadership of a “chief hall master,” carried out revenge and random theft. For disturbing public order [Article 293 of the Criminal Law], the gang was brought to Haidian District Court.

With the case not yet decided, members of another youth gang, the “Black Clothes Gang,” have been brought to court by the Haidian Procuratorate on charges of intentional bodily harm [Article 234] with a knife.

Student-organized gangs

The suspect, Black Clothes Gang leader Li Tao, was born in 1989. He graduated middle school in 2006, and his middling test scores got him enrolled into a vocational high school.

In his statement, he said, “In September, 2006, when I was attending a technical institute in Beijing, I was afraid of being bullied. So I told the eleven people I was with in military training that we should stick together afterward so no one would bully us, seeing as we got along well together. I always dressed in black then, so they copied me and wore black clothes. Once, when we were talking, we came up with the name Hall of Filial Righteousness (孝义堂) and also the Black Clothes Gang (黑衣帮).”

As founder, Li Tao naturally became chief, or “hall master.” Like him, the members were born around 1990 and were mostly students at the vocational school. They ranged in age between 16 and 19. Every week he collected dues from each member: 10 yuan. They hung out together, and often carried out fights and beatings, during which all the members dressed entirely in black. Later on, they purchased uniforms.

At first, the group was intended to help keep its members from being bullied, but later on the Black Clothes Gang started beating up people who wouldn’t submit to them. Students at the school that the gang was really powerful, and many of them sought protection by asking to join up. Gradually, the gang began to take in students from other schools and youth at large, and at its height had fifty or sixty members. They held frequent gatherings and communicated via a QQ group, which used the “Hall of Filial Righteousness” name.

For two years after its founding, the generally small-scale brawling did not attract the attention of the school or the police. But on May 28 of this year, it finally caused real trouble.

That afternoon at around one o’clock, gang member Sun Qiang went out to eat lunch. In a garden next to a high school in Haidian’s Dinghui Xili neighborhood, he got into an altercation merely because the victim, Zhu Hong, had looked at him wrong. Venting his anger, Sun told Jia Bin to notify Li Tao to bring people over to take revenge.

Li Tao quickly gathered together the nine suspects, including Wu Da and Jian Guo, who were attending class at the time. They went over in two taxis. They carried clubs and bricks; someone had bought a machete from a shop, and they had a black replica gun trained at the victim’s head.

Then the Black Clothes Gang rushed forward and it turned into a melee. Ultimately, Zhu Hong received eight knife wounds, and a tendon in his thumb was completely severed. These were light injuries, according to the legal determination.

After the incident, the police recovered the knife used by the Black Clothes Gang: a machete 50-cm long and 4cm wide. The replica gun was not recovered. Afterward, Li Tao and several others turned themselves in, while Zhang Hai and two others were caught.

On August 4, the Haidian PSB transferred the thirteen suspects to the Procuratorate for prosecution.

90s kids play a greater role

In six months, the Procuratorate has looked into two crimes organized by youth gangs. It claims that the gangs have a strictly organized structure, internal rules, and even dues payments: they are large groups whose fighting causes harm. No one wants to think about the consequences if they should continue to develop.

The Black Clothes Gang had an internal hierarchy with Li Tao as hall master. If he was absent, Wu Da and Zhang Hai were responsible.

The other gang, Hall of Princes (太子堂), even topped the Black Clothes Gang. In September, 2004, Zhang Kui, originally from Liaoning and nicknamed “Maomao,” set up Hall of Princes in Haidian and recruited a steady stream of junior and senior high school students. It later grew into a youth gang of seventy or eighty members.

Born in 1981, Zhang was the “older brother” for this group of secondary school students. He named himself “chief hall master” and ruled over five separate halls: the War Hall, which was responsible for public image; the Battle Hall, which handled reputation; the Bravery Hall, which handled training inductees; the Victory Hall, responsible for logistics; and the Punishment Hall, for internal member discipline.

The Hall of Princes also drew up detailed “hall rules.” For example, brothers had to pay monthly dues of between 50 and 100 yuan, and if they wanted to withdraw they were handled by the Punishment Hall. Discipline was extremely strict: anyone who withdrew would be beaten by members if they were seen, and anyone who missed three months of dues would suffer punishment.

The Hall’s adult organization and tactics were astonishing.

In regard to these two cases, Cheng Xiaolu, a prosecutor with the Office for Minor Prosecution at the Haidian Procuratorate, said that criminal cases involving youth gangs have been on the rise since last year, and that youth born in the 1990s had been instigators and planners in many of the cases. As for the present two cases, while the organizations were only involved in crimes of disorder, if they had not been discovered in time, they quite possibly could have developed into organized crime.

Vocational and technical schools become high-incidence areas

The membership of Hall of Princes and the Black Clothes Gang reportedly consisted largely of Beijing youth who shared one thing in common: most of them were underachieving, marginalized students ignored by their parents, dismissed by their teachers, and looked down on by their classmates. The majority were attending technical or vocational high schools or private training centers.

Liu Yong, another prosecutor with the Office, said that in recent years, technical and vocational high schools have become high-incidence areas for gang-related youth crime. Some were underachieving students who dropped out of school before registering for college entrance exams, others were left to their own devices by their schools because they had no hope of getting into college, and still others had already been shunted off to technical and vocational high schools or privately-run training institutes. Students at these schools generally had poor academic records and came from families that were not affluent, and they probably had been repeatedly criticized by their parents and schools earlier in their educational career. Their self-image was negative, and they were depressed and susceptible to unhealthy cultural influences, making them likely to turn to crime. Add to this schools that are not very strict, and the present state of affairs results.

In interviews, it came out that their initial plan was to unite for the sake of courage because they were afraid of being bullied.

According to Zhang Changhong, another prosecutor with the Office, many children in Beijing’s high schools are forced by upperclassmen to hand over their property, but because schools do not handle these conflicts in a timely fashion, or because many children are too afraid of payback that they don’t inform their parents or the school, they’re forced to join together to resist bullying by others.

Zhang Kui, hall master of Hall of Princes, explained that he was often bullied when he was younger, and after he grew up he had the idea of finding companions for self-protection.

The Black Clothes Gang first came together out of a fear of bullying.

“Once when I wasn’t feeling good, and my family didn’t care, the Hall of Princes had people take me to the hospital. That’s how much I rely on them,” Xiao Lin, a Hall of Princes member, told the court.

His parents were busy with work all day and had no time to take care of him. By contrast, when he was sick, the hall master came to visit him, giving him that sense of reliance and belonging.

Joining forces to rescue the children

One major reason for the presence of juvenile delinquents in these youth gangs is undoubtedly a lack of self-restraint. However, crime by “post-90s” kids is more of a mirror for society; in an age of affluence, we need even more to analyze the deficiencies in our families, our schools, our communities, and the present education system.

For example, books and movies that publicize gangs and violence are not entirely unrelated to why some post-90s youth choose the wrong road, believing that force can solve every problem. In his statement, Hall of Princes member Zeng said that their gatherings were influenced by Hong Kong films such as the Young and Dangerous series.

The spread of the Internet and its increasingly complicated online content continually increases the negative influences the net can have on minors. At the same time, parents’ ability to monitor minors’ online activities has not seen corresponding growth. For this reason, one major problem currently facing families, schools, and society right now is how to strengthen their capacity to manage minors’ activities under this new social model.

Liu Guiming, deputy secretary of the Chinese Society of Juvenile Delinquency Research, noted that more than two decades of research into the causes of juvenile delinquency had basically pointed to external causes: family, schools, and the community. But deeper investigations show that more attention should be paid to new conditions under a new social model, new characteristics of youth in a new millennium, and new types of troubled youth. These are the new questions facing today’s education workers.

Wang Mu, a well-known criminology expert, said in an interview, “Crime by minors is serious right now because we have not done a good job with children in the past. The urgent matter right now is to establish an independent juvenile justice system and independently-operating juvenile courts.” He believes that comprehensive, prevention-centered judicial policies to address youth crime is the only effective way at present to solve the problem of juvenile criminals in our country.

Wang Mu has been calling for a juvenile justice system for quite some time now. In 2005, he said basically the same thing to the China Daily:

An independent juvenile justice system does not criminally punish juveniles and aims to protect their legal rights as they undergo correction, Wang Mu said.

“The core of a juvenile justice system is that minors are not given adult punishments,” he said. “It means that we must not use criminal punishment prescribed for most of the juvenile crime that is defined by current laws.”