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Beijing tries to snuff out public
suicide
By Li Yong Yan
BEIJING - Different reasons drive different
people to suicide. To generalize, some people want to
escape something they deem too much to bear - terminal
illness, lost love, impossible debt, to name a few
examples. They live in pain, physical or mental, and
they want to end it, for good.
Others take this
ultimate step to protest against something, most usually
injustice. A Vietnamese monk immolating himself, a
Korean worker stabbing a knife into his belly - these
felt strongly against certain wrongs.
They all
chose the wrong way out, from the perspective of their
families at least. Fundamentally they are weak, selfish
even, unable or unwilling to meet the difficulties in
life and society, and leaving their loved ones to suffer
the loss.
But now they are officially something
else as well, according to the Beijing police. Attention
those who despair of life: it is a criminal offense to
end it in the Chinese capital's Tiananmen Square.
"So? Go ahead and slap my dead body with an
arrest warrant," the determined suicide may sneer. Well,
don't count on it. The bad news for you, but perhaps
good news for your family, is that Tiananmen Square is
swarming with probably the rapidest-deployment
suicide-prevention police force in the world. And they
are well trained for the job.
A few weeks ago,
two would-be tragedies were successfully prevented by
the elite police on the square. The save was so
brilliantly executed that the head of Beijing's police
felt it necessary to tell the world about it. Police
chief Ma Zhenchuan announced his sterling record during
the National Day holiday season and went on to warn that
it was illegal to "vent personal anger" in a public
place as sacred as Tiananmen. He arrested the two people
his men had saved, for provocative disorderly conduct.
Who says China is a lawless country?
Law
and order do not just happen to bind together. There is
a symmetry to it: Break one and you disrupt the other.
It can therefore be assumed that law is a means to
ensure the end: order.
Law and order don't just
happen. They are enforced, by competent authorities, in
two important ways: prevention and punishment. Anybody
who breaks the law and thus causes disorder will have to
be punished to set an example for all to see. When it
comes to suicides, an individual is indeed capable of
harming public interest in extreme cases. For example, a
man may try to destroy a commercial airliner when he
sets about killing himself, for the insurance payout to
his beneficiary. That is a criminal act, open and shut.
But unless and until innocent people are endangered,
there is simply no case, criminal or civic, against the
poor fellow who is driven to this abyss. A public
suicide is usually committed to make a public protest
over the way the government treats the individual and/or
general public.
The recent strings of public
attempts in Tiananmen are proof enough. Without
exception, they are hopeless victims of forced eviction
from their homes. Developers, backed by local
governments, never talk to the homeowners about a fair
agreement. Instead, the developers talk through
bulldozers. Powerless against the wrecker's ball, the
owners turn to the courts, which turn them away. Then
they go to the people's government, which never responds
or, if it does, sends police to disperse the protesters.
With nowhere else to turn to, they show up in Tiananmen
Square, with a bottle of gasoline. Ever the law-abiding
citizens, they douse themselves with fuel, and end up
being charged with provocative, disorderly behavior, by
the suddenly all-efficient law-enforcement authorities.
It is one thing to discourage suicide in any
form and in any place, it is entirely another to cordon
off one particular square as a no-suicide zone, as if
everybody is welcome to use the rest of the country's
9.6 million square kilometers of land. Are we to assume
that it is okay to set oneself on fire in a provincial
capital? Or a town square? Apparently it is all right,
to follow the logic of the police, to poison oneself in
one's own bed. China has one of the world's highest
rates of suicide: nearly 300,000 people take their lives
each year. And we have yet to see the government lift a
finger. So why this abrupt enactment and enforcement of
an anti-suicide law for Tiananmen?
More
diabolical is the fact that the Beijing city government
is more concerned with the disruption of order caused by
a commotion in the square than the personal tragedies
and grave social injustice that cause these public
suicides. Keep in mind it is precisely because
governments, at various levels of provinces, cities and
counties, failed to provide order and, in many cases,
have actually disrupted the process of law that these
angry, desperate people have been driven to the heart of
Beijing.
Thanks to the negligence of public
policymakers, these poor souls have been deprived of a
place to live. Now, they have been deprived of a place
to die.
(Copyright 2003 Asia Times Online Co,
Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for information
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