Summer in the City of To-morrow

Public security personnel around town sport a pretty wide spectrum of variously dorky headgear: berets, 8-point police hats, peaked caps, and bomb-squad hardhats all abound, and I saw at least two patrols of maroon-clad yokels stuffed sullenly into what appeared to be kaiser helmets, I shit you not. Beijing's own riff on the canon is the long-billed baseball cap, which is innocuous in concept but actually just silly enough to be vaguely intimidating when worn earnestly.

Funny hats aside, the true sartorial marker of street-level authority is the epaulet, worn by everyone from embassy guards in full military garb to mall security and parking attendants in t-shirts. The city seems ready to drown in epaulets. You find them in the subway stations and on the sidewalks. They fill the lobbies of hotels, drug stores, museums, and supermarkets. They signify that one ought to Stay On The Sidewalk or Get Off The Grass. Occasionally they direct you to check your bag in front, or to place your belongings in an X-ray scanner. Mostly, though, they sag upon the shoulders of listless young people who might or might not understand that the essence of their job is exactly to be seen standing around, wearing epaulets.

The Man's ubiquity in and around Beijing is inspired not just by the import of this summer's Games, but also bus explosions in Kunming and Shanghai, rioters in Tibet, Muslim separatists, religious and political dissidents of all stripes, Munich '72, and generic post-9/11 establishment paranoia. As it's depicted in a recent NY Times article, Olympic security has been primed for Hollywood-grade terrorist cataclysms. Apparently the city is decked with a massive network of surveillance cameras, and there's even semi-credible talk of police snipers hanging out by the hundreds on the rooftops. One imagines a sort of sophisticated, moodily-lit subterranean control room somewhere in the city center, with a wall-sized satellite map, technicians of ambiguous professional function typing furiously at keyboards, and some guy shouting Enhance! or Code Red! to nobody in particular.

Nevertheless, what you actually encounter on the street comprises roughly the following:

• Around the embassies, at all hours of the day, squads of five to ten khaki-clad, unarmed soldiers march along the boulevards with that oddly faggy snap that seems intrinsic to formal military procedure the world around. The lead soldier always has the best technique, which is probably why he's the guy in front; the point man usually has pretty ragged form, which is probably why he's in the back. Kaiser helmets optional.
• Uniformed (but probably civilian) guards are stationed in front private facilities of all kinds, including shopping malls, apartment complexes, parking structures, and the like.
• In subway stations, there are minor swarms of security personnel directing pedestrian traffic to airport-style X-ray scanners, which for some reason tend to be positioned unintuitively to the side of the entrance corridor. If the station is especially crowded, the X-ray gets spotted by a thoroughly beleaguered attendant who dips his or her hands briefly into the bags of onrushing passengers.
• On some busy street corners, mostly at night, you can find cops accosting pedestrians for random ID checks, the actual randomness of which is highly dubious.
• Beijing Train Station also has checkpoints manned by a few cops, although you seem to be able to walk around these if you just come at the station from a different angle. The walls and planters of the station grounds are lined with police tape, presumably to keep loiterers on the move.
• A recent development is the sudden emergence of "traffic wardens", i.e. crossing guards with TRAFFIC WARDEN written on their neon orange vests, who have been introduced presumably to create some semblance of order in the city's busier intersections. Actually I kind of like these guys, not just for their real contribution to public safety but also for the sort of tragic and microcosmically Sisyphean character of their job, which I find weirdly poignant and worthy.

But far and away the most interesting presence on the sidewalks are the growing numbers of neighborhood-watch-style volunteers, who appear by and large to be recruited from the ranks of the urban citizenry that typically fill the background of Beijing's public spaces—bicycle repairmen, sidewalk merchants, recyclers, custodians, and most notably neighborhood retirees. As far as I can tell, they have no real law enforcement powers; instead of epaulets, they wear Olympics-branded collared-tees and red arm bands labeled 治安志愿者, or "public security volunteer". The PSVs are essentially assigned to narc detail, although the actual scope of this responsibility is still unclear to me. It could entail reporting on potential terrorist activity and public protest, or it could mean chiding passers-by for flagrant violations of the no-spitting rule. In any case, I have never witnessed PSVs actually playing out their official role; invariably you find them squatting on little stools and chatting among themselves. My own interaction with them has consisted almost exclusively of asking them for directions to noodle restaurants or riding around them on my bike, although recently I have taken to surreptitiously taking pictures of them when I think they're not looking.

The PSVs' arm bands are creepily reminiscent of Red Guard couture circa the Cultural Revolution, although it's probably absurd to draw the comparison much further than that. Retirees and the guy who fixes your bike's front tire do not a vigilante goon squad make. Nevertheless, the very premise of a PSV betrays at least a) a public acceptance of the extension of police functions into the civilian sphere, and b) a kind of willing and overt suspicion of one's own neighbors and guests, which tend to offend certain American sensibilities regarding the role of the state and neighborly hospitality, respectively.

China, I'm told, has a long tradition of intra-neighborhood surveillance, going at least as far back as the Ming or Qing dynasty, and it's conceivable that the PSVs simply arise out of different cultural norms concerning the relationship between citizens and the administration of their communities. Or perhaps there's some kind of unsavory material precedent fresh in public memory that explains, if not justifies, the PSVs' wary and essentially misanthropic posture. But it's tempting to contemplate how the PSVs fit into agendas of a familiar and specifically contemporary mold. For example, you could view the PSVs as the product of hallucinatory fears of social entropy similar to the kind that so paralyze the PTAs and homeowners' associations of US suburban babbitry. In other words, the phenomenon is legible not so much as a historical legacy than as a consequence of modern lifestyles and their weird defensive neuroses. What's more is that the PSVs also happen to be a very cheap lever for expanding the visibility of Olympic security, on the one hand, and the Olympic brand, on the other. If the epaulets and billboards don't do enough to advertise their respective messages, then the PSVs more than make up the difference, and do so with a human face to boot.

Of course, for the volunteers themselves, the PSV arm band represents an opportunity to play a part, if only a minor one, in a heady moment of national excitement. In fact, it might be that this opportunity creates the excitement in the first place. One can imagine how it would be fun to put on a uniform, step out to the streets, and trace with your eyes an imaginary line that starts with the fabulous new National Stadium, passes through all the fancy developments all around town, and ends, so the pitch goes, with you and your friends waiting expectantly on the sidewalk.

While it's true that we live in an era in which people home-brew their own nerve gas and fly jetliners into tall buildings, it's ultimately pretty difficult to take any mass-society security project at face value. In this respect, what we see currently in play in Beijing seems cut from the same cloth as all the mayhem that arises from the 21st-century global fixation on homeland security. In the first place, the chaotic, porous, and basically ineffectual nature of mundane security efforts flies plainly in the face of whatever grandiose technofetishistic visions of safety and order might exist in the public imagination. To take nothing away from real examples of government oppression and brutality, I'll submit that observers worried about an extant or emerging police state in China—or the US for that matter—are likely crediting the modern security apparatus with a level of competence and capacity that it doesn't actually possess.

Rather, it seems that the true meaning of public security, i.e. its most important and tangible relation to society at large, is in its psychological effects. Regardless of their expressed purposes, security measures in Beijing are if nothing else an impressive and reassuring display of manpower, a mass ritual that conjures images of sophistication and elite proficiency. What they produce, even prior to any "true" security (however that is defined and measured), is an immaterial peace of mind. And the irony here is as plain as day: any manifest perception of safety is haunted, as a rule, by the equally manifest presence of bugbears and villains, real or imagined. That's to say that security's whole project presupposes, and thus essentially creates, the very atmosphere of fear and emergency that it's supposed to counteract. Daily life suddenly seems filled with criminals and delinquents lurking in the shadows, and in due course some relatively defenseless group—migrants or Muslims or brown people or the poor in general—gets slotted in as a whipping-boy.

At any rate, it occurs to me that close-reading this sort of thing is very much old hat, the stuff not just of a Machiavelli or a Foucault but also Michael Moore documentaries or the fashionable anti-establishment ravings of any given household smart-ass. It's an easy next step to outline how such arrangements would be profitable to regimes of control or their buddies in the security business, blah blah etc. etc. We all profess to get the point, already. And yet it's one of those disappointing observations about society that we seem to take straight on the chin and then shuffle meekly past. It's interesting to think about why this is the case. It could be that we feel overwhelmed by the futility of resistance or protest, and so we decline to do anything about it. In a similar vein, we could simply be chucking this objection onto a very tall pile of equivalently depressing issues, and it becomes another battle among many that we could choose to fight. Or, it could be the case that we are not being very earnest when we claim to understand the true problem. That's to say that we wear the message as a pose but secretly don't believe it, as if there's a little reactionary devil on our shoulder saying, "You don't seriously believe you're not safer because of all this, do you?"

And so do you?