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By Yunus Kemp
BEIJING, Sept. 30 (Xinhuanet) – Beijing is generally safe. People walk the streets in groups or by their lonesome without fear of being mugged or worse, at all hours.
Traveling on the subway day or night also poses no threat to life, limb or personal belongings. Pickpockets and other petty criminals are the norm in places where the masses congregate.
And as some colleagues have pointed out: it is probably safer for a black man or woman to walk the streets of Beijing at night than an African Americans to do the same in parts of the U.S. at the moment.
The safety and the feeling of being safe in this city is a sentiment shared by many expats -- also, blogs by foreigners living here for a while highlight this as one of the main reasons they love to work, live and play here.
A Beijing friend says he split from his Cape Town girlfriend several years back as she didn't want to settle here and he didn't want to move to a city where “most people live in different degrees of fearing for their safety”.
She wanted perennial blue skies and he wanted to not look over his shoulder every other minute. Fair enough.
An online search shows that the incidents of violent crime reported by the media in recent years have all been stabbing related. Private gun ownership is banned in China.
Chinese courts have a 99 percent conviction rate, with part of the violent criminals executed via lethal injection.
Criminal courts in South Africa, in handing down judgments, almost always cite the ‘interest of society’ as one of the determining factors in its rulings.
And the Chinese philosophy holds the group as more important than the individual and believes in swift action to maintain social order.
In the end, systems can only do so much to keep its citizens from harm, but the degree to which it does it is what counts most.
*Yunus Kemp is the Deputy Editor of the Cape Argus. He is on a 10-month scholarship with the China Africa Press Centre
