If you haven’t been to China recently, you haven’t seen its
sparkling streets. After a long stint in Shanghai, I recently visited Suzhou
and Hong Kong. Suzhou is a 20-minute high speed rail ride from central
Shanghai. No potholes. No garbage. No oil stains. I don’t remember even seeing
any gum spots. For a city of 10 million, Suzhou is new, clean and spotless,
just like most of Shanghai.
Hong Kong is dirty. My last trip, I rode a bus from the
unattractive Cyberport on the south side of Hong Kong Island to the airport.
Coming around a turn, I glanced into a park and noticed the litter. Hong Kong
streets and sidewalks have the familiar dirt, age and mess of my old homes,
Chicago and Los Angeles. Hong Kong Island feels even dirtier since I couldn’t
help but juxtapose it with Shanghai’s well-staffed streets and sidewalks.
Shanghai is swept clean daily of trash, leaves and fallen cherry blossoms.
Chicago has worse problems than dirt, pot holes and gum
stains. Murder rates continue to make international news. Pension liabilities
are crushing the economy. The population continues to drop as young people move
away permanently to the western sun and eastern jobs. Entrenched political
interests paralyze progress in law, policy, education, infrastructure and
employment. Making a priority out of ending gun violence, however, has to be
top of Chicago’s agenda. In 2016, four gun murders happened within one block of
my apartment in Uptown. One was in the middle of the day when I was within
earshot.
The longstanding solutions among Chicago lefties for gun violence are gun control and the beat cop. Beat cops still exist in some parts of the world but I never saw one in Uptown. With beat cops, police officers walk, on foot, a “beat” of a few city blocks and stop crime before it starts. In the ideal, every neighborhood’s Officer Friendly builds relationships, knows neighborhoods and resolves petty disputes before violence escalates. The British Bobby spinning a night stick while walking London’s Victorian streets is my stereotypical beat cop. But beat cops are rare today. The fact that I have to go back over 100 years to find a popular reference to them signals how unlikely it is that they’ll be walking Uptown anytime soon.
The economic link between street sweepers in China and beat
cops in Chicago is easy. Paying employees to provide a public service by
walking a geographic area of a city is too expensive for Chicago. Costs in
Shanghai are lower, so Shanghai is loaded with street sweepers. Not only does
every street of Shanghai have a human street sweeper, in an amazing fit of
sustainable living, thousands of street sweepers build their own brooms with
dead tree branches. They look like fanned-out bush branches made from tied
bamboo sticks. I don’t speak Mandarin, much less the Shanghaiese spoken by
these sweepers. But I see the men and women street sweepers on my daily route
to work. I smile, wave and nod. As I’m
coming home at night, I see them sitting and laughing and smoking on corners
with other similarly uniformed sky blue peers.
John Heintz lives in Shanghai, China. He is a writer,
teacher, researcher, editor, podcaster, blogger and thinker on the education,
economic, legal, justice and social issues facing the global community. Most
known for his work in education, John Heintz explores a range of issues in his
writing for Second Rail Education.
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