A deadly trade is openly advertised on a graffiti-adorned wall. Situated close to abridge connecting southeastern Chongqing’s Hong’an township with Biancheng, thepopular “frontier town” of western Hunan, the graffiti does not depict artworks or slogansbut instead advertises the contact details for illegal gun traders.
After calling one of the numbers written on the wall the phone was answered by whatsounded like a middle-aged male speaking in a heavy Hunan accent. He promised that for2,200 yuan (320) he could deliver a Type 64 - the semi-automatic pistol still used bypolice forces across China - to a chosen location. Like any good salesman he was quick tomake his pitch and offer added value.
“It comes with a silencer and five free bullets,” he said.
Delivery was dependent on 500 yuan being deposited into his bank account and oncethis was confirmed a black Volkswagen Santana with Qinghai license plate would pick upthe buyer and take him to nearby mountains where he could test the weapon.
Neither the car nor the bank account would reveal his true identity, the traderinsisted.
“Don’t bother checking,” he warned. “The car was stolen and the ID card I used to setup the bank account was fake.”
After reporting the conversation to police on both sides of the border, officers saidthe sale was probably a hoax and explained that no action can be taken unless a suspect isactually caught doing business.
In this remote mountainous region of Southwest China - where owning a powdershotgun was a tradition among the Miao ethnic people until 1996, when the NationalPeople’s Congress introduced legislation banning the buying, selling and transporting ofhunting guns without official permission - the market for guns is yet to disappear.
No official statistics are available on the number of privately owned firearms.
In 2007, a study by the Geneva-based Graduate Institute of International Studiesestimated the total number of guns held by civilians in China at 40 million, thirdonly to the United States and India. Chinese analysts, however, say the figure is a wildexaggeration.
Today, about 2,100 self-proclaimed Basha (locally pronounced Biasha) people inBingmei, a town in Congjiang county, Guizhou province, claim to be the only civiliansin the country who can legally possess guns (powder shotguns with no bullets, that is).
Tourism has been the tribe’s pillar industry since 1999 and a team of about 80 gunmen puton a traditional performance for visitors every day.
“The shotguns are just used as props, nothing more,” said team captain Gun Yunliang,40. The performers earn around 300 yuan a month from the shows.
Some 500 kilometers north of Bingmei, where shotguns were confiscated in largequantities and “gun performances” are outlawed, the arms trade has instead flourished.
In the 1990s, Songtao, a highly impoverished county in Guizhou, emerged as oneof China’s most famous homes to the gunsmith (the others, also poor counties withsignificant non-Mandarin-speaking populations, are Hualong in Qinghai province andHepu in the Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region), according to Long Wenyu, 36, captainof the Songtao public security bureau’s gun taskforce.
Triangle of trade
Songtao is less than two hours’ drive from both Xiushan in Chongqing and Huayuanin Hunan. Historically beyond effective government control, the three counties span highlycomplex terrain and are all roughly within 500 kilometers of a major city.
Until 2006, the trio formed an underground gun-trading triangle, where illegalfirearms made in Songtao were trafficked into Xiushan and Huayuan and then to China’sbooming coastal cities, said Li Ling, chief of the Chongqing public security bureau’scriminal police unit.
Within the region, particularly in Huayuan, guns were popular with gangsterscontrolled by private mine owners, said Long Wenyu. His unit, the first of its kind at thecounty level, was set up in October 2004, when authorities in Guizhou vowed to curbgunsmiths and traffickers by 2006 and ensure no further backlash in 20 years.
And so far the county has done just that, according to Zhou Shenghua, deputy Partychief for Songtao’s politics and law committee, which oversees law enforcement.
“The situation has for the most part been contained since 2006,” he said. “Ourcurrent focus is on the promotion of relevant policies to villagers and prevention of anypossible backlash.”
To aid that effort, officials were assigned to head up seizure operations in 2009 in nineof Songtao’s 11 towns where arms dealers had been thriving. All hostels, lathe workshops,hardware stores, electrical welding companies and metal recovery units were incorporatedinto a surveillance network, said a statement provided by the county police.
The officials, who were appointed deputy town leaders, and a team of 48 lawenforcement officers and former servicemen are also responsible for helping alleviate ruralpoverty, which the government sees as a direct cause of the gun industry’s popularity.
Assembling a handmade Type 64 takes an experienced gunsmith only two to threedays and costs around 300 yuan, yet several transactions by middlemen can push thesales price up to more than 10,000 yuan in places such as Shenzhen, an economic hub inGuangdong province.
“In two to three days, these gun traders make more money than we do in a month,”
joked a gun taskforce member who did not want to be identified.
For farmers, whose annual earnings are typically in the high hundreds, gun moneycan be a big boost.
Despite recording a 19.5-percent average growth for the past three years, Songtao’sgross fiscal revenue in 2009 was just 335 million yuan (49 million) - a pitiful 1.2-percentof the gross fiscal revenue over that same period in Jiangyin, a prospering county in Jiangsuprovince.
