You are with friends in a downtown area, whiling away a pleasant few hours when someone suddenly approaches you and says: "Help me, please give me some money!"

You happen to have no small change or just not in the mood to oblige, so try to step around the beggar.

However, your way is blocked.

"They simply jump on you, holding your legs and clutching your clothes," says Tang Ruiming, a 58-year-old retired doctor in Chengdu, capital of southwest China's Sichuan Province, recalling her recent experience on the street.

A young man, Tang says, was forced to hand out a 1 yuan (12 US cents) note to a woman who knelt before him and grasped his waist with her arms, begging loudly.

Tang, who used to willingly dole out some small amounts of money to beggars, decided that she might well hold her sympathy after this.

"They seem to have no shame," Tang says. "I do not know if he or she will jump on me the same way."

Complaints

It is by no means an isolated incident - across the country, complaints against unbridled coercive begging in cities have increased significantly.

A survey conducted recently in Ningbo, a coastal city in east China's Zhejiang Province, indicates that beggars are testing the limits of kind-hearted people's forbearance.

Ningbo's Haishu District issued questionnaires to residents, asking whether the government should resort to more aggressive measures to restrict increasing intimidatory begging in the area.

About 95 percent of the respondents said the beggars have seriously disturbed social order and should be effectively dealt with.

In view of the negative impact on their businesses, some owners have voluntarily started to clear away beggars - Ningbo City Square Development and Operation Company has reportedly employed 150 security guards to mount a round-the-clock watch on beggars in the area.

Ying Jianrong, director of the district's Beggar Management Office, believes that "99.9 percent" of the beggars in downtown Ningbo are not "real beggars."

Real beggars are those living on the alms doled out but the "beggars" in downtown Ningbo are more like professionals, working fixed hours in organized groups and earning "salaries" based on their contribution to the group.

"It is these fake beggars who have taken advantage of people's kindness," Ying says.

Ying believes such organized groups can be found everywhere in the country. "These people are not worth helping," he says.

Governments in Chengdu and Changsha, capital of central China's Hunan Province, have urged residents to follow the example of Shanghai and not give money directly to beggars on the street.

A source with the civil affairs authority of Chengdu says the move is aimed to effectively stave off coercive begging. "You rarely see beggars in Shanghai, because Shanghai people rarely give money to beggars."

Kaili beggars

Kaili, a small city in eastern Guizhou Province, southwest China, has recently found itself in the unpleasant spotlight as the "home of beggars."

Since the Spring Festival in some major Chinese cities, they have become a hot media topic - many of the beggars claimed they were from the remote Kaili area, mainly inhabited by the Miao ethnic minority group.

But this is not true, says Meng Renquan, director of the Kaili Civil Affairs Bureau.

Earlier last month, Meng got a call from the aid center in Foshan, south China's Guangdong Province, saying they had taken in 30-odd Kaili beggars. Officials of the bureau met with these people in Foshan soon after. They found these people did not come from Kaili because they didn't speak with local Kaili accent, says Meng.

Meng says Kaili takes good care of its low-income people and there should not be such a large number of Kaili beggars.

According to Meng, of the area's population of 450,000, about 30,000 are classified as "poverty-stricken." Every year, the local government allocates a special fund of 3 million yuan (US$360,000), namely 100 yuan per "poverty-stricken" villager, along with several hundred tons of rice, to ensure the basic living needs of the people.

Therefore, Kaili forbids village authorities to issue "poverty certificates" says Meng, talking about the "poverty certificates" produced by the "Kaili beggars."

"Whenever I encounter a beggar on my business trips to other cities who claims to come from Kaili, I always stop and inquire about their condition. But believe it or not, I have never found a real Kaili person."

Meng believes it is only because Kaili is relatively unfamiliar to many Chinese that its name has been misused. "This is an unfair smudge on our reputation," he says.

The way out

Observers believe the recent increase of beggars in many Chinese cities has to do with the country's repeal of the 21-year-old Measures for Internment and Deportation of Urban Vagrants and Beggars last year.

Under the rule, people without a residency permit were deported or detained; now, they are advised to seek help from aid centers.

But while the change has earned much acclaim as a protection of human rights, city administrators find themselves confronted with a knotty issue: they are left with no effective means to handle the increasing number of beggars in public areas.

The beggar restriction office in Ningbo has begun designating beggar-free zones; and from February 20 they are not allowed in major commercial areas.

Meanwhile, Zhang Guifang, an official in Guangzhou, capital of Guangdong Province, says Guangzhou will establish zones barring beggars.

Beijing, Shanghai, and Suzhou of east China's Jiangsu Province have already embarked on a similar course.

Lin Maoguang, a member of the Guangdong Provincial People's Political Consultative Conference, says it is time for the local government to seriously tackle the "beggar issue" and submitted a proposal urging "better management over beggars" at the annual session of the conference last month.

Lin says he was urged to submit the proposal because so many beggars showed up in downtown Guangzhou during the Spring Festival that they had become a nuisance.

"The existence of so many beggars has tarnished the image of the city, and their coercive begging has made them disgusting," he says.

Legal challenges

However, there are doubts over the legitimacy of zones forbidding beggars.

Shen Kui, a law professor at Peking University, says in an article published recently that the government has no legal footing to restrict beggars unless it can prove that begging breaks the law.

Shen believes the only proper way to solve the problem is to reduce poverty through economic development, while better aiding poverty-stricken people through a more comprehensive social welfare system because the number of vagrants and beggars is likely to grow in the process of urbanization.

Moreover, he urges more financial support for aid centers because, currently, most cannot fully help those in need.

Zou Kaihong, a public prosecutor with the Dongcheng District Procuratorate of Beijing, agrees, but acknowledges the difficulties in discerning the real intentions of the beggars. Professional begging has emerged as a question that needs to be seriously tackled, he says.

Therefore, Zou says he prefers the prescription of Changsha to this problem, which is stepping up efforts to build aid centers and at the same time, urging local people not to directly give money to beggars.

"A real beggar will be content with the food and shelter at an aid centre, while the professionals will never quit their profitable business," says Ying of the beggar restriction office in Ningbo.

Statistics indicate that the aid centre in Ningbo handled at least 100 beggars a day before internment was stopped but merely dealt with 300 in the last five months.

(China Daily March 18, 2004)