On his last night alive, Chang Dongqing responded to an emergency call about an armed robbery in progress near the police station where he worked. Because another officer had checked out the station's only gun, a 1954 series, .45-caliber semiautomatic pistol, Chang picked up the long iron rod that was the station's only other weapon.
Less than an hour later, he was dead, killed by a shotgun blast to the heart.
"My husband had a glorious job," his wife, Han Xuehong, her face drawn, her eyes apprehensive and sad, said as she talked recently at the police station in Taigu, Shanxi Province, about how she has coped since he died in May.
Chang is one of hundreds of policemen who have died in the line of duty since April, when China declared its latest "Strike Hard" campaign, a period of frenzied police activity meant to cow criminals and reassure the populace that the government is keeping crime in check.
He was part of China's figurative thin gray line. Like the thin blue line of the police in the US, it is meant to hold society's criminals back from law-abiding citizens, only this one is far thinner.
In fact, China is one of the most sparsely policed countries in the world. Not only are there few police officers per capita, but also as a matter of policy few of them carry guns, making them vulnerable to the country's increasingly well-armed criminals, like the highway robbers that shot Chang.
To hold the line against crime, the government relies on draconian campaigns that periodically sweep up tens of thousands of suspects, rush them through abbreviated trials and send thousands of them to death -- regardless of the likelihood that some are innocent.
Though the official number of those executed is a closely guarded government secret, this year alone more than 5,000 people are believed to have been put to death. They include the two men involved in Chang's death.
The periodic crackdowns have become the policing strategy of choice for a government lacking the will and resources to provide more police officers that are both better armed and better trained.
But while tens of thousands of people have been executed since the country's first nationwide campaign in 1983, Chinese academics say government statistics show that the "Strike Hard" campaigns have no lasting impact on crime, belying the effectiveness of a policing strategy whose central feature is forced confessions and then death.
The system's failings and abuses are rarely reported in the tightly controlled state-owned media, and for the vast majority of Chinese the campaigns are reassuring and right. But for others, they bring terror and despair.
With an average of six policemen for every 10,000 residents -- a quarter the ratio in the US -- China relies on its citizens, particularly Communist Party neighborhood committees, to act as watchdogs against crime.
Local police forces operate on shoestring budgets, which they supplement during normal periods with money collected through fines imposed for a wide range of illegal behavior.
"When the press talks about the campaigns `puncturing the puffed up arrogance of the criminals,' they are trying to reassure the populace that the police are in control," says Murray Scot Tanner, an associate professor of political science at Western Michigan University who has written extensively on China's crime-fighting drives.
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