The Chinese government has called for an end to the public shaming of criminal suspects, a time-honored cudgel of Chinese law enforcement but one that has increasingly rattled the public.

According to the state-run media, the Ministry of Public Security has ordered the police to stop parading suspects in public and has called on local departments to enforce laws in a “rational, calm and civilized manner.”

The new regulations are thought to be a response to the public outcry over a recent spate of “shame parades,” in which those suspected of being prostitutes are shackled and forced to walk in public.

Last October, the police in Henan Province took to the Internet, posting photographs of women suspected of being prostitutes. Other cities have been publishing the names and addresses of convicted sex workers and those of their clients. The most widely circulated images, taken this month in the southern city of Dongguan, included young women roped together and paraded barefoot through crowded city streets.

The police later said they were not punishing the women, but only seeking their help in the pursuit of an investigation.

The public response, at least on the Internet, has tended toward outrage, with many postings expressing sympathy for the women. “Why aren’t corrupt officials dragged through the streets?” read one posting. “These women are only trying to feed themselves.”

But much of the anger has been directed at the police, who are a focus of growing public mistrust. Although corruption among the police is rife in China, the disdain has been further heightened by a series of widely publicized episodes involving the torture of detainees, suspects who mysteriously died in custody and innocent people jailed on trumped-up evidence.

One man spent 10 years in prison for murder after the police extracted his confession — only to be freed when his supposed victim turned out to be alive.

Mao Shoulong, a professor of public policy at People’s University in Beijing, said the new regulations were necessary to rein in the worst impulses of the police.

“There are more modern tools for law enforcement,” he said. “Besides, if these kinds of tactics are allowed, the police will get used to dealing with problems outside of the law.”

The most recent wave of prostitution arrests involving thousands of suspects is part of a seven-month “strike hard” campaign aimed at gambling, drug use and violent crime. As part of the increased law enforcement efforts, judicial authorities have been encouraged to mete out swifter, and harsher, punishment. It is the fourth such campaign since 1983.

Public shaming of the accused and the condemned has been a long tradition in China — one that the Communist Party embraced with zeal during episodes of class struggle and anticrime crusades. Although public executions have been discontinued, provincial cities still hold mass sentencing rallies, during which convicts wearing confessional placards are driven though the streets in open trucks.

The practice has also taken hold in some Chinese neighborhoods of New York, with some supermarket owners threatening to post photographs of shoplifters and call the police unless the suspects hand over cash, sometimes demanding hundreds of dollars. The legality of the practice, however, remains in question.

It is unclear whether the directive against the humiliation of suspects will have the desired effect. Similar rules and regulations have been passed down through the years, beginning in 1988, when the Supreme People’s Court ordered prosecutors and the police to protect the identities of the accused. In 2007, the country’s top judicial and law enforcement bodies issued a similar notice that forbade the parading of convicts.

Even if such directives must be issued repeatedly, Joshua Rosenzweig of the Dui Hua Foundation, a human rights group, said he was somewhat encouraged that the government recognized the need to abolish such practices.

“Repetition can increase pressure and help force change, but ultimately it will take a great deal of political will to implement these kinds of changes,” he said.

Kim Shin-jo was part of a North Korean unit that tried to assassinate the president in 1968. Now he is a South Korean Protestant minister. (John M. Glionna, Los Angeles Times / July 17, 2010)

‘I came down to cut Park Chung-hee’s throat,’ the captured would-be North Korean assassin told the nation 40 years ago. Now he finds solace in his faith and hopes to help the South put that image to rest.

By John M. Glionna
The Los Angeles Times
July 18, 2010

Reporting from Namyangju, South Korea —
He looks more like a graying clergyman than the boogeyman of thousands of South Korean childhoods.

But Kim Shin-jo is both.

The 69-year-old may preside over a Protestant church in this picturesque community where the Han River bends among mountain peaks. But he is also the reluctant grandfather of North Korean spies, a reminder of a cloak-and-dagger world that refuses to be dispatched to the history books on this divided peninsula.

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On a recent day, Kim read a news story about the sentencing of two North Korean military spies. Such stories stir bitter memories of the night in 1968 when Kim and 30 other heavily armed North Korean commandos slipped into Seoul on a mission to assassinate then-President Park Chung-hee.

For the infiltrators, the operation ended in disaster. Cornered outside the presidential residence, they waged a deadly, days-long gun battle with South Korean police and military forces. Although nearly all of the North’s commandos were killed, Kim was captured. Interrogated for months about his spy career, he was eventually released and later became a South Korean citizen, marrying and having a family.

Years in a free society have exposed the fallacy of North Korea’s argument that the South is an agonized wasteland that must be recolonized. Still, Kim feels pity for these newest Northern moles.

“I know they must be punished — we have a rule of law here,” he says. “Still, I’m a human being. I feel sorry for them.”

As the recent U.S. arrest of nearly a dozen Russian agents illustrates, international espionage still exists decades after the Cold War — especially on the Korean peninsula, where North and South are still technically at war.

Without money for high-priced satellites, a cash-starved North Korea relies on a more practical resource.

“It’s hardly believable, but in this high-tech age, North Korea still relies heavily on humans as information gatherers,” said Lee Dong-bok, a former member of South Korean intelligence and a senior associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Kim, whose parents were executed when he pursued citizenship here, still faces derision over his sinister mission of long ago. He’s not a man of God, some say, but a would-be assassin. He remains haunted for surviving when others didn’t.

“Sometimes,” he says, “I think it would have been better if I had died that day.”

*

The operation code names were Cuckoo and Skylark.

At 27, Kim was chosen from among tens of thousands of North Korean agents to form the elite 124th Special Forces Unit. Their task: Cross the heavily mined DMZ and execute the South Korean president, taking pictures to verify the kill.

The 31 commandos were divided into six teams. As an army lieutenant, Kim led a squad whose role was to take out the bodyguards at the presidential mansion, known as the Blue House.

“I felt gratified to be part of the revolution to emancipate South Korea,” Kim recalls. “We thought the president there was a stooge, an American collaborator. I hated him.”

The unit set off at 8:30 p.m. on Jan. 17, 1968, dressed in South Korean army uniforms. Moving by darkness, hiding during the day, they snipped barbed wire and marched south through the mountains.

One night, they ran into a group of farmers gathering wood. Instead of killing them, they warned the villagers not to report them. The civilians immediately contacted authorities, who launched a manhunt for the infiltrators.

Still, Kim and his teams made it to within 200 yards of the Blue House before being stopped by a suspicious South Korean soldier who demanded their identification.

The commandos opened fire, setting off a series of deadly street battles. Eventually, 35 South Koreans were killed and 64 wounded — soldiers, policemen and civilians, including a 15-year-old boy, who was among the victims of a grenade thrown at a loaded bus.

Insisting that he made a point not to kill civilians, Kim says that he scattered from the rest and never fired his gun. Instead, he fled south into the woods, where he was captured within hours.

Two days later, Kim was trotted out in handcuffs on live television. Asked about his mission, the unrepentant prisoner gave an answer that still haunts many older South Koreans: “I came down to cut Park Chung-hee’s throat,” he declared.

But his revolutionary spirit would not last — thanks to a South Korean army general who headed Kim’s interrogation. Over months of patient reasoning, the officer broke through Kim’s defenses. The two eventually became close.

“He told me, ‘We have a problem with the North Korean regime, not you,’ ” Kim recalls. “He was my father’s age and treated me as his son. He said, ‘I was a young soldier too once. As a commander, I will never kill you. But I will forgive you.’ ”

*

After four decades, the South Korean government recently opened a trail that leads south toward the capital from the North Korean border. It is the path the commandos took on their fatal mission. For years, the winding path has been known as the Kim Shin-jo Route, after a man whose name for many is as recognizable as any former president.

Officials called on Kim to act as a tour guide on the trail’s opening day. He could have refused, he says. But he realized that in order to come to terms with this painful national incident, South Koreans needed to see him in the role of the everyman, to see that he was no longer their boogeyman.

All day, people pointed at him. Those old enough often spoke with scorn. Kim, they swore, was the reason many South Koreans fled their homeland in the early 1970s, fearful of another war with the North. Because of Kim, many of the older generation who remained behind lived in perpetual fear.

“Wherever I go, I get the comments,” says Kim, who became a Protestant clergyman in 1997, finding solace in his faith. “It will happen as long as I am alive. People will point and accuse me.”

Every Jan. 21, Kim memorializes the day of the attack. The day once brought what Kim calls “indescribable pain.” But his wife has taught him to think differently.

“My family tells me that as of Jan. 21, 1968, I was dead,” he says. “On that day, I started a second life. I’m really 69, an old man. But they joke that I’m only 42. And that day that once caused me so much grief should be celebrated as my birthday.”