I was in the LuoHu part of Shenzhen (in DongMen specifically), a place that’s notorious for fake goods, counterfeit, and thieves.  All around a pretty interesting place to just observe.  I happened to see one of these little kid thieves in action for the first time.  I’ve been robbed once in China, back in 2007, also in Luohu, when a thief somehow managed to open my small pocket on my backpack and extract my iPod.  A pretty amazing feat – that zipper was tough to open, yet this thief did without any awareness from me.

I wasn’t the victim this time, but, as I was crossing on top of one of the pedestrian bridges, I noticed a kid tip-toeing back down the stairs, almost in Bugs Bunny cartoon fashion.  Seriously, the only thing that was missing was the pizzicato violins to punctuate the tip toes.  He had his back arched, both arms extending up with wrists pointed down.  Classic caricature thief pose.  The target was a Chinese man, talking on his mobile phone, with a pouch slung over his shoulder – think of it as a man purse.  These things are popular out here.

Out of curiosity, I turned around and walked to the top of the stairs and watched the thief in pursuit.  I was waiting for the opportunity to yell out.  It almost seemed like the target had some sort of premonition, he moved his right hand on the bag and scooted it in front of him, all the while still on the phone.  At the same time, an skinny ugly man came from behind me and stood right next to me on the top of the stairs.  I looked left at him and notice he was just staring at me, almost a glare.  I didn’t realize what was going on at first and just stared back thinking, “another starer…”.  After a couple or three seconds (a long time in terms of stairs), he went down the stairs to the kid who had given up on the target.  I turned away, looking back to see them both staring back at me.  It slowly sunk in that this was a thieving team.  I’d heard of this before.  The kids do the work and there’s an adult nearby to watch and monitor them, and get them out of trouble when something goes wrong.  Should the thief be caught, the adult can jump in really quick and make up some sort of nonsense like, “Stop harassing my son!  What’s wrong with you!” and make lots of noise as to embarrass the victim into just moving on.

When it comes to these thieves, I’ve been told that most people will not say or do anything to warn or help anyone.  That all goes back to the, “best to keep your mouth shut” culture in China.  When you hear of all this nonsense like the Cultural Revolution and so on, you begin to understand why the culture unfortunately developed this way.  I’m hoping there are no nonsensical Good Samaritan laws on the books though.  I didn’t think these were real, but just looked it up on Wikipedia.  How’s that for a change of topic?