Chapter 13: The easy way or the hard way
The Urban Management Bureau stood beside Xiahai City's First Ring Road. Formed from the former Municipal Public Utilities Bureau, it was the comprehensive administrative department through which the Municipal Government and Municipal Construction Committee carried out urban management. Its responsibilities included municipal facilities, urban lighting and water supplies, landscaping, environmental sanitation, harmless waste disposal, urban construction inspections, and flood prevention within the city.
The bureau occupied a compound whose fence was thoroughly entangled in ivy. Inside lay a gray, dusty stretch of grass and landscaping, with an aging main building in the center. Oxidation on the surfaces of some windows had given them a hazy, ragged-edged look. This had once been the office building of the Municipal Public Utilities Bureau and Environmental Sanitation Bureau; now it served as the face of the Urban Management Bureau.
Green vines covered the main building too, making it look at first glance like some dilapidated medieval castle.
Several small Changan trucks and Santana sedans in black-and-white enforcement livery filled the open ground. Beside the old residential building for employees behind them, a cooperatively funded housing development was under noisy construction.
Inside the director's office, Urban Management Bureau Director Wang Weidong held a cigarette, his warm backside planted in his chair as he rocked back and forth, puffing out smoke. Yet he still felt stifled and miserable.
During a recent enforcement operation, they had actually come to grief at that Xiahai stationery shop. Da Mao and several of his men had clashed with criminal investigators, and all of them had been hauled off to the police bureau.
How could he swallow that? Even criminal investigators had no business bullying people like this. Yet that fellow Zhao Lijun had put on airs with him, and it looked