I can talk to them some. I've talked more through girlfriends. Once while visiting Qingdao my girlfriend was stunned to hear a rose kid speaking her local dialect, from a small rural area far away in Hunan. He'd been spirited away to Qingdao to beg rose sales.

Not taking things to the police is a fine old Chinese tradition. It was old when the current government system came in. The police are badly undermanned, believe it or not...the perception of tight police control is mostly a myth. Their main function is preserving the status quo and carrying out government policy...which I've found to be true of a lot of American agencies I thought were there to help us, too.

To be fair, I've lived in some Chinese cities that seemed to have reasonable, well-run, effective police departments. But of course they aren't all that way.