The hero of Nanjing

The Nanjing Yangtze river bridge is four lanes wide and four miles long, a monument to Maoist endeavour clogged with the traffic of China’s economic boom. And every weekend, at one of its two towers, you can see Chen Si. He is 42 years old, with spiky black hair, a rasping cough from cheap Nanjing-brand cigarettes, and a baseball cap bearing the slogan ‘THEY SPY ON YOU’. Around his neck is an oversized pair of binoculars, through which he watches the crowds unceasingly. In the past six years, according to his blog, he has saved 174 people from suicide.

Mr Chen used to be a functionary at a transport company. He read one day in a newspaper that Mao’s famous bridge was now a suicide spot, and shortly afterwards began to go there whenever he wasn’t working and pull down suicidal people as they attempted to climb the railings. He has become celebrated — a concerned citizen taking a stand in a country with 200,000 reported suicides a year, and few good ideas about how to stop them. In Guangzhou, 700 miles south of here, officials tried to stop people jumping to their deaths from a steel bridge by having the structure smeared with butter.

But as I looked at him standing sentry at the south tower, Mr Chen’s project seemed almost as absurd. How could he possibly pick out the suicidal on a four-mile-long bridge? And was he serious with those binoculars, especially with visibility reduced to 50 yards or so in the storm? I introduced myself, and he waved me off. ‘Not now,’ he snapped. ‘I’m working.’ Then the binoculars shot up to his eyes.

Eventually, Mr Chen did talk to me. He never told me what I really wanted to know — why was he out here? Why had he reduced his life to this one repeated act of standing guard? Perhaps because he didn’t know himself.