Where have all the foreign drug dealers gone? Ask the men in black. Beijing expats are buzzing about a weekend crackdown in Sanlitun that struck many of us as more brutal than the norm. (Yes, here brutal can be the norm.) With Beijing pouring controversial investments into Africa -- and preparing to host the 2008 Summer Olympics -- you'd think officialdom would want to avoid incidents perceived to have racist and repressive overtones. Like rounding up dozens of black men -- reportedly including the son of a Caribbean ambassador -- and beating many of them in public during a drug raid.  Pan Yali (an expat who's using his Chinese name due to fear of retaliation) filed this eyewitness account about the bust:

    One sees shocking things in China. Sometimes they are also not surprising. That they are not surprising may be one of the most disturbing things of all.

     Saturday night, I hesitantly pedaled into a small street in Sanlitun, the bar area most popular with expats in Beijing. It is a shoddy, miniature replica of some of the most unappealing carnival-esque streets in the world, the Fourth Circle of Western expat-in-Asia bar hell, a circus that Bosch would appreciate. Two weekends ago, an Australian architect -- a former contestant on the TV show Big Brother -- ordered a drink at a bar here at 3 AM, then slumped over his table, and never woke up.  (Drugs or foul play were suspected, but police dropped the case for lack of evidence.) Tonight the entire cast of characters was out in force: drunken foreigners, the locals who "love" them, the shady bar owners, the homeless children and their decrepit pimps, the flower-sellers and the African drug dealers.

    And then, the young men in unmarked black jumpsuits wielding batons.

    They moved in, marching quickly down the street, without warning, I guessed, to pursue some of the African drug dealers -- often immigrants from Nigeria and neighboring countries -- who are a Sanlitun institution. Like DVD piracy but on a smaller scale, drug dealing is an illegal activity to which police often turn a blind eye in this area of town. Perhaps they accept it as a necessary evil of the alien population, the opium of the foreign masses, keeping Beijing's nightlife scene tolerable. Or it may be that, as with so many other problems in China, authorities recognize that they simply can't control Sanlitun.

     Until they decide to, as apparently happened recently in the run-up to the highly delicate October Communist Party meeting, and with less than a year until the Beijing Olympics. Then they really control it.

     In Sanlitun, it's not unusual to see a flurry of flashing lights as police pull through the bar street from the nearby police station. But the men in jumpsuits were not usual at all. They looked like they belonged at a village demonstration, or a crackdown on a cult gathering near Tiananmen Square. No -- more likely a JG Ballard novel, something torn out of an ultra-violent techno fantasy.

     This was quite real. Petrified black men kneeled in front of a bar, surrounded by police with flashlights. In addition to the men in black, there were uniformed men in camouflage, one of them with an attack dog. There were also, disturbingly, young men, apparently not much older than 20, in nightclub dress: cheap polo shirts, track pants with stripes on the sides, sneakers. And in their hands, rubber batons. 

      Aside from the kneeling men, other individuals were being led down the street by two or three policemen each. Some were being hit on the back by police with batons. Some were being kneed. Some hit barehanded. All looked nervous, some pleaded that they were innocent, that they had done no wrong.  Any resistance prompted a beating.  In the glare of neon signs, other foreigners looked on, their drinks still, their mouths agape. One detainee's head was bleeding.

     A young student, Sam, who is from Trinidad, was paralyzed with fear. He was one of the few black men on the street who hadn't been detained, at least not yet. "They wouldn't let me in the club," he said nodding at the door of a club behind him, "unless I showed my huzhao," or passport. "Why would I carry that with me?" He watched as one of his friends, dressed smartly in a green polo shirt, was dragged away. "That guy is a university student, and they're just taking him away cause he's black. This is straight-up racist, there's no question," he said. "I gotta get out of here."

      Then a commotion nearby: a large, young black man was being dragged away, but not without some resistance. When he struggled loose for a moment from his two police escorts, a group of others ran to help pummel him. They kneed and hit him until he crumpled to the ground. Some eight policemen piled on top to hold him down. He was the son of the Grenadian ambassador.

      A crowd formed, shouting that they had the wrong guy. Photos were snapped, some by me. After a flash went off, the camera was snatched out of my hand by a uniformed policeman. "Follow me," he said sternly and robotically, in practiced police English.

       As we walked swiftly down the street, in a de facto parade of "perpetrators" (most of whom had done nothing but appear on the street that night ), breathless, I tried to explain, in halting Chinese, that the detainee was a diplomat. That didn't matter. The policeman  had orders to round up drug dealers, and here drug dealers tended to be black. He turned to look at me and fired another phrase from his small English arsenal. "Shut up."

     In a crowd of captives, onlookers, and police -- who were shuffling through handfuls of passports -- an official watched as I deleted my photos of scared men and grim police thugs. I could delete the photos, but I can't erase the images from my mind.

    I would see the last arrestee of the night not long afterwards, around the corner in a dark sidestreet. He was standing, bent at the waist, as four policemen took turns hitting him with batons on the back and head. He was not resisting at all. He remained frozen, like a statue, until they dragged him away towards the nearby police station and a waiting van.

     This was not the first beating I've seen here. Numb with powerlessness, I watched as an old woman was kicked about by police on Tiananmen Square last year. But this was the first time that I'd seen, or even heard about, Chinese police beating up foreigners.

     And there's still a lot more cleaning up to do before the Olympics.