Several ministry-level departments, including the powerful Ministry of Public Security and the General Administration for Industry and Commerce, are supervising the campaign.

Documents released by those departments say only local police departments have the right to choose and train security guards for civilian use. Security guards trained without the participation of police departments are illegal.

Security guard agencies must register their companies with the local administrations for industry and commerce and should operate only after their qualifications are authorized.

Without these two preconditions, the documents indicate, any type of security guard will be treated as illegal.

Sources with the Ministry of Public Security said China now has 500,000 or so registered security guards, but the unregistered ones - the so-called "black security guards" - overwhelmingly outnumber the legal staff.

As a result, some cities have had problems related to security guards.

In Beijing alone, 40 instances of security guards beating customers were reported in the past three years. Thirty-six of these incidents were caused by unregistered security guards, who often disappear after committing a crime and are hard to trace.

To keep everything safely regulated, the campaign will shut down all unregistered security guard agencies nationwide in the next three months, and put the whole market under tight control.

Sources with the Ministry of Public Security said they are drafting a strict regulation for security guards, and hope it will be released at the earliest possible time as a guide for standardizing the security market.

Security guard agents first appeared in South China's Guangdong Province in 1984 as a supplement to police forces in ensuring public security. There were 1,357 registered security guard agencies across the country by the end of 2001, employing nearly 500,000 people.

(China Daily December 18, 2002)