Wei Chunxiao didn't expect that 140,000 people would gather in the streets of Dengfeng to pay their last respects to his wife, Police Chief Ren Changxia.

It was April 17. Dengfeng, with a population of 610,000, was in deep mourning for Ren, the city's first female chief of police, who had died on the job in a car accident at the age of 40. Dengfeng, with nearly 90 per cent of its residents still living in rural areas, is in the heartland of Central China's Henan Province.

"To me," her husband Wei said, "she was an ordinary woman.

"She was a woman just like any other woman," Wei said. "She liked to dress up and she cried easily."

During the more than three years Ren served as Dengfeng's public security director, she had little time to spend with Wei and their son, who live in Zhengzhou, the province's capital about 80 kilometres away from Dengfeng.

"Even when she was home, she spent a lot of time on the phone," Wei recalled.

Whatever "misgivings" the husband had about his wife's job, he admired her for her hard work and her commitment to society.

Among the local residents in Dengfeng, Ren has become a bit of a legend.

One story is about Ren dressing up as a rural woman washing clothes by Baisha Lake, in order to investigate the criminal operations of a local group of gangsters.

Another is about Ren walking along a country road dressed in an alluring outfit, hoping to bait a suspected serial rapist and killer.

Farmers in Haizhu Village still remember a spring Sunday two years ago when a woman came to the village with a big plastic bag and a traditional steelyard scale, calling from door to door to purchase rabbit wool.

Old Cui, now in her 80s, invited the woman into her home and recalled the wool collector asking her why the villagers seemed to be afraid of some people.

"I told her not to get involved because she would get into trouble," Cui recalled.

Cui also remembered her because she paid the elderly woman handsomely for the wool.

But Ren didn't heed the old lady's advice, and about a month later, Cui and other villagers attended a village gathering to witness the official arrest of 37 local bullies, who had instilled fear among the villagers and who were suspected of robberies, extortion, rapes and murders in the nearby hilly areas.

Cui and other villagers were introduced to Chief Ren, who presided over the gathering.

"But she was the wool collector," Cui recalled.

Hao Haimin, the officer in charge of the team responsible for the investigation of homicides and other serious crimes at the Dengfeng public security bureau, recalls that Ren would personally go to the scene of almost every major crime that happened within their jurisdiction.

"She always did her homework," Hao said. "None of us could get away with carelessness."

Li Chaoyang, one of the chief detectives on the force, recalled the 13 days he and his team members spent together with Ren in Qigou Village, where a major robbery and homicide took place last October.

The year Ren took office, she led her officers in the bust of a major group of gangsters in the area. And her Dengfeng force also settled a number of major unsolved homicides and robberies in the area.

"She always wanted to be the first to crack a case," Wei said.

Her drive for excellence won her several national accolades as one of the top young police professionals in the nation, and also resulted in her being singled out as one of the top 10 distinguished women of China for the year 2002.

Ren's recognition came not only as the result of her hard work, but also because of her love for and dedication to her profession.

"She liked to play with toy guns and swords and do somersaults with the boys when she was only 7," said Ren Lijuan, Ren Changxia's younger sister.

"She loved reading Sherlock Holmes, and she always looked back at people dressed in police uniform whenever we passed them."

She applied for and enrolled in the Henan provincial police academy in 1981 when she graduated from senior middle school.

Upon graduation in 1983, she was assigned to work in the interrogation division.

Despite her love for her profession and her two years of education in police procedures she was not really prepared for her initial encounters with the world of crime.

In a live interview with China Central Television last September, Ren admitted that she was shy and timid when she started her job. She was just 19 at the time.

She recalled one of her first encounters with a female suspect. "The woman told me not to ask her questions, since I was not married," Ren recalled."

"She said I would degenerate into their lot if I continued.

"My face reddened and I hated myself for speaking in such a tiny voice, no louder than the whine of a fly," said Ren

"She cried after that interrogation," said her husband who was her colleague when Ren started her job in the police department.

"I felt that I must learn my profession well, learn about criminal psychology and other tools of the trade so that I would be able to deal with criminals first hand," Ren said.

She studied and worked hard, rising through the police ranks and winning a professional award in the province during a competition testing the police officers' skills and knowledge.

With her skills and knowledge, she successfully won the job as chief of the technical crime investigation team. When she took on the job as Dengfeng police chief, she had 700 police officers and staff under her, of whom only 50 were women.

She worked hard and tolerated neither sloppiness nor lax management practices.

Soon after she took on the position, she and the bureau's disciplinary officers would check on local police on duty by doing such things as phoning in robbery reports.

She also frequently asked local residents for assistance.

In her first week as police chief, Ren checked up on the work of 17 local police stations and sacked 15 officers for violation of police discipline and dereliction of duty.

She also established a regular open office day when she would meet with local people personally to hear their grievances.

The first day, she saw more than 100 visitors. Two weeks later, more than 200 residents lined up to speak with her. "So many problems piled up in front of me that I wondered how long it would take me to deal with them all," Ren recalled later.

All these problems only served to strengthen Ren's resolve. Not only did she lead the local police in cracking down on crime, she also worked to help the victims. A few times she donated money to the victims. She also adopted Liu Chunyu, a 14-year-old orphan.

In 2002, during a public appraisal of the work of 32 local government departments, the Dengfeng police made it to fifth place, while in previous similar appraisals, the police had been at the bottom of the list.

In her more than three years in Dengfeng, she had little time to go home, even when she was in Zhengzhou for meetings.

"She always looked very tired, with puffy eyes, and she dozed off frequently," Wei recalled." She dressed in baggy clothes at home, saying that baggy clothes were as good as a quilt when she had time to snatch a nap.

"When she called home, she always asked about our son.

"But I think that she will have no regrets about leaving this world in the way she did -- at the peak of her career and respected and loved by the people," Wei said.

(China Daily June 10, 2004)