China is cracking down harder on scalpers selling tickets for hospital appointments in large cities like Beijing and Shanghai, and police have carried out several high profile raids in the past weeks to drive home this point, according to state media.

Ticket scalping is, for most part, a way of life for Chinese people. The scalpers, also called "huangniu" (黄牛), are a common sight especially at entertainment shows, and even outside train stations, where they resell tickets they've booked out for a higher price to the public. Most hospitals require that patients buy tickets to see a doctor.

But the spotlight on the illegal practice is on the resellers outside hospitals right now, in large part prompted by a social media uproar after a video of a woman in Beijing decrying scalpers emerged and went viral.

In the video, the woman furiously rails at scalpers at the lobby of the Guang'anmen Hospital, where she had been waiting for two days to get an admission ticket to see the doctor. While hospitals charge a 300 yuan ($45) fee for registration, scalpers had taken all the registration tickets, and were reselling them at 4,500 yuan ($686) to patients in line.

More police raids on hospitals

Authorities have sent scalpers to jail in the past decade, but going by media reports, this spate of arrests is a step up in its efforts to demonstrate its stance against the rampant practice.

On Monday, five suspects were arrested at the large Shanghai Ruijin Hospital, reported Shanghai Daily. Three of them had been security guards employed by the hospital, and local media posing as patients managed to jump the line by bribing scalpers, who then paid security personnel at the hospital.

Last month, soon after the woman's video went viral, the Beijing police appeared to step up raids, storming five hospitals in the Haidian district and arresting 11 scalpers.



Massive lines at a hospital in Jiangsu. Image: Wang jiankang/Imaginechina

The practice continues, in spite of police action.

But it's clear that the practice continues, in spite of police action. An unnamed scalper in Beijing told Caixin this week that he had been at it for two years, and typically waits several hours each day queuing up for a number to see a doctor. For his pains, he makes about 7,000 yuan ($1,068) a month — about three times his former salary as a welder in the rural north.

Another scalper admitted that operating smoothly requires bribing hospital security guards and doctors, although at times when this wasn't possible, he found ways around it by teaming up with other scalpers to evade security or undercover cops.

Other reports argue that the solution isn't as simple as police enforcement. For people coming from rural parts of the country to the city for specialist treatment, they don't have proper IDs and documentation. As such, the scalpers who come with local ID cards can offer a quicker route to registration, and present an attractive offer to those desperate to see a doctor sooner.

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