Laowiseass - If you're a Foreign Affairs Office cop, smile next time

The plain-clothed Foreign Affairs cops in Qinhuangdao, the city where the Great Wall crumbles into the polluted Bohai Bay, erased this photo from our bureau photographer's camera last week.
The cops pictured here initially let a Japanese-language writer, the shooter and I take photos of our grilling because they were doing the same to us -- witness the video camera in the one guy's hand. Fair's fair, they decided, and they had said we weren't wanted for any crimes. They just held us five hours at the city Foreign Affairs Office to ask what we knew about five other people who they'd just detained in our presence, detained of course for fixing to give us an interview about corruption at two bankrupted military factories.
It was a classic grade-B HBO moment, when they caught us all, knocking on our hourly-rate hotel room door, yelling "police!" then storming into the room asking who was who and why we were all there. About 25 more cops took our two bureau drivers, both Chinese citizens, to another cop shop after grabbing them by the arms and taking their phones away. Cops to drivers: Why are you working for the "little Japanese"? (小日本人)
Were we detained? Caught? No, cop-interrogator Wang Yiming said. No, we just need you to rat out, I mean tell us what the other five were talking about in the hotel room. So I could go now, I asked half way through his questions. He didn't answer. He told me later I had a bad attitude for not telling him what was said in the hotel room during the five minutes before his squad broke in. I indicated to him that good attitudes could also be expressed by letting non-suspects out of custody in less than five hours.
The posse later indicated that although we were allowed to take photos in the questioning room we weren't allowed to take them out. So they were all erased, and the Foreign Affairs vice director asked if we wanted to do dinner, which we didn't.
Cops in the photo here are examining a page from the Japanese writer's notebook. He had taken a page of notes in the hotel room. He never saw the page again. Luckily our shooter had taken a shot of the notes themselves along with the photo shown here. In Beijing the next day, the shooter popped his camera card into a slot somewhere in his labyrinthine computerized photo lab and out popped all the photos he took.
We used the notes to write a story. Photos not unlike the one here went on the wire.