The evening party staged on the West Lake for the G20 Hangzhou summit in East China's Zhejiang Province on September 4 amazed visiting world leaders as well as a global audience.
Ahead of the gala and summit, divers from Beijing spent months combing the 6-square-kilometer lake, a surface area equal to about 900 soccer fields.
The divers come from the Diving Group of the Riot Security team with the SWAT Unit under the Beijing Municipal Public Security Bureau. With an average age of 33 years old, the 20-member group's main job is to ensure the security of the waters adjacent to sites of major events.
The waters they have worked in include the Jinshui River which flows next to the Tiananmen rostrum, which they examine ahead of National Day parades and Yanqi Lake beside which the 2014 APEC summit was held in November.
The Yanqi Lake security check took over a month. The divers first used sonar and magnetometer instruments to screen the waters. When any suspicious objects were detected, they needed to take a dip in the freezing waters to check by themselves.
"The task was tough, the team members took turns diving, the diving suits were never dry," one diver recalled to the Beijing Times. During the meeting, they also performed guard duty, patrolling the waters.
Meanwhile, they also search for criminal evidence underwater, such as murder weapons and corpses. Sometimes, they also take on search and rescue tasks.
The fitness requirements for a SWAT diver are not inferior to those of a fighter aircraft pilot. With the members mainly being former national wrestlers, swimmers and retired naval elites, only two in 10 candidates will finally make the team after three years of harsh training.
The diving group in Beijing is one of the only two under the national public security system. The other is under the Guangzhou Public Security Bureau, which has about 10 divers and is mainly in charge of security along the Pearl River.
China has witnessed increasing terrorist attacks in recent years. As the anti-terrorism situation tightens up, the SWAT divers' mission has become increasingly vital and challenging.
