I have a confession to make.
Although I have lived and worked in Taiwan, Hong Kong and China more than 20 years, when I relax, I like nothing better than reading a crime mystery or murder novel, or watching a crime/detective TV program or movie on a subscription channel. The crime genre usually reveals more about a society and culture than information which comes through official channels because most crimes, especially organized crime, are based on unwritten social rules and cultural values. The published laws give the official view, while crimes tell us how a society really works. If you want a smooth introduction to a new society, culture and language, start with the official version, but if you want to gain real insights into how it really works, study the unofficial stories. Nowhere is this more true than for China; the Chinese have even developed a widely adopted term for it called 潜规则 which means the “rules beneath the surface”.
When most westerners think of Chinese, most unconsciously place Chinese into stereotypes they are most familiar with: restaurants, laundries, massage parlors, educators, kung-fu experts, IT experts, science and technology experts, hackers, IP thieves, shop-owners, Chinese political leaders and diplomats, Chinese human rights dissenters, and so on. For the most part, Chinese are considered to be smart law-abiding citizens, and when they commit crimes, they usually commit white-collar crimes which are not violent. In the US, the number of Chinese and Chinese-Americans in jail is much lower than the three major groups of Whites, Hispanics and Black Americans. This is why, ever since the end of WWII, Chinese-Americans were often labeled as the “model minority”, along with other educated and industrious East-Asian groups, including Korean-Americans, Japanese-Americans and Vietnamese-Americans.
Now that China is a global power whose influence is felt all over the world, and Chinese have a presence in virtually every city in the world, it is important to get a better understanding about China, and about the unwritten rules which govern Chinese society and relationships. While stereotypes have a seed of truth, they are inadequate for gaining a deep understanding for what is going on under the surface.
Today’s China is ruled and governed by a single party: the Chinese Communist Party. It has total control over official and online media, and exercises strict control over content, and the image of China it presents to the rest of the world through Chinese official media and sympathetic commentators. This image consists of a strong, prosperous China which has become a leading global power, and whose citizens now enjoy a level of education of prosperity which they have never previously achieved in China’s past 5,000 year history. All of this has been achieved under the leadership of Party General Secretary Xi Jinping, who is the Core Leader of the Party.
Historically, Chinese governments have labeled anything which they didn’t like as crimes. Suppression of free speech is not a modern Chinese government policy; it started with the Ming dynasty (1368- 1644 CE), when newspapers and gossip magazines first began to take root in a population which was becoming increasingly literate. The Ming dynasty term for these crimes was 文罪 which meant “literary crimes.” For Chinese governments and rulers since then, the internal debate has been about the scope of free speech and government censorship, not whether it should exist. The places which have relatively censorship-free are Hong Kong (until 2020 when the National Security Law was introduced and implemented) and Taiwan.
Crime, by its very nature, is unofficial. This means that when today’s Chinese government talks about modern China, it is not interested in presenting unofficial views which may subvert and contradict the Chinese government’s official position presented to the rest of the world. Chinese serial murderers, human traffickers, rapists, con artists, corrupt business people and officials, and embezzlers have no role in this official view. Yet, they exist just as much in China as anywhere else.
China and the Chinese are much more complex and multi-layered than any single official position. Chinese have been emigrating to the West since the mid-20th century, and there are large Chinese-ethnic populations living in Hong Kong and Taiwan, and throughout South-East Asia. Until 2020, most Hong Kong Chinese identified more with the West and western values than they did with the People’s Republic based in Beijing, and the people of Taiwan mostly feel that they have more values in common with the west than with Beijing, which is why a majority now identify themselves as Taiwanese instead of Chinese. In the US, this is made more complex by the different waves of Chinese emigration: early Chinese emigrants in the 19th century were mainly poor and illiterate peasants from Guangdong province. In the early 20th century, during the Chinese Exclusion Act, the only Chinese admitted were smart Chinese seeking higher-education in American universities. In the 1970s and 1980s, most Chinese immigrants came from Taiwan, while beginning in the 1990s, most immigrants came from the People’s Republic. Now, most younger Chinese come to the US to earn a graduate or undergraduate degree, and then return to China to seek a job. These different groups came from different social strata, had different levels of education, and often did not speak mutually-comprehensible Chinese languages or dialects. To outsiders, they were all Chinese, but among themselves, they were often as different as Germans from Italians.
Most Chinese have a reputation for being hard-workers, and have not spent much time telling their own stories. This began to change in the early nineties in the US with the publication of the Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan, which later became a popular movie. This reinforced the positive image of hardworking and smart Chinese women, willing to do anything and put up with any humiliation to help their next generation succeed in American society.
In every society and culture, crime carries a stigma, and this is especially the case in Chinese society, which values education, relationships and often, government service as the path to success. In order to make organized crime and rebellion more socially acceptable, rebels are usually presented as seekers of justice against corrupt local officials, or a ruling dynasty. The Story of the Three Kingdoms and The Water Margin all tell versions of this Chinese Robin Hood story. In almost all Chinese historical narratives, Chinese dynasties start by overthrowing a corrupt dynasty, ruled by a new emperor who uses strong measures to establish a new and uncorrupt dynasty with lofty ideals. Gradually, with the passage of time, the new dynasty’s ruling family and officials become lazy and corrupt, and the cycle repeats itself.
In Chinese politics, and especially today, it has never been a good idea for a Chinese to publicly criticize the ruling government because that would likely result in retribution not only against the individual, but against his family. In order to get around this barrier, smart critics would often cloak their criticism of the current government by writing historical novels which criticize past governments for corruption, not the current one.
This was the case with Jin Yong 金庸 (Louis Cha) and his martial arts novels, which he started publishing in Hong Kong in the 1950s. These novels had rebel-hero leading characters fighting to protect their communities and their values from corrupt local officials and merchants. These martial arts novels were later made into movies, launching Hong Kong as a center for kung-fu, and later, detective movies.
The problem with most criminals, not just Chinese criminals, is that they don’t document what they do, for very obvious reasons. A lot of the time, they are just too busy making money. In the US, this changed with the publication of The Godfather and the release of The Godfather movies in the 1970s. The career of movie director Martin Scorcese is largely based on telling organized crime stories. Italy has a very rich history of organized crime, but most outsiders knew little about it until Roberto Saviano wrote Gomorrah, which was followed by a popular television series of the same name.
Chinese Crime will tell stories about the unofficial side of China, and the unofficial stories I have collected in the past, and am continuing to research. In China, the demarcation between lawful and unlawful is not a sharp line but more often a very broad gray area. Fiction often has a basis in fact, and when governments change, what was once generally accepted as fact is frequently revealed to be fiction. Smart criminals are usually very clever people who have engaging stories to tell. Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, was a mathematics genius. Reading his manifesto, Industrial Society and Its Future, he predicted many of the current problems with the Internet, especially social media. (The phraseology he used identified him to his brother, who contacted the FBI.)
Keep in mind that the word crime in English is based on societies with criminal and civil codes which go back a long time in history. In China, much of what is enforced are based on government directives instead of legal code. This means that in today’s China, government policy can be changed more quickly than in the West, giving Chinese government leaders more flexibility to make quick adjustments, especially with regard to business and economic development. The downside is that Chinese citizens have less protection, especially when it comes to property rights like eminent domain. But even then, Chinese have found ways to work the system.
A murder in China is just the same as a murder anywhere else. In practice though, the murder investigation may very well depend on who was murdered and who is the accused murderer? As you will see in Chinese Crime, a lead investigator who is not sensitive to this issue is not likely to remain a lead investigator for very long.
Until Chinese Crime, most of these stories have been largely unnoticed outside the Chinese-speaking world. I hope that you find these stories at a minimum entertaining and, at best, insightful.