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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Fachliteratur
- Serie: China Today
- Sprache: Englisch
China is a transitional society with one of the highest inequality rates in the world. Criminologists would typify this as a highly toxic combination, creating very high levels of crime. Yet China reports extremely low crime rates. How might this be?
With this book, Børge Bakken shows that the reality in China does not match the rosy picture of low crime and rule-by-law that the authorities present to the world. Looking beyond the statistics, Bakken discovers that violent crime is a particularly ‘sensitive issue’, deliberately censored by party propaganda and by an unaccountable police force that can ‘vanish’ any type of crime to a degree that makes a ‘crime rate’ a mere formality. As Bakken reveals, official Chinese crime statistics cannot be used to make assumptions about China's crime profile. Even the assumption that crime represents the problem and control its solution is not valid, Bakken argues. Because when control becomes part of the problem, the false assumption of a ‘harmonious society’ evaporates, rendering ‘harmony’ a myth and violence the traumatic reality.
This meticulous investigation of crime and justice in China is crucial reading for those interested in the Chinese regime and China's state control, as well as criminologists and sociologists of crime.
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Seitenzahl: 512
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
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Table of Contents
Cover
Series Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Figures and Tables
Figures
Tables
Map
Chronology
Introduction
数字
Shùzì
Numbers1: The Manipulation of Chinese Crime Statistics
Faking Statistics: From the Crimes of the Little Man to the Crimes of Power
From ‘Maoist Ratios’ to the Law for Statistical Work
Managerialist Ideology and Ideological Propaganda
创伤
Chuāngshāng
Trauma2: The Historical Patterns of Crime, Violence and Trauma
Civilization Theory and Long-term Trends in Homicide
History, Homicide and Modernization: Contrasting Europe and China
Violence and Trauma in China in Historical Perspective
排斥
Páichì
Exclusion3: Transition, Inequality and Exclusion: Two Kinds of People
The Gini Coefficient and the Link between Inequality, Violent Crime and Homicide
The Link between Inequality and Violence
Migration and Polarization: From Blaming the Poor to Exclusion Theory
Two Kinds of People: The Migrant Poor of China’s Industrial Revolution
Half a Billion Migrants and the
Hukou
System: China’s Form of ‘Apartheid’
Urban Villages: Slums or Areas ‘Awaiting Prosperity’?
Otherness and Exclusion Start Early: China’s Left-behind Children
Migration, Violent Crime and Victimization
Poverty, Exclusion and Execution
监视
Jiānshì
Surveillance4: Big Brother, Big Bucks and Big Data: The Chinese Surveillance State
Market Rationality, International Capital and Camera Surveillance
‘Keep Smiling’: Selling the Bitter Pill of Surveillance to a Sceptical Public
The Myth of an All-embracing ‘Digital Dictatorship’
Legal and Human Rights Issues Related to Surveillance Technology
Managerialism Revisited: The Irrationalities of Stability Maintenance (
Weiwen
)
Grid Management: The ‘Boots on the Ground’ of Surveillance
Detention, Policing and Extra-legal ‘Dirty Policing’ in China
Notes
严厉
Yánlì
Harshness5: ‘Hard Strikes’ and Moral Panics: The Craze of Anti-Crime Campaigns
Moral Panics and Age Invariance Theory
Moral Panics, Demography and Age Invariance Theory
The Social Construction of Crisis and the Politics of ‘Harshness’
正义
Zhèngyì
Justice6: Legal Hierarchies, Punitive Practices and Changing Norms
Punitive Norms in History and Modernity: Europe, America and China
Mercy and Violence in Chinese Legal History
The Present System of Justice and Injustice: A Fit for Truth and Reconciliation?
The Legal Uses of Death and the Norms of Legal Personnel
The Power of Norms and the Fading Popular Support for Capital Punishment
Status Hierarchies Revisited: Penal Elitism and Changing Popular Norms
Cultural Core Values or Modern Norm Cascades?
7: Concluding Remarks
References
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Tables
Chapter 2
Table 2.1:
Official and restricted homicide data for the PRC 2000–2003
Chapter 5
Table 5.1:
Juveniles aged 14–25 as percentage of total population 1953–2020
List of Illustrations
Chapter 1
Figure 1.1:
Official crime numbers and case clearance rates in China 1981–2020
Chapter 2
Figure 2.1:
Long-term historical trends in violent crime
Figure 2.2:
The ‘inverted U-curve’ of official homicide cases in China from 19...
Chapter 3
Figure 3.1:
Trends in Gini coefficient of family income in China and the United States
Figure 3.2:
Gini coefficients for selected provinces in China in 2017
Figure 3.3:
Income distribution and intentional homicide rates 1965–1994
Figure 3.4:
Victimization of resident population and migrant population in Tianzhi city (vio...
Chapter 4
Figure 4.1:
Expenditure on public security in China from 2010 to 2020, by government level
Figure 4.2:
Control zone with a smile
Figure 4.3:
Correlation between number of CCTV cameras and crime index
Figure 4.4:
A single unit of an urban grid with (in the original) colour-coded sections, str...
Chapter 5
Figure 5.1:
The age invariance curve: criminal offenders in England and Wales 1842/43/44 by ...
Figure 5.2:
The age invariance curve: proportion of arrests per total population for differe...
Figure 5.3:
The Chinese age invariance curve: proportion of cases per total population for o...
Figure 5.4:
The Chinese population pyramid 2020
Chapter 6
Figure 6.1:
Support for the death penalty by level of education
Figure 6.2:
General support for the death penalty in China by levels of belief in its effect...
Figure 6.3:
Gallup poll opinion survey on death penalty attitudes in the United States 1940...
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Series Title
China Today series
Richard P. Appelbaum, Cong Cao, Xueying Han, Rachel Parker and Denis Simon,
Innovation in China
Greg Austin,
Cyber Policy in China
Børge Bakken,
Crime and Control in China: The Myth of Harmony
Yanjie Bian,
Guanxi: How China Works
Jeroen de Kloet and Anthony Y. H. Fung,
Youth Cultures in China
Steven M. Goldstein,
China and Taiwan
David S. G. Goodman,
Class in Contemporary China
Stuart Harris,
China’s Foreign Policy
William R. Jankowiak and Robert L. Moore,
Family Life in China
Elaine Jeffreys with Haiqing Yu,
Sex in China
Michael Keane,
Creative Industries in China
Daniel Large,
China and Africa
Joe C. B. Leung and Yuebin Xu,
China’s Social Welfare
Hongmei Li,
Advertising and Consumer Culture in China
Orna Naftali,
Children in China
Eva Pils,
Human Rights in China
Pitman B. Potter,
China’s Legal System
Pun Ngai,
Migrant Labor in China
Xuefei Ren,
Urban China
Nancy E. Riley,
Population in China
Janette Ryan,
Education in China
Judith Shapiro,
China’s Environmental Challenges 2nd edition
Alvin Y. So and Yin-wah Chu,
The Global Rise of China
Teresa Wright,
Party and State in Post-Mao China
Teresa Wright,
Popular Protest in China
Jie Yang,
Mental Health in China
You Ji,
China’s Military Transformation
LiAnne Yu,
Consumption in China
Xiaowei Zang,
Ethnicity in China
CRIME AND CONTROL IN CHINA
THE MYTH OF HARMONY
Børge Bakken
polity
Copyright Page
Copyright © Børge Bakken 2023
The right of Børge Bakken to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2023 by Polity Press
Polity Press
65 Bridge Street
Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press
111 River Street
Hoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-6317-3
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-6318-0(pb)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022935167
by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NL
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
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Figures and Tables
FIGURES
1.1: Official crime numbers and case clearance rates in China 1981–2020
2.1: Long-term historical trends in violent crime
2.2: The ‘inverted U-curve’ of official homicide cases in China from 1981 to 2017
3.1: Trends in Gini coefficient of family income in China and the United States
3.2: Gini coefficients for selected provinces in China in 2017
3.3: Income distribution and intentional homicide rates 1965–1994
3.4: Victimization of resident population and migrant population in Tianzhi city (violent crime)
4.1: Expenditure on public security in China from 2010 to 2020, by government level
4.2: Control zone with a smile
4.3: Correlation between number of CCTV cameras and crime index
4.4: A single unit of an urban grid with (in the original) colour-coded sections, street names and sub-districts
5.1: The age invariance curve: criminal offenders in England and Wales 1842/43/44 by age and sex
5.2:The age invariance curve: proportion of arrests per total population for different types of crime (USA 1940, 1980 and 2010)
5.3: The Chinese age invariance curve: proportion of cases per total population for overall crime (PRC 2000)
5.4: The Chinese population pyramid 2020
6.1: Support for the death penalty by level of education
6.2: General support for the death penalty in China by levels of belief in its effectiveness
6.3: Gallup poll opinion survey on death penalty attitudes in the United States 1940–2020
TABLES
2.1: Official and restricted homicide data for the PRC 2000–2003
5.1: Juveniles aged 14–25 as percentage of total population 1953–2020
Map
Chronology
1894–5
First Sino–Japanese War
1911
Fall of the Qing dynasty
1912
Republic of China established under Sun Yat-sen
1927
Split between Nationalists (KMT) and Communists (CCP); civil war begins
1934–5
CCP under Mao Zedong evades KMT in Long March
December 1937
Nanjing Massacre
1937–45
Second Sino–Japanese War
1945–9
Civil war between KMT and CCP resumes
October 1949
KMT retreats to Taiwan; Mao founds People’s Republic of China (PRC)
1949–53
Height of landlord purge during ‘land reform’ (
tugai
土改) movement
1950–3
Korean War
1953–7
First Five-Year Plan; PRC adopts Soviet-style economic planning
1954
First constitution of the PRC and first meeting of the National People’s Congress
1956–7
Hundred Flowers Movement, a brief period of open political debate
1957
Anti-Rightist Movement
1958
Household registration (
hukou
户口) system introduced
1958–60
Great Leap Forward, an effort to transform China through rapid industrialization and collectivization
March 1959
Tibetan Uprising in Lhasa; Dalai Lama flees to India
1959–61
Three Hard Years, widespread famine with tens of millions of deaths
1960
Sino–Soviet split
1962
Sino–Indian War
October 1964
First PRC atomic bomb detonation
1966–76
Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution; Mao reasserts power
February 1972
President Richard Nixon visits China; ‘Shanghai Communiqué’ pledges to normalize US–China relations
September 1976
Death of Mao Zedong
October 1976
Ultra-Leftist Gang of Four arrested and sentenced
December 1978
Deng Xiaoping assumes power; launches Four Modernizations and economic reforms
1978
One-child family planning policy introduced
1979
US and China establish formal diplomatic ties;
Deng Xiaoping visits Washington
1979
PRC invades Vietnam
1979
PRC’s first post-1949 substantive Criminal Law and Criminal Procedure Law enacted
1982
Census reports PRC population at more than one billion
1983
Deng regime launches first ‘hard strikes against crime’ campaign (
yanli daji yanzhong xingshi fanzui huodong
, 严厉打击严重刑事犯罪活动) or yanda (严打)
December 1984
Margaret Thatcher co-signs Sino–British Joint Declaration agreeing to return Hong Kong to China in 1997
1989
Tiananmen Square protests culminate in 4 June military crack-down
1992
Deng Xiaoping’s Southern Inspection Tour re-energizes economic reforms
1993–2002
Jiang Zemin is president of PRC, continues economic growth agenda
May 1996
First ‘Statistics Law of the People’s Republic of China’ (formulated in December 1983) adopted
November 2001
WTO accepts China as member
2002–12
Hu Jintao, General-Secretary CCP (and president of PRC from 2003 to 2013)
2002–3
SARS outbreak concentrated in PRC and Hong Kong
2006
PRC supplants US as largest CO
2
emitter
January 2007
The Chinese Supreme People’s Court centralizes death penalty decisions by reviewing decisions taken by lower courts
August 2008
Summer Olympic Games in Beijing
2010
Shanghai World Exposition
February 2011
China officially becomes the world’s second largest economy
2012
Xi Jinping appointed General-Secretary of the CCP (and president of PRC from 2013)
September 2013
Bo Xilai sentenced to life in prison for bribe-taking, 15 years for embezzlement and 7 years for abuse of power
2014
Collapse of global commodity prices begins
June 2015
Zhou Yongkang sentenced to life in prison for bribery, abuse of power and the intentional disclosure of state secrets
January 2016
Economic growth in China falls to lowest rate in 25 years (6.9%)
October 2017
The 19th CCP Congress is held; Xi Jinping’s ideology and the Belt and Road Initiative are incorporated into revised CCP constitution
March 2018
National People’s Congress votes to remove two-term limit on China’s presidency from the constitution
June 2019
Anti-government and pro-democracy demonstrations in Hong Kong
1 October 2019
Celebrations mark the 70th anniversary of the founding of the PRC
2020
Outbreak of Covid-19 in Hubei spreads globally (January–)
30 June 2020
The 13th National People’s Congress imposes the Hong Kong national security law covering secession and subversion under Article 18 of the Basic Law
Introduction
The Chinese expression ‘harmony’ (hexie 和谐) is central in Chinese propaganda and it is central in this book. The Chinese character he (和) means ‘kind’ or ‘gentle’ in addition to ‘harmonious’, even ‘peace’ or ‘tranquillity’. Xie (谐) means ‘in harmony’ or ‘to come to an agreement’. The present meaning of hexie, however, is a purely political concept in China today.
Control itself has become indistinguishable from the crimes it was meant to prevent. Delia Lin has written a sociolinguistic analysis of the political uses and misuses of words in China, tracing the word hexie back to Confucian times as focusing on obedience and order instead of kindness and gentleness. The historical meaning of ‘harmony’ as obedience is enhanced by present political realities: ‘“Harmony”, in the Confucian paradigm, may be best understood as a non-resistant, self-conscious acceptance and observance [of the “rituals” or rules] of li embedded with hierarchical order. In many cases, it refers to an amenable obedience to the hierarchical order devoid of riots and intense conflicts’ (Lin, 2017b: 19). Lin describes how the political uses of words sometimes render them virtually useless for common conversation. She argues that this constitutes a form of ‘pan-politicization’ of words, generating linguistic defiance or fatigue: ‘Typically, when the political importance of the pan-politicized keyword is repeatedly reinforced, people begin to tire of the keyword and its derived vocabulary. They start to generate a “psychology of defiance” or nifan xinli (逆反心理)’ (Lin, 2017b: 109). This defiance again leads to a form of ‘pan-politicization fatigue’ (fanzhengzhi pilao 泛政治疲劳). Consequently, the keyword suffers a continuing decline of interest from the public as it becomes increasingly meaningless. When this happens, the state must strengthen the political campaign to arouse further interest in the pan-politicization project.
This is clearly what happened with the Party’s concept ‘harmonious society’ (hexie shehui 和谐社会). This is one of the reasons I speak of ‘harmony’ as a myth, because it isn’t even meant to describe social well-being, kindness and peace in any meaningful sense. ‘Harmony’ is simply classic doublespeak – although the traditional philosophy would not regard it as such – and serves as a synonym of control and obedience to the order itself. It is the Party’s harmony and order that is at stake here.
‘To harmonize’ could also be translated as ‘to bring (everything and everyone) in line’. In the vocabulary of politics, Gleichschaltung was a politicized expression of the German Nazi regime. All institutions were ‘gleichgeschaltet’ or ‘brought into line’. The German word originally came from the science of electrical engineering and meant that the current only flows in one direction in perfect order. The word died with the Nazi regime and is no longer in use. ‘Harmony’ has the same meaning in China and is equally politicized as one of the keywords in the current propaganda of ‘stability maintenance’. The degree of violence mobilized to uphold that power is a subject that adds massively to overall violence in China rather than being a means to pacify violence. The greatest crime is still seen as bending the Party’s rule of political ‘harmony’.
There is also another reason why I call ‘harmony’ a myth. This has to do with numbers – shuzi (数字). Crime rates represent highly sensitive information in China. Politics and propaganda rule the game instead of the scientific recording of statistical truths. To Mark Twain’s famous line ‘lies, damned lies and statistics’ should be added ‘Chinese crime statistics’. Unfortunately, too many commentators have taken Chinese official crime statistics for granted, not paying heed to the massive problems related to the hidden numbers. I claim that, sadly, the system is rigged from top to bottom, creating false statistics on all levels.
From central propaganda departments to local administrative police performance practices, crime numbers are manipulated in uncountable ways. The analyses made by scholars trying to make sense of the numbers simply cannot be trusted. We can only apply some of the better tools of social science to smoke out some of the unlikely numbers found in China. For instance, it is impossible to have one of the highest global inequality measures plus an extremely high rate of stranger homicides, and yet claim one of the lowest homicide rates in the world. The correlation between inequality and homicide is one of the strongest we have in the science of criminology. Yet Chinese data seem to defy such scientific analysis. It is not because of some Chinese ‘exceptionalism’; that China defies scientific scrutiny because of some hidden ‘cultural’ reason. It is merely because the official data are wrong. Some data are even handled as official ‘state secrets’, like the execution rates, and need not even be falsified to be concealed from view.
‘Harmony’ also comes in the form of ‘harmonized crime rates’. Do we have the real numbers? None of us does, but my aim is to reveal some of the methods and practices that lead to the false crime rates and to show that violent crime is much more common than the official data claim. This book may be seen as a ‘crime novel’ that seeks evidence from details that power wants to keep concealed from investigation and insight. We do have methods and research that take apart some of the false numbers. Much information comes from fieldwork and observation, and a lot has been contributed by internal sources and individual research carried out by excellent researchers inside the system itself. Valuable information trickles down to those who care to take notice.
I will highlight some of the issues I address here, starting with the falsified numbers. Not only are the statistics of criminal violence falsified. Even historical events of state violence are erased from the books. I argue that China is a traumatized nation after decades, even centuries, of violence systematically denied or downplayed by the power holders. China has experienced a violence–trauma–violence cycle that can only be broken by a process of truth and reconciliation. Thus, trauma – chuangshang (创伤) – becomes an important element in our discussion. Political reconciliation, however, seems impossible in the present political climate since such a process requires a judicial system that is both independent and accountable.
When it comes to criminal street violence, we must seek the main causes of such violence in China’s transitional character. China’s transition into modernity has seen changes even surpassing the mighty Western Industrial Revolution. This development includes both massive economic growth and massive social injustices. China has developed from ‘egalitarian poverty’ into what Thomas Piketty has called a ‘Dickensian capitalism’. Some may call it a neo-liberal trickle-down economy, a model known to create massive inequality. Others have called it ‘market Stalinism’ focusing on the strict control regime.
Chapter 3 discusses the phenomenon of exclusion – paichi (排斥). We know from criminology that inequality and exclusion directly cause crime and violent crime given specific social circumstances. Chinese propaganda even plays with Marxist concepts like ‘primitive accumulation’, justifying Preobrazhensky’s dubious concept of a necessary ‘socialist primitive accumulation’ or ‘socialist exploitation’. The social circumstances that created transitional violence in China have also led to the establishment of ‘two kinds of people’, triggered by the ‘household registration’ or hukou (户口) system. This system has effectively created a division between those with a rural and those with an urban hukou, practically dividing people into urban ‘haves’ and rural ‘have-nots’. It has also formed an army of half a billion internal migrant workers without proper rights. One of China’s leading historians, Qin Hui, has compared the situation in today’s China to the ‘racial socialism’ of apartheid South Africa (Qin, 2013a). The fact that South Africa and the People’s Republic of China are involved in a tragic contest of being the most unequal society globally cannot be ignored. The intimate link between inequality, violent crime and homicide cannot be bypassed when we analyse the causes of crime in transitional and unequal Chinese society. China does not copy the experiences of Western historical criminology but has followed its own path to modernity and crime.
While the first three chapters discuss the hidden numbers and the causes of violence and crime, the subsequent three chapters discuss different aspects of the control system. Surveillance – jianzhi (监视) – has become a defining entity for the Chinese control state. What has been termed China’s ‘digital dictatorship’ is motivated by ‘big bucks, Big Brother and big data’, meaning that both the enormous profit rates of the security sector and the Orwellian take on ‘harmony’ and control trigger the brave new world of big data control. While the repressive effects of this system should not be underestimated, particularly in the border areas of Tibet and Xinjiang, the brittleness of this regime should also be emphasized. The ‘boots on the ground’ are flawed and lacking in motivation, while bureaucratic managerialist performance criteria fail to uphold effective control. We see through surveillance and grid-policing that what may seem all-powerful on paper is fraught with internal contradictions and problems that erode control.
Harshness – yanli (严厉) – is the key concept of chapter 5. The ‘hard-strikes against crime’ – the so-called yanda (严打) campaigns – replaced the political violence of the 1950s and 1960s, making China into a legal execution machine after the Deng reforms. The ‘strike-hard’ campaign of 1983/84 killed tens of thousands of mainly alleged juvenile criminals in an elite-engendered ‘moral panic’ that the world has seldom seen the likes of. It had no deterrent effect as crime just increased after each campaign. Not only can the campaign be seen as a massive elite-engendered moral panic; it denied the obvious scientific explanation of the demographic causes of an imagined ‘crime wave’ only to secure the political power of the new leader. Even Deng Xiaoping’s own legal reforms were systematically set aside during these campaigns, as Deng himself scorned those who argued for ‘accuracy’ in legal sentencing. The ‘strike-hard’ campaigns were not mainly about crime control, but a systematic return to the excesses of past political violence extending the violence–trauma–violence spiral into modernity. Such campaigns are still in use, most notably in Xinjiang, where the harshest control is implemented.
The final chapter, justice – zhengyi (正义) – is about missed opportunities. The elements of change already existed during the dynasties in institutionalized systems of mercy and leniency. Such opportunities were utilized by the French revolution to generalize a more lenient and just system for the people. In China the revolution in 1949 failed to change the feudal power structure, continuing the ‘ultra-stable’ cycles of the feudal past, failing to solve the violence–trauma–violence cycle in the present. The existence of an independent justice system that would be necessary for any reconciliation and true ‘harmony’ in China failed to emerge. Contrary to independent justice and separations of power, there is instead the ‘harmony’ between the three branches of the judiciary – the police, the procuracy and the courts, the ‘iron-triangle of the gong-jian-fa (公检法)’ – that dominates the judiciary today. Politics and power can still overrule any court decision, as in the dynastic system of ‘high justice’ versus ‘low justice’. High justice was about the legitimacy and moral superiority of the ruler, showing leniency to the elite. The common person paid the price in the form of ‘low justice’, meaning exploitation and harsh punishments. The only hope of reconciliation seems to lie in replacing the ‘exemplary norms’ introduced from above with social norms from below. I will use the ‘norms of death’ – the rapidly dwindling support for capital punishment in China – to indicate that norms may be ‘stronger than all the armies in the world’, as once claimed by Victor Hugo. Norms work silently and meticulously. One cannot kill an idea whose time has come. It may not be utopian to claim that the hope of change lies in the social norm rather than in the system of power.
Writing a book on crime and control in China involves several approaches I must emphasize. First, the approach must be comparative. The importance of comparative research in criminology cannot be overstated. Archer and Gartner’s classic book in the field claimed that: ‘the need for cross-national comparisons seems particularly acute for research on crime and violence since national differences on these phenomena are of a remarkable magnitude’ (Archer and Gartner, 1984: 4). Zimring and Johnson analysed the leading international criminology journals from 1990 to 2000 and found that the proportion of articles with ‘any kind of international/comparative focus’ varied from 6 to 11 per cent only (Zimring and Johnson, 2007: 471).
The second aspect to remember is to leave behind the bad habit of looking at crime in one country at one time in history and instead use a more comprehensive historical analysis. Even talking about China without a historical context is beginning to lose the full picture. Context also plays a role in a multi-disciplinary approach, and China cannot be understood without a political context. Violence also cannot be confined to the violence of the streets. Criminology must take state violence seriously, and we need to apply an analysis that takes historical state violence into consideration in a criminological setting. I argue that such violence has led to traumatic experiences that do not disappear by denial and erasure in the name of narrowly defined ‘harmony’. The focus of this book is crime and control in China, but the reader will encounter discussions of a global, political and historical character as well as a narrower discussion of crime and control on the ground in today’s China.
数字ShùzìNumbers1 The Manipulation of Chinese Crime Statistics
When we look at Chinese crime through the prism of statistics, we see dubious numbers that have little to do with the reality of crime in the country. There are many reasons for this, and I will try to map out some of them here and in later chapters because this is quite crucial when it comes to trying to paint a picture of what is going on in the country in terms of crime and control. All crime statistics have flaws. In China, however, the fake statistics are closely linked to the way in which the control and justice system is operating, and sometimes it is hard to say where the lack of accountability and the power manipulations start and where they end. Statistics, crime and justice are all at the mercy of a Kafkaesque bureaucracy and an Orwellian propagandistic control structure. In addition, an increasing commercialization and managerialist regime of control introduces a set of business-like procedures dictating how the statistical data are used and how the criminal justice system operates. The system functions more like a politicized and bureaucratized business model, with incentives and punishments to encourage the actors in the system to achieve certain goals following a different logic than that of seeking truth and justice. Faking the statistical facts is but one of the ways in which this system conceals the real situation of crime in China, making it impossible to understand fully the real situation of crime and control in the country. In other words, nobody knows these facts, not this author, nor any other scholar, probably not even the top leadership in China. Nevertheless, we can sometimes find real data, sometimes we can make calculated ‘guesstimates’, and sometimes we have statistical procedures and scientific correlations in the science of criminology that can serve as litmus tests and reveal some of what is fake and what is real in the picture that is presented to us. This text aims to find such signs of life in the dense and sometimes impenetrable jungle of what is termed ‘Chinese crime and control’. In the following, I will use both existing and hidden data, but always with due caution.
As already indicated, although the Chinese situation is probably extreme, the manipulation of crime data is known throughout the world. For many different reasons police themselves have rational as well as irrational incentives to fake the crime numbers. This problem started to attract international academic interest in the early 1960s (Kitsuse and Cicourel, 1963) and light has continually been shed on the issue since, both in the media and in criminological research (Maguire, 2012). Using their discretionary power, police can manipulate crime numbers by deliberately misclassifying offences. They can effectively reduce crime rates by downgrading crimes from felonies to misdemeanours or refrain from recording them at all (Eterno and Silverman, 2012; Eterno and Verma, 2016). At the police station level, reducing crime numbers to manipulate the evaluation of police performance has been observed through the prism of organizational managerialism (Young, 1991; Bottomley and Coleman, 2009). Such managerialism is running rampant in the Chinese police force today. Manipulating the numbers upwards is a well-known phenomenon and has been used to gain more resources for the police (Maguire, 2012). Corruptly decreasing or increasing crime statistics for political reasons is also a well-known phenomenon. As early as the late 1980s Chinese officials talked in private about crime rates four to five times higher than the official numbers, but the focus was then on petty crime rather than serious and violent crime (Dutton and Lee, 1993). Today the situation is even more serious in terms of the contrast between officially recorded and hidden numbers of crime.
Studies in the field have often been characterized by misunderstandings based on false official information. At the turn of the millennium, some scholars spoke of ‘three waves’ of crime in China based on random official data showing fictitious indications of ‘crime waves’. Such assumptions were mere fantasies based on official statistics that were changing randomly in the first decades after the market reforms started in the 1980s. For example, when millions of bicycle thefts – a dominant form of theft in China – were changed from a legal standpoint from constituting a crime to being a mere offence and taken out of the theft statistics around the mid-1990s, the overall crime rates fell drastically since theft normally makes up 80 per cent of the total crime rate in most countries. Others even tried to create theories of a specific Chinese ‘crime profile’ based on equally inaccurate numbers. The only thing we can say with certainty is that we do not know the real crime rates in China and that we have few reasons to take the numbers we are presented with as anything even remotely close to the actual situation of crime.
Random campaigns orchestrated ‘hard strikes’ against crime, which made ghost targets based more on fear and moral panics than on any theoretical understanding of crime. The Communist Party’s approach to crime in the late 1970s and early 1980s was about ‘extermination’. Crime should be completely eradicated during socialism, and this utopian idea lasted far into the market reforms and budding capitalist society that gradually emerged in China. When eradication proved impossible, reducing crime rates became politically correct whether the reduction was real or imagined. The deflation of crime statistics in China became increasingly problematic as the crime rates soared (Yu and Zhang, 1999). Chinese crime falsification is multi-faceted: political, administrative, judicial and managerial. From the lower ranges of policing through the local administration, through central and local propaganda, crime rates were massaged to save face and gain legitimacy for a Party that needed to show the successes of creating ‘harmony’.
It is clear that the official crime rate figures are false to exaggerate the impression of social harmony. I was interviewed about Chinese crime by the BBC a few years ago, and I tried to map out a few of the problems of crime and crime statistics. The journalist seemed to like my conclusion more than my analysis when I quoted Mark Twain’s old saying (some trace it back to Benjamin Disraeli), that there are three kinds of lies: ordinary lies, damned lies and statistics, and I added Chinese crime statistics to that famous line. That was about all the journalist published from my rather elaborate analysis. The result, as might have been expected, was attacks on Chinese social media. The commentators’ anger was justified because the journalist had skipped my entire analysis, just mentioning the catchy punchline on lies. Let me now take the opportunity to explain in more detail how we can understand the phenomenon of fake crime statistics.
In some cases, internal data represent the smoking gun, in other cases interviews, scientific correlations, good criminology and organizational theory can help us understand the situation better. Statistics that deal with demography are also not entirely precise in China but are much more accurate than the systematically fake numbers in the sensitive area of crime. We have fairly clear correlations in criminology between inequality and crime, age and crime, etc., that can reveal some of the situation based on criminological scientific findings. I will examine more closely such findings to paint a more truthful picture of the situation. Even if this is the only scientific way to analyse the problem, the real crime numbers will in some cases be calculated ‘guesstimates’, but such guesstimates provide a much better basis for analysis than the obviously faked official statistics, even if we have to pay some attention to the latter as well. We may never find the accurate numbers, but we can begin to reveal possible trends. The international police organization Interpol long ago stopped publishing international crime statistics as a basis for international comparison because the official statistics they received simply did not compare apples with apples. The international data on crime were often both useless and meaningless.
When I taught criminology, I used to tell my students that there are basically three different ways to estimate crime rates. You can ask the police who provide the basis for official crime rates; you can ask the perpetrator what crimes he or she has committed; or you can ask the victim what kinds of crime he or she has been exposed to. The most accurate way of estimating the real existence of crime is of course the so-called victim surveys. Victims do not always talk openly about their victimhood, but they tell a much more honest story than the perpetrators who sometimes tell us, even boast, of the crimes committed, although they tend to hide the numbers much more than the victims in their self-reports on crime. The police give the most inaccurate numbers of all. This is a phenomenon we recognize in criminology all over the globe, but that does not mean that all data are equally inaccurate. Some countries have proper research reports contradicting and discussing official data, some have proper victim surveys, some seem to accept the inaccurate and massaged official data only.
As already mentioned, in China the data on crime are often seen as a ‘sensitive area’ that should be concealed from the public and is systematically covered up. Still, there are islands of good research in China even if such research is often marginalized and overlooked. This book does not pretend to have the ultimate ‘answer’ about Chinese crime, but the subtitle of the book, ‘The myth of harmony’, will be the leading thread in what follows. I will not weigh and discuss every theory in the criminology handbook here. Nor will I discuss all kinds of crime in China. Violence will be of particular interest. I will focus on some of the findings in criminology and organizational sociology that can reveal a bigger part of the picture called ‘Chinese crime and control’.
This will be a critical book meant to remove the layers of fake statistics and misunderstood analyses based on such flawed numbers. I make no apologies for digging up some of the fake realities we must unearth to understand the real situation. The concepts of ‘fake news’ and ‘alternative facts’ and the relativity of truth have always been a dubious issue in Chinese culture and philosophy, all the way back to Daoism and Legalism. I maintain that some of these traditional ‘thought patterns’ still have an important impact on the thinking of the present regime in China, and I have written about this in my previous work (Bakken, 2000). One such ‘thought pattern’ can be found in the ways truth and power coexist in Chinese thought.
The more sinister interpretation of the famous Daoist principle of wuwei (无为) or ‘inaction’ claims that it is irrelevant to find out what is true and what is false as reality doesn’t really matter. What matters is where the power decides to go and what our attitudes towards power should be. Of course, I am not claiming that Daoism is a philosophy of untruth as there is room for interpretation of merit in its origin. However, Daoism’s relativity of truth doctrine can easily be manipulated to be in tune with the dark heart of the punitive power doctrines of Legalism (fajia 法家) as argued by one of China’s leading historians, Qin Hui (Qin, 2019). The relativity of truth has been utilized by power holders for millennia. In the pre-Machiavellian Legalist tradition the central element of absolute power – shi (势) – always stood way above truth (Fu, 1996).
I mention this not to accuse ancient Chinese philosophy of responsibility for the present situation, but to illustrate the long roots and the historical basis of a justice system that is deeply entrenched in tradition, even though it has a definition firmly linked to the present one-party regime and its ideology. The argument is that the past always lives in the present in China, also in terms of today’s power through the country’s control and justice system. While history will be part of this discussion, however, the more recent history of the People’s Republic of China and its system of power and control is what interests us the most.
FAKING STATISTICS: FROM THE CRIMES OF THE LITTLE MAN TO THE CRIMES OF POWER
China has been an advanced civilization with an imperial power system for millennia, and statistical analysis was an important issue for the emperors throughout the dynastic period. Socio-economic data were recorded systematically during the shifting empires, especially in the areas of tax and population. Statistical accumulation was important for the success of any ancient dynasty. During the Maoist period, however, the gathering of statistics was either neglected completely or made into a political form. It has been commonly held that the Maoist period failed to create a modern system of governance because of this neglect of scientific methods of measuring socio-economic development (Li and Mo, 1993).
Xin Liu’s book The Mirage of China is a well-crafted history of the use of statistics in modern China that explains some of the problems I will try to apply to criminal statistics in this book. Liu is not using criminal statistics to clarify his points about fake statistics, but instead presents an explanation of how statistics have been used and abused in recent Chinese history, illustrating the systematic ideological concealment of facts and the muddled relations between the fanciful and the factual (Liu, 2009: 8). These are problems of extreme importance in order to understand that statistics are not objective truths anywhere, particularly not in the climate of present-day China. It is necessary to illuminate this massive problem to even begin to understand the real social problems in China, be they crime or any other social issue. Statistics are basically propaganda, but not propaganda only. It is a fine art to be able to manoeuvre through this conglomeration of abused data.
Although we can never find the accurate numbers, we can come pretty close in our estimates. We may have to apply what renowned criminologist Nils Christie once called the ‘humming method’ of working on crime statistics in an alien environment where accurate data do not exist. Christie used to suggest numbers of imprisoned populations to officials in the Soviet Union, Cuba and other countries with no official data in that field, and then evaluate the reaction of the government officials to test whether he was exaggerating or underestimating the numbers (Christie, 1993: 28). Some professionals in the police and statistics administration know much more than the official data permit them to reveal in writing, and I have tried to use some of these sources based not only on inaccurate ‘humming methods’ but also by getting real internal numbers from officials in the sector by telling them numbers I already know and asking them to comment on the statistics I present. In most cases, I have found that people in the statistical system, some of them high cadres, know very well that the official numbers are fake and why this is the case.
I must also correct some of my good colleagues who ended up using fake data to arrive at conclusions about the crime situation in China. It is most often an honest mistake, and I have fallen into that trap myself in my previous writing. In most cases, my colleagues are innocent in spreading Chinese propaganda through believing the fake data. Their theoretical assumptions would often have been correct if it were not for the fact that they take the fake statistics for granted – exactly what the regime wants them to do. Sometimes, the central Party may not have any direct impact, as local circumstances may conceal the real data even from the upper levels of the Party and Public Security hierarchy.
The Trump era introduced to everyone the concept of ‘alternative facts’ at a level never seen before in international debate. Trump also hinted at the issue of ‘harmony’ and deliberately withheld information about the negative effects of the Covid-19 virus ‘because he didn’t want to create a panic’ (Pontell et al., 2021: 205). Crime is a field especially prone to fake facts. We know that the fear of crime is often a major problem in any society. In China in particular, not publishing violent crime data has been used to uphold ‘harmony’ by massively deflating such data. We will discuss the following issue in much more detail later, but Zhou Yongkang, the security tsar who was removed by Xi Jinping for being involved in massive corruption (Bakken and Wang, 2021), virtually banned the publication of any truthful records of the real murder rates in China. This situation is paradoxically still dominating the fake murder statistics in China long after Zhou’s fall from grace. In China, crime statistics are also a matter of ‘face’ as much as they are a matter of ‘fact’.
The People’s Republic of China has a particularly dark history of statistics that also sheds light on another neglected issue of crime estimates in China: that of state crime through massive political violence. During the Land Reform campaigns in the early 1950s, the government declared that around 5 per cent of the population were political ‘rightists’ and against the socialist revolution. This started a campaign-like frenzy to find the 5 per cent in neighbourhoods and work units all over the entire country. Such ‘campaigns’ or yundong (运动) are, as we shall soon come back to, important political and administrative mechanisms of control in China to this day.
Mao himself set quotas for arrests and executions for this campaign. This ‘Maoist ratio’ was used to stir up mobilization of the masses in support of the government (Liu, 2009: 30). Such a rationality of proportionality was a crucial element of Maoist logic for the regime to define the new socialist reality and calling for popular mobilization. Such grisly relationships of the ratio to the total population took many lives when the campaign started to look for people to execute. The ‘Maoist ratio’ recommended that one in 1,000 of the population should be punished severely for their reactionary deeds and ideas, half of whom should be immediately publicly executed (Yang, 2008: 108). County gazetteer data later showed that the number in fact had become four in 1,000 of the population (Javed, 2017: 223). Estimates of the number of executions during the Chinese land reforms based on such random political ‘statistics’ range from a lower range of 200,000–800,000 (Stavis, 1978: 25–30) to estimates of two to five million executions, along with several millions sent to ’reform through labour’ (laogai 劳改) camps, where many more lost their lives (Roberts, 2006).
Talking about a ‘Maoist ratio’ may be a too neutral way of describing the political killing spree of the 1950s. One historical eyewitness to the atrocities names the practice more accurately as ‘killing quotas’ (Li, 2005). Li Changyu laments that, even if later rehabilitation of some of those labelled ‘counter-revolutionaries’ during the anti-rightist campaigns of the 1950s ‘may repair the reputations of the living, [it] can never restore the lives of those executed or persecuted to death under Mao’s capricious system of political quotas’ (Li, 2005). These campaigns and quotas always mushroomed out of control, but that did not seem to bother either Mao Zedong in the 1950s or Deng Xiaoping in the 1980s. People were killed for the sake of reaching pre-established campaign quotas as if dead bodies were a measure of success like production quotas normally are. On 30 April 1951, Mao himself talks about ‘executions’ in the same manner as ‘production’, commenting: ‘The principle is that in cases where blood debts are owed or in the presence of other extremely serious crimes, when failure to execute would mean popular indignation would go unassuaged, then the death sentence should be carried out without hesitation, in order to pacify popular indignation and improve production’. He comes back to the paying of blood debts again on 8 May 1951, saying that: ‘execution shall be confined to those who owe blood debts … which evoke public indignation’ (Li, 2005; Mao, 1951/1977: 54). A ‘blood debt’ was quantified as any other debt in this system of campaign-administered accounting.
This discussion of a ‘Maoist ratio’ or ‘killing quotas’ tells us something about the way in which numbers operate in China as well as telling us about the trauma following this numbers game. We will see how such issues define China in the following since violence rather than ‘harmony’ has characterized this system for decades. Numbers not only deceive; they also even kill, and the whole issue about ‘erasing’ numbers must be read in a wider context than the mere issue of individual crimes. During the Nuremberg trials, starting in 1945, the top Nazi leaders of the Third Reich were held responsible for the mass killings during the Second World War. In the opening inquest of the trial, it was established that: ‘Law shall not stop by the punishment of petty crimes by little people, it must also reach men who possess themselves of great power’ (WW2 ‘Nuremberg’, 1948).
In other words, to say anything significant about crime in China today, the crimes of the state must be included lest we completely miss the context of the real issues of harmony and violence. Thus, I will discuss not only the falsification of individual crime data, but also the systematic way in which state violence has been erased by the ‘men who possess themselves of great power’. In this light, state crime must also be part of the picture when discussing the falsification of crime data. Criminology should not be preoccupied with the crimes of ‘little people’ only. Much of the discussion in this book is about ‘ordinary crime by little people’, but the wider context must never be forgotten, and we must also look at the crimes of power. Criminology must cover issues of history as well as politics and power in the discussion of violence, particularly when ‘harmony’ is describing the very methods of state crime itself.
The grisly past of political and brutal rationality of the Maoist ‘killing quotas’ has luckily vanished in present-day China, but core elements of such ‘political statistics’ remain. The statistical rationality of today is to find growth rates and social data to inform the government on one side, but to still execute propaganda on the other side to ‘mobilize’ the population, leaving the seemingly irrational political residue of ‘political statistics’ intact. The Chinese bureaucracy was never a Weberian pure bureaucracy. In his famous classic Economy and Society, Max Weber defined a pure bureaucracy thus: ‘Bureaucracy means “without regard for persons”’ (Weber, 1922/1978: 975). ‘Its (the Bureaucracy’s) spirit can be described as sine ira et studio (without anger or passion)’ (Weber, 1922/1978: 225). The Maoist equivalent was based on the charisma and the personality cult of the Great Leader, and even if it was ‘without regard for persons’ in the extreme but in quite another sense than in the neutral and rational Weberian definition, it was not ‘without anger or passion’; it was full of them. Political passion became the rationale of Maoist politics as well as of the Maoist statistical killing ratio.
In his discussion of bureaucracy, Weber claimed that the politician and the entrepreneur were needed to serve as counterweights to curb the stifling effects of a potentially all-powerful bureaucracy. He would never have imagined the bureaucracy and the statistics of passion based on the political binary thinking that lay at the root of Maoist rationality. It is not a coincidence that the first article of Mao Zedong’s collected works starts like this: ‘Who are our enemies? Who are our friends? This is a question of the first importance for the revolution’ (Mao, 1926/1967: 13). It was all about the revolutionary passion of the early Maoist era. The binary thinking of campaigning and the political statistics continue to this day. The unscientific approach to reality dominating this period led among other things to the catastrophic Great Leap Forward, when political passion encouraged people to exaggerate the output of their production in order to demonstrate their political support and enthusiasm. According to Xin Liu:
This political passion or collective insanity, which cannot be easily understood from an ‘objective’ viewpoint beyond its historical boundaries, produced both sacrifice and accolades. It can also be argued that the lunatic ambience gave birth to a large pool of opportunistic encomiasts. During those years of zeal and violence, individuals had few alternatives but to follow the political prescriptions of the day. … The marriage of the official dream with the popular fantasy produced the deranged mass movement, in the course of which local officials made up inflated numbers for agricultural productivity and production in order to demonstrate their own loyalty and achievements. (Liu, 2009: 43, 44)
However much the zeal and violence may have disappeared at the level described in the historical examples given here, I repeat that the very alarming reality is that certain basics of this flawed rationality still remain: the authoritarianism, the lack of accountability, the opportunism, the concealment of facts, the binary thinking, the bureaucratic incentive systems; all these flaws in rationality have remained cornerstones in a system that is still based on the same basic flaws in thinking and practice that we saw during the years of high political passion. Crazes and panics are still inevitable effects, even intended basic methods, of such a system. While the extreme crazes and passions of the Maoist past may be gone, they can always come back in the form of some kind of nationalist zeal and violence in the future, but the panics are all there as we shall soon see in my discussion of the so-called ‘strike-hard campaigns against crime’ – or the so-called yanda (严打) campaigns instigated by Deng Xiaoping in 1983.
FROM ‘MAOIST RATIOS’ TO THE LAW FOR STATISTICAL WORK
We must revisit Deng Xiaoping – another of the central figures ‘who possesses great power’ – because he is seen by many as representing the sane voice against the zeal and passion of the past. As we shall also see, there is a kernel of truth in this, but only a kernel, in the argument for Dengist rationality. Among other things, Deng seemed to want to introduce a scientific and accurate form of statistical analysis in China, a system that could aid the reformed Party in understanding the real developments in society and the economy. He introduced a concept that now seems almost like a Gorbachevian glasnost argument in the years after the Cultural Revolution – shishi qiushi (实事求是) – ‘seeking truths from facts’. Even the Party’s theoretical journal was given the name Qiushi – ‘Seeking truth’. China suddenly saw legal reforms that introduced a system of statistics. ‘What should be’ would now be changed into ‘what is’. Facts and truth became words of honour. It was against the shadows of the politically passionate past with its crazes and panics that the Law for Statistical Work was established in 1983. The law was meant to guarantee the authority and legitimacy of official government statistics to prevent such catastrophes as the Great Leap Forward. The attention was turned towards the problem of legally governed official statistics. A new world of scientific accuracy and objective numbers was seen to be the way forward.
The government could now rationally come to sane decisions without the interference of mythical socialist utopias. Amendments to the law were added in 1996, and this version, with its 34 articles, was meant to oversee the efforts to set up a legal framework of statistical accountability. Article 2 explained that statistical work would now function like a supervising agency for the surveillance of socio-economic development, a key statement for Deng’s quest towards pragmatic economic development based on accurate facts. Article 3 made it absolutely clear that national institutions, social groups, industrial units and private enterprises ‘must not make up, hide, refuse to deliver, or delay in submitting statistical data. They must not fake or purposely change the statistical information’ (Liu, 2009: 46). The truth and truthfulness of statistical information should be secured by law. Illicit instruction or intimidation to falsify data that may come from superiors should be prevented by law. The law aimed to establish the authority of facts against the ideological errors of the Maoist past, and the concept of ‘objectivity’ or keguan xing (客观性) suddenly became a part of the political vocabulary. Deng had seen the efficiency of modern technology and regarded accurate statistics as a means to make new forms of authority, surveillance and planning possible in a modern society. After all, the People’s Republic saw its five-year plans as the basis of its political practice. Statistical facts should be truthfully reported and recorded in order for the Party to effectively implement correct policies. In addition to legalizing the system of statistics, from 1976 to 1986 the number of employees in statistical organizations increased ten-fold. This was the core of the new rationality of the Dengist reform period. However, a lot of what I discuss in the following could be covered by the phrase: ‘so what went wrong?’
Why do we suddenly see the old flaws come back into the system, making statistics revert to the credo of the past instead of the ratio of Deng’s alleged pragmatism? I think present-day China is neither Maoist nor Dengist any longer, but some of the original sins of the system are retained while some of the good reforms introduced by Deng seem to have been discarded. As we shall see later, Deng himself fell into the trap of political campaign rationality, paradoxically in the very same year that he introduced the Law for Statistical Work. Deng was clearly no Max Weber. In the historical paradox of the 1983 anti-crime campaigns, Deng Xiaoping had reverted to the logic of the ‘killing quotas’, pushing a moral panic against crime with nearly the same frenzy as in the recent ideological past, but now based on what was alleged to be ‘accurate demographic and criminal statistics’. In chapter 5, I will come back to the unfolding of this paradox, which can be described in criminological terminology as one of the biggest moral panics the world had experienced in the period after the Second World War.
