The Routledge Handbook of Chinese Criminology

Liqun Cao, Ivan Y. Sun, Bill Hebenton, Liqun Cao, Ivan Y. Sun, Bill Hebenton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780415500401
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135021450
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Strafrecht

As the world's second largest economy, China has made great progress in developing criminology. The Routledge Handbook of Chinese Criminology aims to be a key reference point to summarize the large body of literature in both Chinese and English about various aspects of crime and its control in China for international scholars with an interest in the development of criminological research on and in the Greater China region, and for everyone with a broad interest in international criminology.

The editors of the handbook have selected authoritative contributors recognized for their research and scholarship on China, Hong Kong Macao, and Taiwan. This handbook consists of five sections:

• An account of the development of criminology as an academic discipline in modern China, as well as some of the unique theories, strategies, or philosophies of crime control that have emerged,
• An analysis of the criminal justice system in China, including the police, the courts, corrections, juvenile justice and the death penalty,
• An exploration of the issues and problems in conducting research in China,
• Reflections on the nature of crime and criminality in China, including drugs, prostitution, human trafficking, corruption, floating population, domestic violence, and white-collar crime,
• An account of crime and criminal justice in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macao.

The book presents a coherent and comprehensive collection of essays on current research and theory in criminology, crime and justice in China and Greater China, and the Editors' Introduction and Conclusion provide further contextualisation of the Handbook's key themes.

Section V Greater China: Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macao

20 Unmasking crime and criminology in Taiwan

DOI: 10.4324/9780203766774-20

Bill Hebenton and Susyan Jou

Introduction

Geographically located in the Western Pacific, just 100 miles from the south-eastern coast of the People’s Republic of China, the island of Taiwan comprises most of the land area of the nation known officially as the Republic of China – also known at times as Nationalist China, Free China, the Republic of China on Taiwan – but most often referred to nowadays simply as Taiwan. With a population of some 23 million people, and with a surface area of less than 14 thousand square miles (in Europe akin in size to the Netherlands or in the USA, to the combined states of Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island) – the island of Taiwan is one of the most densely populated countries in the world. ¹

Its unique and intriguing historico-political landmarks can be easily identified. ² Early contact and some emigration from China during the imperial Ming Dynasty, incorporation in the imperial Qing Dynasty (1683), and becoming Qing’s 20th province in 1887 – all of which has led to a complicated relationship with cultural and genealogical roots in China; colonization under Japanese rule for 50 years (1895–1945), ³ thereafter, the establishment and consolidation of a military regime under Chiang Kai-Shek for nearly four decades until 1987. ⁴ Chiang’s regime itself had its origins in the tremendous political upheaval that had been occurring in China during the Japanese colonization of Taiwan: namely, the sweeping away of the last dynasty (Qing) and founding of the Republic of China in 1912. Following the Republic’s foundation, the Nationalist Party (Kuomintang or KMT) assumed government from 1928 until 1937 when the tensions with the nascent Chinese Communist Party resulted in civil war between 1927 and 1937. The civil war receded in 1937 due to the Sino-Japanese War (1937– 45) but resumed after World War II. Eventually, in late 1949, an embattled Chiang took his government and regime, the anti-Communist KMT, and some 1.5 million mainland Chinese across the straits to the island of Taiwan. Starting in the late 1960s, there followed over 30 years of unparalleled economic growth, the eventual emergence in the late 1970s of a small democratic movement, the relatively smooth transition to democracy (compared to other “third wave” countries) in the late 1980s, and the contemporary emergence of Taiwanese nationalism in struggle with orthodox Chinese nationalism. These landmarks have shaped the island, its people, and society.

In terms of political economy, Chiang’s Leninist-style regime produced division on ethnic, cultural, and language issues, with marked cleavages of social and economic status, as well as a sharp polarization of political sentiment. Political and economic dissent was quickly suppressed, and the military-police state created on “a temporary basis” in 1948 was only effectively abandoned in 1987. In terms of modernization – understood as a continuing process involving the broad transformation of traditional and local values together with changes in institutions and behavior patterns – change in Taiwan has taken place across economic, political, social, and cultural sectors, though the degree of change has varied within each sector. The modernization of Europe and the USA took some two centuries, but, in Taiwan, “that time span has been compressed into a few decades, dating back to the late decades of Japanese colonial rule” (Tien 1989: 42). Having set out this broad historical context, let us now proceed to consider official crime data in contemporary Taiwan.

Unmasking crime

Governments across the world have several purposes for use of administrative criminal statistics: making policy; managing performance; and, crucially, communicating with the public (MacDonald 2002). In this context, three fundamental questions have been considered by criminologists, and by varying degrees by policy-makers and practitioners.

First, definitional matters. In Taiwan, the “official” crime statistics often refer to police recorded crime data (Annual Crime Statistics Report in Taiwan) (see National Police Agency 1974–2012). It is produced by the Criminal Investigation Bureau of the National Police Agency (NPA) based on all recorded crime in 22 local county and city police departments. Crime, in these statistics, usually follows the statutory criminal codes and is categorized by the interest of police.

“Violent crime,” for example, does not exist in the criminal code, but police calculate it from seven crimes, namely, murder, robbery, forcibly taking, kidnap, rape, intimidation (based on monetary amount demanded), and aggravated assault. It performs both a counting crime role and a performance one. The definition of police crime statistics can change over time. Before 2000, aggravated assault was not counted as “violent crime.” Auto-theft was not included in the statistics until 1979. It was only in 1979 that the police decided to report car theft in the statistics and motorcycle theft in 1986. This “hidden” crime constituted 54 percent of all crimes in 1974, 75 percent in 1986, and 87 percent in 1990 ( Annual Taiwan Crime Statistics Report, 1974, 1986 and 1990). Thus, official crime rates before 1974 masked significant acquisitive crime. The boundaries as to what is legally proscribed and enforced continue to shift across societies and historically, and Taiwan is no exception. Existing statutory definitions become obsolete, and new forms of harm (or wrong) emerge (for example, cybercrime), or increase in public seriousness, and become the object of statutory intervention. These are essentially matters of moral and political preferences, and reflect issues such as the relative heinousness of particular crimes, and the extent of state supervision and regulation of civil society and private life.

Second, representativeness of official statistics on crime and criminal justice. Do they provide an accurate and unbiased measure of the occurrence of crime in society? Is recorded crime a measure of the workload of the police rather than a barometer of society? For example, police crime statistics in Taiwan focus only on data gathered by police departments under the NPA and neglect crimes reported to other law enforcement agencies – i.e., the Investigation Bureau of Ministry of Justice mainly in charge of white-collar crime and corruption or Coast Guard Command and Military Police in charge of drug dealing and trafficking. In general, the debate about representativeness has focused on:The crime statistics of police, court, and victim survey in Taiwan are good examples to demonstrate how the crime figures are based on agency interests. Figure 20.1 shows the different crime rates between police- and court-recorded data in Taiwan from the 1970s to 2010. Based on police statistics, crime rates increased from 480 per 100,000 population in 1986 to a peak of 2442

Figure 20.1 Police crime rate and court conviction rate in Taiwan, 1973–2010

Sources: Annual Taiwan Crime Statistics Report and Judicial Statistics Yearbook.

• Feasibility – Is it feasible to count the incidence of all acts and events that constitute crime (legally proscribed), and, if not, what limits this? (See, for instance, the work in England and Wales, Home Office 2000.)
• Bias – What “biases” exist in the official statistics of crime and criminal justice, and do they reflect the propensities of those affected to report crime to the authorities, or the operations and practices (including the crime-recording practices) of the authorities that collect and collate them?
• Alternative means of data collection – the representativeness of alternative means of collecting data, especially (self-reported) crime victimization surveys. Since the early 1970s and based on the American experience of the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), self-report victimization surveys have spread to other nations (see, for example, Penick and Owens 1976; Bijleveld and Smit 2004; Sparks et al. 1977). Taiwan, on the other hand, did not start its first National Victim Survey (NVS) until 2000, now followed by two other “sweeps” in 2005 and 2010 (Sheu et al. 2000, 2005, 2010). The first NVS was funded by both Ministry of Justice and Ministry of Internal Affairs under the Crime Victim Protection Act. An enhanced “Project of Crime Victim Protection” was set up in the same year to implement the governmental assistance to crime victims. In the Project code 2.7, it tasked the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Ministry of Justice with conducting a regular victim survey to assess the needs of victims and ultimately provide a better victim protection policy. Due to budgetary constraints, the Ministry of Justice could not participate in the second and third surveys. Reflecting this particular background of the Taiwan victim survey, the key issues were focused on crime prevention policies from the victim’s viewpoint, standard of police service to the victim, and suitable victim aides (Huang 2006). The same group of researchers designed the questionnaires and oversaw data collection and analysis (Sheu et al. 2000, 2005, 2010). The surveys examined experiences of crime (personal and property crime), crime reporting behavior, satisfaction with police work, needs and services from the government, and compensation. There were 10,375 household interviews in 2000; 18,046 telephone interviews and 2,025 face-to-face interviews in 2005; and 16,015 telephone interviews and 1,800 face-to-face interviews in 2010. In the first victim survey, crimes such as theft (auto,...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction: discovering and making criminology in China
• SECTION I Historical themes
• SECTION II Criminal justice system issues
• SECTION III Methods of inquiry
• SECTION IV Forms of crime and criminality
• SECTION V Greater China: Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macao
• Editors’ conclusions: dreaming of better times
• Index