Contemporary Issues in Crime,Criminal Justice and Criminology in Greater China: Editors’ Introduction

A Brief History of ACCCJ and Its Accomplishments

The field of criminology and criminal justice studies has grown exponentially since the 1980s, while at the same time interest in the study of crime, justice and criminology in Chinese societies also increased rapidly. In North America, the idea of having a platform for scholars with shared interests in Chinese societies had been coalescing since the late 1990s. In 2009, after informal conversations between Liqun Cao, Xiaogang Deng, Bill Hebenton, Shanhe Jiang, Bin Liang, Hong Lu, Ivan Sun, and Lening Zhang, a more concrete plan of action to establish an association that covers criminology and criminal justice for all Chinese societies began to emerge. Collectively it was agreed to have a preparatory meeting during the 2009 Annual Meetings of the American Society of Criminology (ASC) in Philadelphia, USA. At that ASC, a group of criminologists gathered and dined at Joy Shin Lau Chinese Restaurant in Chinatown, Philadelphia and discussed the formation of an association devoted to criminology and criminal justice in greater China. The idea was received enthusiastically by all present and a taskforce was formed with Bin Liang, Hong Lu and Liqun Cao tasked to draft the byelaws for the new association.

After a year of preparation, the Association of Chinese Criminology and Criminal Justice (ACCCJ) was officially established on November 17, 2010 in San Francisco. The mission of the ACCCJ is to promote research and studies in criminology and criminal justice on Chinese societies, and to mentor young scholars who are interested in comparative criminology/criminal justice. A total of 32 scholars from Canada, mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, the U.K., and the U.S. attended the inaugural meeting during which the draft byelaws of the association were discussed and a board of directors were elected. Seven members were elected to serve on the first board, including ACCCJ’s first President Liqun Cao, President-elect Shanhe Jiang, Treasurer Bin Liang, and directors Xiaogang Deng, Bill Hebenton, and Hong Lu and Ivan Sun. Membership of ACCCJ grew to over 50 during the ASC San Francisco meeting of 2010 and in addition to formal membership fees, donations were also collected from Liqun Cao, Yuet-Hua Cheung, Xiaogang Deng, Phil Ni He, Bill Hebenton, Liying Li, Jianhong Liu, Ivan Sun, Bonnie Wu, and Solomon Zhao.

During 2010 to 2011, ACCCJ officially adopted its byelaws and election rules. With assistance from Mengyan Dai and Solomon Zhao, Bin Liang, as the treasurer, took on the tasks of ACCCJ registration and ACCCJ’s federal tax-exempt status application as a non-profit organization. ACCCJ was officially registered in Texas in 2011 and its federal tax-exempt status was successfully approved in 2012 and the byelaws were amended accordingly for this purpose.

The association established its email listserv by Xin Jiang and a temporary website subsequently. In 2011, the first issue of ACCCJ Newsletter was published with Bill Hebenton as the inaugural editor. The newsletter sought to disseminate details of scholarly publications by members and also to alert members to other publications on Greater China. The association had its first institutional member, the Institute of Criminology from Hunan University, in 2011. Beginning in 2011, ACCCJ also started organizing its own thematic panels and roundtables during the regular annual meetings of the American Society of Criminology (ASC); a practice continued ever since. More than 30 sessions have been organized over the near decade, with an average of 3 or so per ASC annual meeting. This liaison with ASC could never have happened so smoothly without the ASC’s Chris Eskridge and Susan Case, and we gratefully acknowledge their assistance.

During President Shanhe Jiang’s tenure (2012–2014), he organized and coordinated the first ACCCJ summer delegation trip to mainland China and Macau in 2014. Shanhe Jiang also established the Outstanding Student Paper Award to recognize outstanding scholarly works of graduate students. The award was renamed as the Jiang-Land-Wang Outstanding Student Paper Award in 2015 in recognition of the very generous financial donation of Shanhe Jiang, Kenneth Land and Jin Wang. As of 2019, this award carries a monetary award of US $300 per awardee. The ACCCJ logo was also officially adopted in 2015.

During President Lening Zhang’s term (2014–2016), he continued to organize ACCCJ’s summer delegation trips among other activities established by his predecessors. Lening Zhang initiated a new feature to the ACCCJ annual general meetings by inviting Steven Messner to greet and speak to our members in 2016. Francis Cullen (2017) and David Weisburd (2018), and Ruth Peterson (2019) have followed suit at subsequent annual meetings.

During President Ivan Sun’s tenure (2016–2018), the ACCCJ: (1) revamped and launched a more sustainable website (https://acccj.org/); (2) increased its members to 100 in the fall of 2018, and (3) successfully organized summer delegations again to many places in mainland China and Macau, and led ACCCJ’s first summer delegation to universities in Taiwan during the summer of 2018.

During current President Bill Hebenton’s term (2018–2020), he has supported Bin Liang in organizing ACCCJ’s summer delegations to mainland China and Hong Kong in 2019 and oversaw the plan for ACCCJ’s 10-year anniversary celebration, including publication of this special issue of International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology. His tenure also coincided with the outbreak of the COVID 19 virus crisis period; and following notification of the cancellation of the American Society of Criminology 2020 Annual Meetings, this has necessitated the postponement of the ACCCJ 10th Anniversary Celebrations until ASC 2021 Annual meetings.

According to a tally by the current editor of ACCCJ Newsletter, Dr Luye Li, our members reportedly have published a total of 311 academic papers, 49 book length monographs, and received 29 external research grants during the ten-year period of its existence. Much of the research has been published in core top-tier mainstream outlets in the fields of criminology, criminal justice and law and society.

Currently, according to the ACCCJ membership list as of June 2020, the composition of ACCCJ members is as follows: by gender, 41% of members are female; by professional status, 67% are professors, 23% are students; and 10% are professionals and others; by geographic location, 63% are within the U.S., 26% are from mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan, and 10% are from other countries around the world, such as Australia, Canada, England, and Japan; almost half (49%) are life-time members. To date, ACCCJ has awarded a total of 8 outstanding student paper awards plus one honorable mention and between 2014 to 2019, the summer delegations visited a total of 34 universities and research institutions in mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan.

As of 2020, and its tenth anniversary, ACCCJ stands strong as an association of scholars. Its past accomplishments provide testimony to its goals as stipulated in its byelaws. We are proud of our inclusiveness, and our ability to attract the attention and motivation of so many international scholars interested in criminology and criminal justice in Chinese societies. As a transparent professional association in an open society, ACCCJ is ready for new challenges in the future. We are confident that ACCCJ will continue to grow and thrive in the coming years.

Developments in Criminology in Chinese Societies 2010 to 2020

Given that the ACCCJ aims at enhancing research and teaching involving the Greater China region (encompassing Mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau), we first briefly mention new developments in criminology in Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan and then devote greater space to legal developments in Mainland China. Detailed discussion of the various criminological developments, police reforms, crime prevention, and legal reforms in Mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau have been addressed previously in Cao and Hebenton (2018), He and Zhuo (2016), Cao et al. (2016), Hebenton and Jou (2013), Liu and Wang (2015), Zhao and Liu (2011).

Taiwan, a diversified country with urban/rural divides is now recognized as a prime location for meaningful comparative criminological research; and there is now substantial evidence of fruitful collaboration between Taiwanese scholars and those from around the world in terms of joint publication. Its contemporary democracy embodies and exemplifies the capacity of a society to move from an authoritarian past. This past has necessarily shaped its institutions and how knowledge is produced. Historically, its Central Police University had a key role in producing research studies, but criminological knowledge is increasingly produced by non-police institutions, such as the Graduate School of Criminology at National Taipei University and the Criminology department of National Chung Cheng University.

Hong Kong and Macau have been seen as societies with a history of rule of law, although scholars have raised concerns about the “mainlandization” of their legal systems over the past two decades (Jones, 2014; Lo, 2012). Recent developments in 2020 by the Beijing authorities to introduce a new security law in Hong Kong have further raised fears of the possible impact of such a new measure on curtailment of traditional understandings about academic freedom and rule of law. The current institutionalization of criminology and criminal justice research in both Hong Kong and Macau mirrors that in the United States and the United Kingdom. Research is scattered among the schools of law, departments of social sciences and sociology and departments of social work. The department of Sociology at the University of Macau is particularly strong in criminology, and is arguably now a powerhouse for criminology not only in Chinese societies, but also in wider Asia.

In mainland China, criminological research has been and continues to be largely produced by scholars from law schools, many of whom are trained in traditional legal jurisprudence, rather than empirically driven social science. Over the past decade, sociology has begun to embrace criminology as a sub-field (Cao & Hebenton, 2018). Criminology as a sub-area continues to appear in every year’s Chinese Sociological Conference. The School of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Nanjing University—one of the prime sociology programs in China, has organized a month long summer camp on criminology for junior scholars in China in 2017, 2018 and 2019. Under the leadership of Professor Hu Rong and with the support from University of Delaware, the sociology program at Xiamen University has also organized a criminology summer camp in 2018 and 2019 with an emphasis on criminological and sociological theories, critical criminological issues, and quantitative data analysis.

Mainland China has consistently recognized and politically prioritized the need for a stable political, economic and social order and this remains the main impetus for its legal reforms. The 2010s saw a policy transition from “building a harmonious society” of the President Hu-Wen era to “making every citizen feel fairness and justice in every legal case” of the President Xi Jinping era. Three major changes are evident at the time of writing and all three combine to transform China’s legal structure and culture. The first change involves greater procedural guarantees in law. Criminal Procedure Law (2018) and the Lawyer’s Law (2018), for the first time, adopted the standard of proof beyond a reasonable doubt, cross-examination with live witness testimony, a right against self-incrimination, defense lawyers’ rights to earlier intervention in cases such as interviewing clients, reviewing and obtaining duplicate copies of documents, requesting evidence collection, calling for expert testimony in court, and being free from persecution due to providing criminal defense in court (Articles 34, 35, 36, 37). Meanwhile, the number of exonerations based on wrongful convictions has accelerated, including cases where a principle “to acquit when in doubt” (疑罪从无) was adopted (e.g., the Nian Bin case). Studies that have examined procedural reforms (Peerenboom, 2014), defense lawyers’ roles (Lu et al., 2019), and wrongful convictions and exonerations (He, 2016) during this period of time agree on certain advancements in law, as well as noting the remaining challenges and obstacles in enforcing these laws due to extra-legal structural and cultural factors.

The second change centers on the rise in professionalization among legal officials with a dramatic expansion of their powers. For example, the Judges’ Law (2019) now stipulates that judicial responsibility rests in each presiding judge, who is now required to have a minimum of an undergraduate degree, to facilitate public legal education through legal rulings, and shall not be held liable administratively or legally for interpreting the law and his/her legal rulings. Qualifications for becoming a police officer remain the minimal high school diploma (with an additional police college education required for leadership positions). The People’s Police Law (2013) authorizes the police to stop and question any criminal suspects, check their ID, and take suspects to the police station if deemed necessary (Article 9). In relation to police, scholars have noted two recent trends, both occurring at the same time: the rise of a security state aiming at stability maintenance (Wang & Minzner, 2015) and the growing acceptance of a modernized police role in preventive patrol, law enforcement and crime prevention (Cuvelier et al., 2014).

The third development continues the dual track policy of seeking to balance severity and leniency (宽严相济) in criminal dispositions, manifested mostly in policies such as court-sponsored mediations, community-based corrections, and the “killing fewer and killing cautiously” policy (Trevaskes, 2010). Deeply rooted in Confucianism and embedded in restorative justice ideals, these reconciliatory and restorative measures signify a more pragmatic approach to crime problems in China, despite potential conflicts between legitimacy and efficiency of legal institutions (Pei, 2014).

Some political reforms, however, have atrophied and gone into reverse. The fuzzy distinction between the government and the party is such an example. Critics of the party-state argue that the political leadership’s continued efforts at enforcing an anti-corruption campaign and more recently the campaign against organized crime are efforts aimed at purging political opposition. The party-state has strengthened its oversight of information flow, media, universities, businesses, and non-governmental organizations, and the use of advanced technologies such as facial recognition and artificial intelligence and social credit scoring of citizens have also raised new concerns among scholars (Qiang, 2019).

For legal reforms to take root, legal professionals’ attitudes and values are critical. Law schools and professional colleges play an indispensable role in disseminating law and training legal professionals. In respect of China Law Schools/Departments Ranking (2017), of interest are the 49 programs established between 2010 and 2020. Shandong Finance and Economics University Law School ranked the highest among the newly created programs at 87th place, with 12 affiliated research institutes, 77 teachers, 46 professors, 1 doctoral professor, 234 students and 8 Master Level Points; in contrast, while ranked almost at the bottom (752cd), Shandong Justice and Police Professional College Law Practicum Department (山东司法警官职业学院法律实务系), established in 2010, had 33 teachers, 9 professors and 2,085 students, suggesting a huge demand for professional degrees in criminal justice and law enforcement field. What is even more striking is that several of these new programs had no full-time teachers listed, yet with student enrolments in hundreds (e.g., the 2012 established Xinjiang Police College Law Department had 610 students enrolled; the 2010 established Zhejiang Public Security Navy Police College had 320 students enrolled). One measure that distinguishes the quality of these programs is the ability to offer graduate degrees. Despite the relative newness of the programs, 8 programs offered Masters degrees, 18 had affiliated research institutes, 3 had doctoral professors, and 41 had professors. Moreover these new programs appeared to concentrate mostly in coastal and relatively more developed regions (e.g., besides Tianjin and Chongqing, six regions have not had a new law program in the past 10 years including Xizang, Qinghai, Guizhou, Hainan, Liaoning and Jilin). While it is not entirely clear what factors lie behind these regional disparities in provision, the existence of such differences should be of concern.

As we look forward to the next ten years of the ACCCJ, we would like to take this opportunity to suggest three future priorities for criminologists interested in Chinese societies and indeed for the ACCCJ as an association: first, a focus on generating original evidence-based research, especially “law in action” studies that seek to assess changes in laws and legal institutions such as implementation of procedural safeguards, independence in judicial rulings, police power in stop and questioning, court-directed mediations, and community corrections; second, whenever possible, seek to engage in program evaluation on the effects of new technologies around facial recognition, and more widely the impact of “big data” and algorithmic justice on crime investigation and prevention; third, while continuing with collaborative research, teaching and mentoring with top-tier law and sociology programs, we must seek to establish links with programs in less developed regions where no full time teachers are available and that indeed might benefit more from our expertise, particularly in police colleges where the demand appears to be high but resources remain scarce.

Contextualization of the papers in this special issue

This special issue features nine articles that provide original research on crime and criminal justice in the present-day Greater China region (Mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan). The issue opens with a study whose fieldwork is based in Guangzhou, the main manufacturing hub of the Pearl River Delta, and one of mainland China’s leading commercial and manufacturing regions. In Climbing the Protest Pyramid: A Situational Analysis of the Resistance of Rickshaw Drivers in Guangzhou, China the author provides a highly original sociological study in resistance in the particular ecological setting of Guangzhou - using data collected through systematic social observation of police law enforcement and rickshaw drivers’ routine activities, focus group interviews with the police, in depth semi-structured interviews with rickshaw drivers, official police detention statistics of rickshaw drivers, and media content data mining. These multiple sources provide a real strength to the paper’s argument. The author provides a very well articulated and convincing typology and an analysis of resistance - a genuine “pyramid of resistance”. Alongside the central argument around the dynamics of escalation, the paper further examines how certain situational factors affect the development of resistance. There is excellent integration of fieldwork notes into the text. Overall, this is a polished ecological case study of the moral economy of Guangzhou. In Gendered Justice in China: Victim-Offender Mediation as the “Different Voice” of Female Judges, the author takes up the thesis elaborated by the US feminist and ethicist Carol Gilligan (1982) and seeks to elaborate it in the empirical context of victim-offender mediation in China. In part one of the paper, the author overviews the gendered history of China, the normative philosophical influence of Confucianism on Chinese people’s preference for mediation and reviews the literature on victim-offender mediation in China. The second part details the qualitative research methodology of the fieldwork in four district courts in China, and presents major original findings. Acknowledging the problem of representativeness, the author points to the need to apply the method to other geographical regions in China.

The conceptual starting point for the next paper is the recognition that prisons throughout the world require, albeit in different contexts and by varying intensity, as part of the process of rehabilitation, that prisoners proffer certain types of autobiographical stories. In Narrative Rehabilitation: Manifestation of Chinese and Western Reform Ideals and Practices, the author undertakes an ethnographic study within a small prison for male offenders in China; this paper seeks to highlight the comparative similarities and differences in rehabilitation of offender narratives. Importantly, it also discusses assumptions made about a “correct narrative” or a set of requirements indicating effective change, recognizing that these judgments differ in Western and Chinese contexts, and that differences also reside in the process of narrative rehabilitation and agents who have the power to offer a verdict on the offender’s narrative performance. The author provides an ambitious comparison between Western and Chinese worlds of “rehabilitation,” and the theme is clearly very important to modern understandings of the prison. The real strength of the paper lies in the elaboration of two modes of reasoning and justification around “rehabilitation” practices: the Western model within a psy-discourse and a Chinese model of narrative rehabilitation outside the explicit framing of psychological discourse, and offered under the Confucian educative and disciplinary ideal of thought re-education and perfectibility. All prison activities occur within a wider ecology of power dynamics, with its own historical mix of why things happen the way they do (the changing meanings of “rehabilitation” in England for example is complex and multi-layered). In the current ecology of the Chinese prison, this research provides a richly contextualized account of the necessity of particular state-sanctioned moral and political tropes.

Taiwan, officially known as the Republic of China (ROC), lies off the southeastern coast of mainland Asia across the Taiwan Straits from Mainland China. Taiwan’s contemporary political history can be characterized as a steady transition from authoritarian governance (from the late 1940s through the 1970s) to democracy in the late 1980s. And while many commentators acknowledge that contemporary Taiwan’s democracy reveals the human spirit’s capacity to start afresh, others point to the legacy and continuance of certain autocratic precedents. Major social, political, and economic changes have affected the patterns of crime and criminal justice policies and practices in Taiwan; in recent years, the nation’s criminal justice system has undergone dramatic reforms and innovations. Although its “footprint” in international criminological research is becoming more widely known, there is still a shortage of empirical studies that examine issues of crime and criminal justice on Taiwan published in English. Cybercrime greatly affects individuals, businesses, and national security; increasingly, cybercrime is emerging as a major crime type in Taiwan. As elsewhere, the complexity of criminal investigation of cybercrime is poorly understood, and the authors of Collaboration Between Law Enforcement Agencies: Implications of a Case Study About ATM Hacking seek to address this via their analysis of a high profile ATM hacking case in Taiwan in 2016. Using qualitative data collected from different branches of the law enforcement involved in criminal investigation in Taiwan, the study unpicks and analyses the importance of national-local law enforcement collaboration in combatting transnational cybercrime. Enhancing our understanding of interagency investigative work as a site of tensions (“turf-jealousies”) and contradictions, this study documents the ways in which agencies cooperate, the perceived benefits of cooperation, and the perceived challenges to cooperation. Major conceptual questions are raised by such an analysis - do the agencies identified engage in a variety of joint activities and agree on likely benefits that working together affords? Do the broader political and contextual legacies in which these organizations operate limit the extent to which they can cooperate? This case study in Taiwan helps us to appreciate that investigating cyber-related crime requires a much broader understanding of the wider context specific to a criminal investigation. While formalizing and structuring the cybercrime investigation process may allow law enforcement to identify the evolving skills and knowledge necessary to successfully tackle the activities of the cybercriminal, this study helps us to appreciate the challenges of local and national collaboration.

Citing crime rate drops in many parts of the World, and the relative deficiency in empirical research on crime drop in Asian countries, the authors of Development and Crime Drop: A Time-Series Analysis of Crime Rates in Hong Kong in the Last Three Decades examined different types of crimes in Hong Kong from 1976 to 2017. This study makes a unique contribution to the literature by incorporating a number of explanatory variables drawn from criminological theories. A variety of national statistics pertaining to socio-economic context are employed and tested for their contribution to crime rate change. Among other things, we find it particularly intriguing when the authors interpret the increase in Gross Domestic Product as less of a motive for crime, rather than more suitable targets, and for the negative association between Gross Domestic Product and crime rate. Practitioners as well as researchers interested in cross-sectional or time-series studies should find this article informative.

The rational choice perspective has long been an established area of criminology, and a foundation of criminal justice system in many countries. In Rational Choice Theory Applied To An Explanation of Juvenile Offender Decision Making in the Chinese, the authors tested whether it can explain juvenile offenses in China using a survey of youth offenders and hypothetical questions of offending. They used measures to assess the dimensions of rational judgment between cost and benefit of crime. This study makes an important contribution to the literature for analyzing perspectives of youth offenders and showing how perceived benefit has relative significance to perceived cost in a decision to commit crime. As they suggest, administrators of juvenile justice should find this study thought-provoking and should perhaps be tempted to model the methodology in regional settings.

Chinese scholars have shown the tendency in Mainland China to equate punishment with justice (Jiang, 2009). The issue of whether and to what extent major change in China is in any sense reflected in public attitudes toward criminal justice administration is an intriguing issue. Borrowing the term “heavy penaltyism” to describe the penal philosophy in China, the authors of Convicting the innocent or freeing the guilty? Public attitudes toward criminal justice errors juxtapose China’s historical tolerance to wrongful conviction with Western intolerance to it. The paper raises the question of who are more likely to prioritize positive false over false positive and if such findings could be contextualized across different provinces in China. The study used national survey data and examined demographic, socioeconomic, and social characteristics of an individual on attitudes toward judicial errors. Furthermore, wrongful conviction is a burgeoning topic area in Western criminal justice scholarship as we discover more and more tragic cases of an innocent person spending long years of incarceration. Given the increased salience of judicial errors, both scholars and practitioners should pay much greater attention to understanding any shifts in how the public view this matter. In the end, public confidence is vital for government administration.

In the comparative study Does Trust in Citizens Mediate the Relationship between Internal and External Procedural Justice: A Comparison between China and Taiwan Police, the authors offer a valuable insight into what needs to be done to improve police-community relations. Through application of survey technique to a sample of more than 1,000 officers in China and Taiwan, they sought to see if how officers are treated inside the police iorganisation has any bearing on how they treat citizens outside on the streets. Seeking to understand this kind of relationship could not be more topical—and relevant to Black Lives Matter and other relevant civil rights movements in the USA and elsewhere. The research findings have much needed implications for practitioners. For example, it is suggested that from the highest levels, senior police administrators should prioritize justice throughout their police organization - in order to enhance the likelihood of fairer treatment on the streets.

Finally, in Police Discretion and Restorative Justice in China: Stories from the Street-level Police this qualitative research considers the relationship between national police reforms and organizational characteristics and the way officers carry out restorative justice on the streets of China. The findings are based on 2 months of field observation of mediation cases and semi-structured interviews. The author suggests that the current state of restorative justice for parties involved in conflicts in China is somewhat predictable based on mode of street-level bureaucracy. However, he hints at the concern that wide ranging police discretion, driven by both cultural and organizational forces, could derail the ultimate purpose of restorative justice.

In conclusion, as editors, we trust that readers will find all the contributions in this special issue engaging and thought-provoking. Continuing comparative research by ACCCJ members and others will increase mutual understanding of the similarities and divergences in crime, criminal justice and criminological development in a Greater China, where cultural affinity and political diversity coexist. Over its ten year history, the ACCCJ has sought to play its part in critical mobilization of a strong intellectual endeavor and advocacy on social justice, and while our editorial task is finished, it remains only to wish ACCCJ well in the future.