Organisational structures and operational patterns of organised crime in China : a content analysis of court judgements

Abstract

This dissertation focuses on the criminal patterns of criminal syndicates in China and how they differ between urban and rural areas. To form the data base of this dissertation, I collected 976 organised-crime judgements from three different databases. I then conducted a content analysis and identified characteristics and patterns of Chinese organised crimes. I further classified those judgements into two settings, organised crimes taking place in urban and rural areas, in order to better understand the differences between organised crimes in different spatial and social contexts. In short, I found significant differences in three respects: first, a higher prevalence of violence and also soft violence appear frequently in urban China; second, while both organised-crime syndicates profit primarily from the provision of unlawful goods and services, the ones in urban China appear to be more dependent on offering business services, while the ones in rural areas profit more from unlawful monopolies of natural resources; third, the organised-crime syndicates in urban China often disguise themselves as companies offering ‘legitimate’ business services, in order to avoid law enforcement scrutiny, while their rural counterparts, on the other hand, pursue this by embedding political power. Through gift-giving, bribery, and corruption, the organised-crime syndicates in China often choose corrupt officials as their business agents. At the same time, the dissertation introduces the concept of social embeddedness, arguing that organised crime is structurally embedded in society and identifies two ‘interfaces’, 1) supply and demand in the marketplace and 2) the overlap between legitimate and illegitimate social contexts. Overall, this dissertation systematically explores organised crime in China with substantial empirical evidence and provides new insights into its social embeddedness in different spatial and social contexts.