ABSTRACT
The most common types of serious crime in the PRC in the first decade of the twenty-first century have made the traditional ‘shock and awe’ style of campaigning increasingly anachronistic. Using campaign justice against simple street crimes and uncomplicated violent crimes may have been considered by some in the party to be effective in the 1980s and 1990s, but in the twenty-first century this line of reasoning has been increasingly difficult to rationalize because those serious crimes that are seen as the biggest threat to social stability are the very crimes that are relatively difficult ‘to strike’. While the discussion in Chapter 4 focused on the inadequacies of severe and swift punishment strategies and other social, legal and economic limitations of campaign policy, the discussion in this chapter on the rise of organized crime allows us to see the inadequacy of traditional campaign strategies in fighting certain new categories of crime in particular. We focus here on one major area of crime in contemporary China that is difficult to ‘strike hard’ using traditional ‘united operations’ and punishment rituals such as sentencing rallies. Organized and gang crime is difficult to strike hard at because such crimes are hidden, complex and relatively sophisticated. Yet, criminal groups in China form the core of those in the population who commit serious offences. According to scholar Ming Xia, there were around one million criminal groups with a total membership of approximately four million gang members at the turn of the new century. These groups range from small gangs to sophisticated syndicates. 1
