ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses field strategies used to gain access to the secretive world of Chinese human smuggling groups, and reflects on what seemed to have worked well over the years by the author. One key element that seemed to have worked well is expanding one’s informal social networks to include those of others for data-gathering purposes. The concept of guanxi (personal contacts) has been extensively applied in my field activities as an important venue to develop and reinforce research-relevant social contacts because they offer the quickest entry into a target population. After all, human smuggling is a business built upon a myriad of personal connections. By tapping into a common cultural practice, I have been able to gain the trust and confidence of many subjects. This myriad of social networks in turn also validate data gathered from different sources.
Ethnographic studies that rely on interviews and observations are often used to deal with subject matters that cannot be handled through traditional surveys or other quantitatively oriented designs. This is particularly true for topics involving criminal activities, in which the most knowledgeable people are also least likely to be found or, even if found, to divulge. Organised crime is one such topic.
Organised crime is a loose term referring to a long list of illicit enterprises in which groups of individuals pool together resources to 185engage in organised and clandestine activities for profits. These include illegal numbers games, drug trafficking, currency counterfeiting, credit card fraud, human smuggling and labour racketeering. Most literature on criminal organisations is based on data that are relative easy to obtain, such as police investigations, news stories, crime statistics, victim accounts and interviews with law enforcement officials. The least studied is the perspective of those who are involved in these enterprising activities – the entrepreneurs themselves. To understand these criminal activities, it is important to learn from those who are actually ‘doing it’. For logistical reasons, empirical research in this respect has remained rare. Detailed accounts, even when available, are mostly from incarcerated offenders who may have reformulated their stories and life experiences for the inquiries of the judicial process.
Field research is not for everyone, and it is even more challenging if the subject matter involves populations who have nothing to gain from telling their stories. Although subject payment has been widely used in American social science to encourage participation, when it comes to organised crime, such incentives are often ineffective. In my research on Chinese human smuggling, paying smugglers was downright awkward. In this chapter, I will discuss the strategies I used in my fieldwork and the experience I have gained from studying Chinese human smugglers (or snakeheads).
Before I dive into more detailed descriptions of my fieldwork, a few clarifications are provided here to orient the readers. The first is how the term ‘snakehead’ came about. Fuelled by strong desires among many Chinese nationals to improve their economic opportunities overseas, Chinese human smuggling has gone global in the past two decades. The list of destination countries has stretched to include most industrialised nations in the West. The smugglers who facilitate this irregular migration process are collectively called ‘snakeheads’ both in China and in the overseas Chinese communities. The term was first used among Chinese migrants and smugglers of Fujianese decent – a province along China’s southeast coast facing Taiwan. The exact origin of ‘snakehead’, however, remains unclear, although it has been widely since the late 1980s to brand anyone involved in organising or coordinating the transportation of people into another country without going through legal immigration channels. Illegal Chinese migrants and their smugglers alike know little about how the terminology first came about. Those who wrote about Chinese smuggling understood the term mostly as a figurative description of the clandestine process of human smuggling, which resembles the movement of a snake (Burdman 1993; Chin 1999). The earliest documented use of this term appeared in a United Press International story about Hong Kong-based mobsters involved in smuggling illegal immigrants from mainland China into the British colony (UPI 1981).
186The second clarification is on where human smuggling fits in the realm of organised crime. Human smuggling involves enterprising agents who pool their resources in a coordinated manner to provide essentially travel services for people to circumvent regular immigration control by any host nation. Although all criminal organisations share some common attributes such as secrecy and conspiracy to profit from providing illicit goods and services, divergent opinions exist on how to clarify the differences between organised crime and crime that is organised.
In mainstream criminology, there are two traditional perspectives on criminal organisations. One, shared by many scholars and law enforcement agencies and perhaps articulated best by Donald Cressey (1969), describes an organised crime groups as a hierarchical, centralised and bureaucratic structure similar to that of a modern corporate, such as the Italian Mafia (Cressey 1969; Abadinsky 1990). These criminal organisations are operated like a normal corporation where there is a clear division of labour and chain of command. Rules and regulations govern members’ activities, and membership is restricted. Much of the literature on Chinese organised crime follows this school of thought in their descriptions of the triads in Hong Kong and the gangsters in Taiwan (Zhang 2008). Although contemporary triad societies are said to be far more fragmented than their forebears, they still possess well-defined organisational structures with multiple levels of hierarchy and clearly assigned roles and responsibilities at each level (see Chu 2000: 27–8). To join these groups, potential recruits pass through a certain period of probation and then are inducted through ritualised procedures.
On the opposite side of this corporate perspective is the enterprise model. Researchers in favour of this model argue that the traditional concept of organised crime should be abandoned (Passas and Nelken 1993; Block and Chambliss 1981; Van Duyne 1997). The enterprise model suggests that organised crime is made up of mostly flexible and adaptive networks of enterprising individuals who can easily expand and contract to deal with the uncertainties of the illicit market. These entrepreneurs are organised only to the extent that they can effectively carry out profit-generating activities, which is a rather utilitarian or rational behaviour as some economists have advocated (Reuter 1983; Savona 1990). Reuter (1983), based on principles of industrial organisation and market economy, argued that illegal enterprises are relatively small and short-lived. Apart from a relatively small group of core members, most associates are brought in as required to provide needed services. Human smuggling, as an illicit enterprise, fits the enterprise model nicely. Human smugglers form temporary business alliances and the organisation lasts as long as smuggling opportunities exist. A smuggling group may dissolve after one operation is completed if there are no new opportunities on the horizon. Although social interactions may continue among smuggling partners, the smuggling business itself lies dormant.
187As an alternative to these two different perspectives on the structure of organised crime, Dwight Smith (1975, 1980) provided the continuum perspective and argued that ‘entrepreneurial transactions can be ranked on a scale that reflects levels of legitimacy within a specific marketplace’ (p. 336). Illegitimate markets exist beyond the boundaries of legitimate markets and should be examined in their specific industries to understand the ‘spectrum of legitimacy’ (Smith 1975). Such a spectrum perspective offers alternatives to the dichotomous views to classify criminal enterprises either as formal organisations or as informal entities. Kenny and Finckenauer (1995: 25) argued that organised crime is sufficiently varied and complex that one explanation or one theory cannot cover all the bases. Criminal organisations respond to varying market demands by contracting or expanding in size; they assume a variety of organisational structures shaped passively by external social-legal factors rather than by design. However, different ways of conceptualisation lead to different understandings of criminal organisations, describe different trajectories in their activities and may well produce different policy recommendations.
