ABSTRACT
With its focus on the frameworks and practices of community crime prevention and social capital in the West, the previous chapter laid the foundation for the following chapters on the Chinese perspective. As discussed previously, social capital embodies two interlinked aspects: the relational networks and the resources flowing between. When employed to describe the features of large entities, such as a community, a distinction is made between ‘bonding’ and ‘bridging’ social capital. Under this definition, social capital is further identified as the underlying mechanism of the community approach to crime prevention in the West, with bonding social capital and bridging social capital depicting the internal and external dynamics of community life, respectively. Thus, regarding social capital, probably anyone with a basic sinological sense will not doubt its lineage in the Chinese cultural heritage. Chinese society, by and large, is closely associated with guanxi, which could be regarded as the Sino-version of social capital. Based on the definition of social capital introduced earlier, this chapter mainly locates those elements in Chinese culture and society that are either intrinsically social capital or are closely related to social capital.
