Chinese White-collar Crime Research

In 1939, Edwin Sutherland, one of the founders of criminology in the United States, put forward the concept of"white-collar crime"firstly, defining it as"a crime committed by a person of respectability and high social status in the course of his occupation."Since then,"white-collar crime"has become a terminology widely accepted by the academia in the study of criminology, and it has attracted more and more research and exploration.In China,"white-collar crime"refers to a crime committed by a person or a work unit of high social/economic status and authority in the course of his occupation to acquire illegal benefits. As China's economic reform goes deeper and its economy becomes more open, and as China's socialist market system gets established and developed, white-collar crimes also grow rapidly. Such crimes seriously hurt China's economic order and social credibility and damage China's economic environment.Sutherland's differential association theory provides a scientific explanation of the motivation and development of white-collar crimes from one angle. According to his theory, the behavior of white-collar criminals is learned and developed from interpersonal interactions with others, and this explains the source and evolution of such crimes. From the viewpoint of functionalism, Morton's abnormal behavior theory considers abnormal behavior as a product of unbalanced social system. This theory can also explain the reasons of white-collar crime.White-collar crime in China has the characteristics of being hidden, occupational, intellectual, and non-violent. Because of these characteristics, it is hard to be detected. Unlike street crime, white-collar crime does not have direct victims, and therefore the public will not feel that their safety has decreased because of white-collar crime. Because white-collar crime does not cause as obvious a feeling of being victimized as street crime, white-collar crimes are not pursued as vigorously as street crimes. Another reason for today's high white-collar crime rate in China is that punishment for such crime is not severe enough.To prevent white-collar crime in China, the society needs to first implement a strategy that combines pursuing current criminals with preventing future occurrence of the crime, and put the emphasis on crime prevention. Furthermore, we need to improve our laws and build a strict system against the crime. To prevent white-collar crime, we should use various tools to reduce the crime from its root. Specifically, the measures should include public law education and moral education, information network establishment, use of high-tech methods in dealing with intellectual criminals, development of more rules and regulations, and enforcing laws more strictly so as to punish white-collar criminals more directly and forcefully.