Article 4
Crime Around
the World
by Paul Murphy
W hen some Hong Kong police officers rang the bell
of an apartment in Kowloon, the door burst open and
gangsters opened fire with AK–47s and other automatic
weapons.
The gang fought their way into the street, bullets rico-
cheting down the stairwell as they descended, and then
hurled grenades at the police. Among those hit in the fire-
play—amazingly, no one was killed in the April 1992 in-
cident—was T.J. Oakes, a British police officer who has
worked with the Hong Kong force since 1975. For his
courage he received a commendation from Britain’s
Prince Charles.
“A shoot-up of that kind can happen in any big city,”
remarked Oakes, who is now chief superintendent in the
Crime Support Unit at Hong Kong police headquarters.
“We’d gone looking for some car thieves and instead
stumbled upon a gang of armed robbers.”
But he agreed that while battle-weary police are on
constant alert for this kind of violence in cities like Chi-
cago and Los Angeles, in Hong Kong such cases remain
far rarer. In recalling his long period on the Hong Kong
force, Oakes singled out occasional homicides as among
the worst cases he has had to tackle.
However, along with violent gangs, Hong Kong also
suffers from a much-publicized problem of “triads” that
profiteer from gambling, prostitution, pornography, nar-
cotics, loan-sharking, and extortion.
Yet, given such problems, it would seem a strange trick
of semantics to describe Hong Kong’s crime rate as “low,”
although it is frequently painted in such effusive, glowing
colors. The reason: Lawbreaking in the West is far higher.
This is a fact that was not always the case, as the crime-
related deterioration in Western societies can be accu-
rately pinpointed to the early 1960s, coinciding with the
escalation in “youth culture” and an emphasis on the in-
dividual at the expense of the family.
Hong Kong’s much-lauded “low” crime rate is shared
by other industrialized nations in the Far East, despite the
fact that triad gangs have tended to mushroom in com-
1
munities where ethnic Chinese live, while organized
gangs known as yakuza are widespread in Japan.
The Far East, however, is noted for its tough, no-non-
sense approach to policing and criminal justice, and this
has undoubtedly helped in keeping down crime. (Recall
the 1994 case in Singapore when American teenager
Michael Fay received a caning sentence for a weeklong
spree of spray-painting cars.)
CRADLES OF LOW CRIME
And yet the industrialised Far East is not the world’s
only cradle for law-abiding citizens—a fact seen when we
analyze global crime figures (see chart). The statistics
show that developing societies have the least crime.
The low-crime countries encompass a wide variety of
religious beliefs. They range from predominantly Islamic
societies, such as Bangladesh, The Gambia, Saudi Arabia,
and Indonesia, to semiagricultural Western societies like
Greece and Cyprus.
Such countries even include so-called communist
China, where a strong Confucian/Buddhist culture still
thrives.
One of the problems in analyzing global crime data is
that there are differences in methods of compiling infor-
mation. The quality of statistics in some of the poorer
countries has been criticized in the past by the United Na-
tions unit that monitors world crime. For this reason, per-
sonal, anecdotal experiences are invaluable in assessing
the veracity of the statistics.
As a journalist who has traveled in many developing
Asian countries, I can attest to the general truth of the
trends indicated. For example, in my travels all over
China, I saw no evidence of youth crime or delinquency.
There was a high level of honesty among ordinary peo-
ple, and I felt safe walking in unlit rural lanes and in dark
alleys in the poorest sections of big Chinese cities.
The bulk of my traveling in China was in 1993, how-
ever, and since then many millions of state workers have
ANNUAL EDITIONS
S. KANNO/THE WORLD & I
Low-crime refuge: Japan and other East Asian countries with a
strong family culture defy the norm that crime increases with a
nation's wealth. Here are pedestrians in the Shibuya section of
Tokyo.
been laid off as the country’s economic reforms gather
momentum. When I returned to China last year, I found
evidence of a growth in robberies and other lawlessness,
although the general situation was still relatively stable
and safe.
Comparing Crime
• Developing nations exhibit the lowest crime
rates, with the exception of such East Asian
economic powerhouses as Japan and Sin-
gapore.
• There is a general correlation between low
crime and a strong family culture in countries
around the world.
• When East Asian people are introduced into
Western societies that emphasize indepen-
dence, their family coherence begins to crum-
ble and crime starts to rise among them.
In discussing the fact that poorer, developing societies
such as Indonesia and China have far lower recorded
crime rates than industrialized societies, a common ex-
planation has been to say that the greater a country’s
2
wealth, the more the temptation to steal. But this pattern
does not fit with Japan: Crime fell in the early 1960s as the
country grew richer, the downward curve continuing the
more affluent it became.
CRIME EXPLOSION
The British criminologist Sir Leon Radzinowicz, in the
introduction to a 1977 book he coauthored, The Growth of
Crime: The International Experience, noted the disparity be-
tween some developing nations and a remarkable up-
surge in crime in many Western countries since the 1960s.
Observing an “unprecedented” growth of crime in
Britain, he wrote: “In 1900, the police of England and
Wales recorded under 100,000 crimes, less than three for
every 1,000 people.… In 1973, it was almost three for ev-
ery 100 people.”
But he found the same problem elsewhere in Europe:
“In France, whose police have been admired for their ef-
ficiency… the decade from 1955 to 1964 alone saw a rise
of crime per 100,000 population of 70 percent. In Sweden,
that model of equable prosperity, enlightened laws, and
penal pioneering, the rate went up 44 percent.”
Moving westward to the United States, he found that
the rate of crime increase was “far more extreme” than in
Europe. “Chicago has more burglaries than the whole of
Japan,” he wrote.
He remarked that the huge crime surge was mostly
taking place in affluent societies, bar a few exceptions, of
which Japan was the most notable. He saw hedonism and
its by-products as a possible cause.
How has the picture changed, more than 20 years after
Radzinowicz’s book was published? In the United States,
since the mid-1990s there has been a clear fall in crime in
major cities, although lawbreaking remains far higher
than in the pre-1960 period.
Various factors have been cited to explain this decline
in crime, from the end of the baby boom era to “zero tol-
erance” policing and tougher judicial policies. America
has, for example, been rapped by Amnesty International
for a surge in the number of executions.
In Interpol’s worldwide crime survey for 1994 (see
chart), it is clearly evident that developing societies such
as China and Indonesia are continuing to enjoy a lower
crime rate than the West. Yet both these countries have
suffered serious problems. Unlike the West, where crimi-
nologists tend to look at social factors for the causes of
crime, in China and Indonesia there are clear economic
and political factors playing a strong part.
In the case of China, which has suffered big increases
in lawbreaking since the mid-1980s, the problem has been
blamed, in part, on its modernization and reform process.
Millions of itinerant farmers have moved into cities, and
millions of others have lost their jobs as a result of the end
of the “iron rice bowl.”

PAOLO GALLI/THE WORLD & I
Sinocrime: Low-crime countries exhibit a variety of religious
beliefs. Even China's communist culture is still permeated
with a Confucian/Buddhist tradition. Here is a street scene in
Guangzhou.
Meanwhile, in Indonesia, rioting began in the summer
of 1997 after the Asian economic crisis led to the collapse
of its currency, culminating in an explosion of violence in
Jakarta that led to the resignation of Asia’s longest-serv-
ing president.
Police in South Korea, another country suffering from
the “Asian flu,” have observed increases in crime that
they have blamed on rising unemployment.
VIOLENCE IN JAPAN
A disturbing new note has also crept into Japan, for
many years regarded as the model of low crime and still
enjoying a crime rate lower than Switzerland (often cited
as the model of low crime in Europe). Since the end of
1997, a series of stabbings in Japanese schools has pointed
to anarchic delinquency in a country not noted for social
instability.
While the United States has been hit by a string of
shootings in its schools, violence in Japanese schools was
not supposed to happen. The explanation? An “MTV
youth generation”—hedonism replacing family cohesive-
ness—is one possible cause being discussed.
This kind of delinquency remains rare in much of Asia,
but fears that Western pop culture causes an erosion in
family values have sparked heated discussions in many
places, including India and Indonesia, to the point that
Western culture has been branded a threat to society.
3
Article 4. Crime Around the World
But the crime survey chart in this article does show
that crime is very high in a number of developing societ-
ies. High crime exists, for example, in Swaziland, Barba-
dos, Namibia, Botswana, and Jamaica.
While high crime is not a new problem in African tribal
and Afro-Caribbean societies (for example, large in-
creases in black crime were recorded in South Africa as
early as the 1920s), the 1960s crime explosion in the West
is a completely different phenomenon.
Britain was among the countries in which crime soared
starting in the 1960s, although then the problem tended to
be restricted to big cities.
Criminology experts in the West focused earlier this
century on youth crime as a working-class problem,
blaming the cause on economic deprivation. Since the
1960s, however, middle-class crime has been increasingly
reported in the West, often discussed in relation to prob-
lems in schools, with a strong correlation noted between
educational performance and delinquency. By contrast,
middle-class crime in Asia remains the exception rather
than the rule.
When Elsie Tu (née Hume), a Briton married to a Chi-
nese, arrived in China from England in 1947 to work as a
Christian missionary, many Western movies and novels
demonized the Chinese, depicting them as smoking in
opium dens or lurking in alleys with knives. So it is with
some irony that she has watched the changing world
crime trends.
Tu became an elected urban councillor in Hong Kong
in 1963, and her campaigning against triad gangs was in-
strumental in the creation in 1974 of the Independent
Commission Against Corruption, which has helped make
Hong Kong one of the most corruption-free places in
Asia.
In the early 1950s, she shifted from her missionary
work and set up a school for poor children in a tent in
Kowloon.
STRONG FAMILIES, LOW CRIME
Speaking in her office at the Mu Kuang School, which
now has some 1,500 students, Tu said that, while the ma-
jority come from low-income families, many have gone
on to become scientists and other professionals. She
noted, however, that students’ behavior has deteriorated
in the last decade. Today, she said, youngsters will occa-
sionally “fight outside the school, smoke in toilets, make
noise, litter, and be impertinent.”
“Not all girls behave as well as they did,” Tu said, “and
I blame the spread of Western feminism.”
But generally, she felt, there were few problems, and
certainly nothing as serious as the spate of stabbings re-
ported in Japanese schools.
“The reason crime is low is that the family is strong,”
she asserted. “And that is the case because of the Confu-
cianism that goes with it. Confucianism is very deep in
ANNUAL EDITIONS

Crime in Perspective
Combined Interpol and the United Nations
Violent Economic
Country Rate Crime Crime Culture say that, because of variable methods
(Relative Type of compiling statistics, it is not possi-
Standing) Rate* Rate*
ble to make crime-rate comparisons
between countries. The author, how-
China 0.2 10 90 CB
ever, has tried to find a partial way
Indonesia 0.5 40 50 I around the problem.
He first culled through the coun-
Greece 1.8 120 610 SAW
tries on the Interpol crime list and
Saudi Arabia 1.9 180 70 I rejected some for obvious incom-
pleteness of information. Monaco, for
Singapore 2.8 160 1,150 CB example, was dropped because it is
Italy 3.3 90 2,420 W unique in having a tiny permanent
population, its crime almost entirely
Japan 3.4 220 1,230 CB committed by outsiders.
Then he jettisoned those countries
Bulgaria 4.3 230 1,950 XR
whose crime statistics showed unbe-
Switzerland 5.3 90 4,350 W lievable crime ratios, such as more
homicide than serious assault.
Russia 6.1 520 940 XS He worked with the 63 remaining
Hong Kong 7.2 630 910 CB nations to develop crime-rate num-
bers in the following way: Suppose a
Samoa 11.9 1,100 930 T country has a population of one mil-
lion, and in one year there were 4
Botswana 16.4 1,430 2,050 A
rapes, 1 murder, 8 assaults, 24 thefts,
France 17.4 1,220 5,150 W and 6 burglaries.
The violent crime rate is gotten by
United States 24.9 2,000 4,900 W
adding 4 + 1 + 8 = 13, dividing by one
Germany 27.6 2,190 5,650 W million = 0.000013, and multiplying
by 100,000 = 1.3.
Canada 28.3 2,300 5,280 W The economic crime rate is ob-
Denmark 33.0 2,410 8,870 W tained by adding 24 + 6 = 30, dividing
by one million = 0.000013, and multi-
Hungary 92.9 9,050 2,430 XR plying by 100,000 = 1.3.
The economic crime rate is ob-
Belgium 126.9 19,490 31,990 W
tained by adding 24 +6 = 30, dividing
SOURCE: INTERPOL; PAUL MURPHY *per 100,000 population by one million = 0.00003, and multi-
plying by 100,000 = 3.
The combined crime rate is de-
fined arbitrarily as 10 times the vio-
Key to Culture Classifications. lent crime rate plus the economic
I = Islamic crime rate.
A = black African (animist, Christian, Muslim) In the case of the hypothetical
CB = Confucianist/Buddhist country, the combined rate is the vio-
T = tropical island lent rate, 1.3, times 10 = 13, plus the
XS = ex-USSR economic index, 3, for a total of 16.
XR = ex-Iron Curtain
W = largely secularized Western Industrial
SAW = semiagricultural West —The Editor

4

the Chinese mind. The Chinese are still following the
Confucian ideal, even if they cannot articulate the specif-
ics of the philosophy.”
Harold Traver, an American who is associate professor
in criminology at Hong Kong University, agreed with Tu
that “strong family bonds and a traditional network of
kinship groups” are important factors in explaining the
comparatively low juvenile crime rate in Hong Kong.
“In the average Chinese family,” he said, “children are
expected to go out and study hard and work hard. There
is not the ‘do your own thing’ looseness that you get in
the West.”
He cautioned, however, against ascribing this to a
unique Chinese mind-set.
“There have been many studies here of Chinese psy-
chology, but I don’t buy into that,” he said. “People are
alike. The important thing is a tight-knit family structure
and a family’s expectations of the performance of their
kids.”
Every April, the Chinese in Hong Kong celebrate Qing
Ming, a holiday in which they honor their ancestors by
bringing food and fruit to the gravesites. But far from be-
ing a solemn occasion, there is a festive atmosphere in the
cemeteries, with many families enjoying picnics by the
graves of their ancestors.
Michael Stone, a professor in Jerusalem who is an au-
thority on Armenian Christians, said: “The Chinese love
of food and emphasis on the close bond of family values
are reflected in societies all over the East and also West
Asia through to Israel.
“By contrast, in the West, nuclear families are more of-
ten too busy to make the effort to transform the act of eat-
ing into a family celebration.”
Chinese societies have Confucianism and the Buddhist
tradition, which lay down obligations for parents to en-
sure that their children are virtuous. In return, the off-
spring are required to show absolute respect to their
parents.
This article orginally appeared in The World & I, June 1999, pp. 68-73. Reprinted by permission of The World & I, a publication of The Washington
Times Corporation. © 1999.
Article 4. Crime Around the World
In Hindu India, dharma (duty) is bound up with loyalty
to the extended family.
Family duty is also emphasized among Muslims, for
whom obligation is enshrined in the concept of taklif (re-
sponsibility). Family life plays a crucial role in Islamic so-
ciety.
Vietnam follows the Chinese Confucian traditions.
However, Vietnamese gangs with names like “Lao Killer
Boyz” and “Dirty Punkz” (a female group) have prolifer-
ated among second-generation immigrants in California,
Patrick Du Phuoc Long wrote in The Dream Shattered.
The author, a counselor to Indochinese children in ju-
venile correctional facilities in Santa Clara County, Cali-
fornia, noted that traditional Vietnamese family values
can be summarized in terms of Confucian precepts such
as filial piety, but that these golden ideals vanish for
many second-generation Vietnamese children.
Long recorded many cases, such as the horror of a Viet-
namese mother who reprimanded her teenage son only to
have him snap back: “Mother f___, if you keep scolding
me, I won’t come back.”
For many Asian immigrants who have moved to the
West, the key to preserving their ethical code is to avoid
integration. One Indian-American parent issued a stark
warning in an article in a newspaper for Asian Indians in
North America:
What I see in many of our second-generation
children here is a lack of respect for elders and a
total lack of appreciation for what the parents do
for them. The answer is to reinforce a sense of
family culture.
Abdicating this responsibility is akin to com-
mitting societal suicide.
Paul Murphy is a British writer based in Hong Kong who has been en-
gaged in independent criminology research at the University of Hong
Kong.