Guest editorial

• Published in: Social transformations in Chinese societies Vol. 12; no. 1; pp. 2 - 7
• Main Authors: Laidler, Karen Joe, Lee, Maggy
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Bingley Emerald Group Publishing Limited 01.01.2016
• Subjects: Armed forces; Borders; Corruption; Criminal justice; Criminology; Drug abuse; Drug trafficking; Fear of crime; Food; Grey markets; Immigration policy; Imprisonment; Investigations (Law enforcement); Juvenile justice; Kidnapping; Knowledge; Law enforcement; Leisure; Migration; Mills, Charles Wright (1916-1962); Political factors; Punishment; Slavery; Smuggling; Social disorganization; Social identity; Social sciences; Sociological imagination; Sociology; Victimization; Hong Kong; United States > US; Asia; China
• ISSN: 1871-2673
• DOI: 10.1108/STICS-05-2016-002

[...]governmental support for research has long been favoured as a way to understand the aetiology of crime and the machinations of the criminal justice system. Over time, the criminological enterprise in the department has been extended to cover a wide range of social concerns, crime and control debates in Hong Kong, mainland China and East Asia which link what C Wright Mills (1959) famously termed “private troubles” and “public issues” in his book The Sociological Imagination – from the history of criminal justice (Jones and Vagg, 2007); drug use and culture (Joe Laidler, 2005, 2009); youth justice (Adorjan and Chui, 2013) and youth studies (Fraser, in an ESRC-funded study of youth leisure in Hong Kong and Glasgow); victimization survey (Broadhurst et al., 2010); crime and punishment (Bakken, 2005; Xu, 2009); gender, migration and imprisonment (Joe Laidler et al., 2007; Lee, 2007; Lee and Laidler, 2014); policing and oral histories (Ho and Chu, 2012; Joe Laidler and Lee, 2015; Martin, 2013; Martin and Chan, 2014); fear of crime (Lee and Adorjan, Forthcoming) to military corruption (Wang, Forthcoming), gendered politics of human trafficking in Southeast Asia (Ham and Dewar, 2014) and the recent protests under the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong (Fraser, 2015). Through a series of field observations of the organization of parallel trading in North District and semi-structured interviews with traders and frontline officers with experience and knowledge of the grey market operations, the researchers were able to provide critical insights into the nature of the social disturbances and public disorder arising from parallel trading activities; the current strategies adopted by law enforcement agencies to control parallel trading and the resulting public disorder; and the challenges that law enforcement agencies face in policing the area. Ultimately, the paper argues that the problem of cross-border parallel trading has to be understood within a broader socio-political context in relation to social anxieties, identity conflict, contrast between the expanding economy of China and saturated one of Hong Kong, relaxed immigration control of Mainland visitors and food safety and product quality problems in China.