Book Review: Financial crime in China: Developments, sanctions, and the systemic spread of corruption

• Author: Liqun Cao
• Published date: 01 June 2017
• DOI: 10.1177/1057567717691326
• Date: 01 June 2017
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

Book Reviews

Book Reviews

Cheng, H. (2016).

Financial crime in China: Developments, sanctions, and the systemic spread of corruption.

New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. xiv, 194 pp. $110 (hardcover), $84.99 (e-book), ISBN 978-1-137-43529-3

Reviewed by: Liqun Cao, University of Ontario Institute of Technology, Oshawa, Ontario, Canada

DOI: 10.1177/1057567717691326

For a good part of the past 10 years or so that I have known Dr. Hongming Cheng, he has been

working on the research that he writes about in this book Financial Crime in China. At the inter-

section of sociology and criminology, Dr. Cheng’s work on this topic has broken some new grounds

and raised deeply thoughtful questions. When the editor asked me to write a book review,

I approached my reading with some trepidation. To the best of my knowledge, there is no book

on the market, discussing this important topic in the past 20 years, and its subject is murky by its

nature. Most financial crimes in the common law societies are dealt with in civil lawsuits, and only

some criminologists would regard these behaviors as criminal. Yet in China, financial crime is

considered more serious because it contradicts the ruling party’s “original intention.” Out of the

55 crimes that are subject to death penalty since 2011, three of them are directly related to financial

crimes: financial frauds, graft, and bribe taking. Indeed, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP there-

after) won the civil war in 1949, but it is more ambiguous today whether it has won the battle against

corruption, financial crime included.

I liked the book. It is both eclectic and engaging. In reading it, I found it thought provoking,

wellwritten,andcommittedtotacklingtheimportant issues that are a subfield of criminology.

After reading the book, I want to introduce others to it, believing that those of us who work with

and study China would be well served by contending with the issues that Dr. Cheng raises in his

book. The discussion that occupies the following pages is intended to be such a stimulus . It is my

hope that the discussion will stimulate others to lift up these issues for further exploration in their

professional lives.

China remains an authoritarian nation. Even as the ruling party shifted its emphasis from political

control to economic development since the 1980s, political stability, meaning any imagined or real

threat to the CCP’s monopoly of power, remains the overriding concern in its domestic politics while

crime, including financial crime, is a by-product of that concern. Financial crime that has the

consequence to disturb the political stability is dealt with ultimate severity, or in Dr. Cheng’s words,

it is “an essential characteristic of Chinese society” (p. xi). The study of financial crime is, however,

the road traveled less by criminologists or China watchers. Dr. Cheng’s book, thus, fills in a gap in

the current criminological literature.

The monograph consists of nine chapters with seven figures and four tables. Chapter 1 is an

overview of the constantly changing or reforming financial system in China. Chapter 2 discusses the

new emerging upper world and makes a structural argument. That is, there is a linkage between the

state influences and financial marketization that creates this new upper world and new opportunity

for financial crime to occur. Chapters 3–5 describe three specific forms of financial crimes in China.

International CriminalJustice Review

2017, Vol. 27(2) 149-157

ª2017 Georgia State University

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