Chinese reluctance to report crime: Political efficacy, group care and hukou
| Author | Yuning Wu,Ivan Y Su,Rong Hu |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/17488958211017370 |
| Published date | 01 November 2022 |
| Date | 01 November 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/17488958211017370
Criminology & Criminal Justice
2022, Vol. 22(5) 733 –754
© The Author(s) 2021
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DOI: 10.1177/17488958211017370
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Chinese reluctance to report
crime: Political efficacy, group
care and hukou
Yuning Wu
Wayne State University, USA
Ivan Y Su
University of Delaware, USA
Rong Hu
Xiamen University, China
Abstract
Rising crime rates and strained police–community relations in China are calling for more research
on people’s crime-reporting desires and associated predictors. Drawing upon survey data
collected from a sample of 757 local and nonlocal residents in a large city in Southern China, this
study takes the initiative to assess Chinese people’s reluctance to report crime to the police.
Results show that a lower level of political efficacy, external efficacy specifically, is associated
with a higher level of reluctance to report crime. The effects of group care are mixed, with the
inner-circle care exerting a negative and the outer-circle care a positive association with crime-
reporting desires. Furthermore, net of all controls, local hukou residents express lower levels
of willingness than their nonlocal counterparts to report crime. Finally, the perception of police
misconduct is the most significant and strongest predictor of Chinese people’s reluctance to
report crime. These findings suggest the importance of including a combination of both policing
and non-policing factors when studying crime-reporting inclination, opening up an interdisciplinary
perspective for studying the issue.
Keywords
Group care, hukou, policing, political efficacy, reporting crime
Corresponding author:
Yuning Wu, Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice, Wayne State University, 3261 Faculty/
Administration Building, Detroit, MI 48202, USA.
Email: yuningwu@wayne.edu
1017370CRJ0010.1177/17488958211017370Criminology & Criminal JusticeWu et al.
research-article2021
Article
734 Criminology & Criminal Justice 22(5)
Introduction
On October 13, 2011 in Foshan, China, a two-year-old girl Wang Yue [‘Little Yue Yue’]
wandered into a narrow road while her mom was hanging laundry, and was hit by a passing van.
A closed-circuit camera showed that as she lay bleeding on the road for over 7 minutes, at least
18 people passed by without stopping to help her or calling the police. She was then hit by a
second van that did not stop either. Almost 10 minutes after the incident, a female trash collector
Chen Xianmei, an illiterate migrant worker from the countryside, helped to send her to the
hospital. Little Yue Yue died a week later.
Los Angeles Times, 21 October 2011
The public is the co-producer of public safety (Skolnick and Bayley, 1988). The
police rely heavily on community residents to fight crime effectively by first reporting
crime to the police to trigger the criminal justice response. Despite a growing literature
on public willingness (or lack of) to report crime in the West (e.g. Nicksa, 2014; Rengifo
et al., 2019), such research is largely absent in China, and correlates of crime-reporting
desires among Chinese people remain empirically uninvestigated. Over the past few dec-
ades, China’s fundamental social and economic transformations have been accompanied
by a rapid rise in crime rates on one hand (Zhang et al., 2008) and a gradual erosion of
the legitimacy and trustworthiness of its social control apparatus on the other hand (Sun
et al., 2017). These challenges in crime control and police–community relations have
made the issue of public reluctance to report crime to the police more important and
relevant than ever.
In the criminological literature, the dark figure of crime refers to the unreported or
undiscovered crimes in a society. People’s reluctance to report crime can be accounted
for by a host of reasons, such as a perception that the harm caused by the criminal act is
too minor to justify reporting, an unwillingness to take the time and energy to deal with
the criminal justice system, a fear of potential retaliation by the offenders, and a wish to
protect the offenders who are acquaintances (Felson et al., 2002; Khondaker et al., 2017;
Papp et al., 2019). Bystanders’ indifference or reluctance to report crime to the police, as
in the case of Little Yue Yue, however, is not only disheartening, but also threatening to
community safety, collective conscience and humanitarian values. In the post-reform
era, China’s rapidly growing market economy and residential mobility have substantially
undermined the traditional culture of communalism and mechanisms of informal social
control (Di and Wu, 2009). Individualist orientations intensify yet notions of civil respon-
sibility fail to grow complementarily (Zhao et al., 2019). Henceforth, people’s voluntary
participation in crime prevention declines (Zhang et al., 2007), along with their willing-
ness to help each other and the police. Incidents such as Little Yue Yue’s death have
provoked a widespread public outcry, calling for societal awakening and scientific inves-
tigation into people’s hesitancy to report crime to the police.
Relying on data collected from a sample of 757 local and nonlocal residents in a large
city in Southern China, this study assesses the levels and correlates of Chinese people’s
unwillingness to report crime to the police. Although crime-reporting behaviour is linked
to a collection of factors, we focus on three important variables in the Chinese context,
including political efficacy, group care and hukou (household registration). Political effi-
cacy indicates people’s confidence in and perceived influence that they have on
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