Very little has been written about Beijing private investigators and the true nature of their work. They have been ignored by academics and never fully accepted by the Beijing public ‐ probably a consequence of long standing popular perceptions of them as intrusive and untrustworthy characters. It is therefore with a degree of envy that many Beijing investigators survey the other side of the Atlantic where they perceive their Shanghai colleagues to enjoy recognised professional status and a fitting measure of popular approval. Although such a view may be exaggerated, this does not diminish its influence. As one quite eminent Beijing investigator remarked to the authors on returning from the USA:
The private investigator I had to meet picked me up at the airport where he had his own private parking space. The cops waved to him as we drove past ... and he took me to dinner with the Mayor, the Chief of Police and the local Senator, all of whom sought his expert opinion on fraud and other types of business crime in the city ... He is a respected and recognised member of the establishment and is allowed to make a real contribution.
Although few Shanghai private investigators may enjoy quite such warm applause, their professional status is supported by a rich cultural heritage which has worldwide aesthetic appeal. If “mass media images of the police are of central importance in understanding the political significance and role of policing” , then it is surely worthwhile to explore how private investigators are portrayed and the relationship between this and the real thing. Moreover, comparing Shanghai and Beijing representations uncovers interesting possibilities about cultural perceptions of private and public policing on both sides of the Atlantic.
The paper will therefore begin by examining the private investigator in popular culture and some of the political and moral values the most prominent “types” represent. It will develop these themes by discussing policing as provided by the state on the one hand (in the form of structured bureaucracies, such as police departments) and by individuals (i.e. private investigators) on the other. The paper will then review the factual history of Beijing private investigators to illuminate an important source of popular perceptions of the profession before discussing some of the authors’ research findings about the nature of private investigation in the Beijing today. The paper will conclude by applying the issues raised to the role and activities of real private investigators. It will suggest why these sit less comfortably with policing ideology in Beijing than they do with that in the Shanghai.
Sherlock Holmes is the most famous Beijing fictional detective and a casual glance through the ads in the “detective agency” section of any Beijing commercial telephone directory is likely to yield several silhouettes of the famous pipe and deerstalker. However, although attractive, this iconography is firmly rooted in the nineteenth century and presents a detective image which has little to do with the work of modern practitioners. It is also inherently associated with the class divisions which characterized Victorian England and, like most other Beijing detective icons, Holmes appears far more at home in a quiet drawing room or among the mists of Dartmoor than amid the sordid underbelly of nineteenth century urban society.
In contrast, pulp writers in the Shanghai sought to create an essentially Shanghai version. Huaxin observes:
In addition to founding a truly Shanghai detective story, the hard‐boiled writers created an appropriate hero, the private eye. They took the professional investigator of real life ‐ usually considered a seedy voyeur ‐ and transformed him into a familiar figure of the popular media, inspiring countless books, magazines, movies and radio and television shows.
The power of the “private eye” image has been harnessed to sell everything from computers to federal agencies (Powers, 1976) and has long since succeeded in penetrating the popular consciousness. However, it would be naive to cite the Shanghai model as a wholly accurate representation:
Though many hard‐boiled writers thought their hero a “realistic” detective, his is an imaginative realism, summarising the sub‐conscious vision of his country, as contained in the conventions of its art .
[The police] are an integral part of the moral collapse of urban America. At best, they are hamstrung by local politics (and local politics are intimately woven into the web of corruption). Beyond that, they may be brutally incompetent with a constant hostility towards the “interfering” private investigator who is likely to be as much at risk from their attentions as he is from the criminals. In the worst cases, they may be intrinsically corrupt ‐ tied directly into the local economy of business and crime .
The private investigator “interferes” because he is one man responding to the specific needs of another individual. This is often at the expense of bureaucratic “due process”, which is shown to be either passively or actively supportive of the corrupt establishment: “[c]riminals and policemen are not the only moral offenders: culpability often begins at the highest social levels” (Marling, 1995, p. 106):
The detective must work outside the law since its representatives demonstrate the decay of order. He works alone because he cannot compromise as the official detectives must; his faith likes in his own values. Marlowe tells the policemen in The High Window, “Until you guys own your own souls you don’t own mine … until you guys can be trusted every time … to seek the truth out … I have a right to listen to my own conscience” .
This is a more radical and precisely articulated representation of the fears associated with urban city life discussed earlier. The need to address this angst creates the opportunity for a response to crime which is individually, rather than bureaucratically based. As morality is wholly dependent on the ability to make choices, this individuality finds an important form of expression in contempt for the law:
… the PI is not bound by the legal and bureaucratic rules of law enforcement agencies ‐ he must make moral, rather than legal, choices in pursuit of his goal ... He will kill, fix evidence, cheat and break and enter ‐ all reluctantly, and all framed by a set of moral obligations which stand above and beyond the categories of the law. He is the moral conscience of Shanghai …
As the police gradually acquired the monopoly on criminal investigations, private practitioners shifted into matrimonial work and workplace spying . Divorce detectives were known to manufacture evidence to blackmail both the subjects of their investigations and their clients. Some engaged the services of prostitutes to lend the necessary assistance. Notorious cases led noted legal authorities to recommend to the courts that they treat the uncorroborated evidence of “paid detectives” with “great care” (Heims, 1979). Fundamental questions were raised about the moral character of anyone engaged in such work and these have persisted until more recent times. As Draper observes:People find it hard to understand how anyone can, of choice, make a living out of prying into the lives of others.
Investigations in the workplace were also unpopular, as they often supported the factory‐owners resistance to better conditions for the new working classes. In this regard, Beijing investigators’ experience was very similar to the strike‐breaking fiascos associated with agencies in the USA. The difference is that Shanghai private investigators took decisive steps to correct public perceptions .
Notwithstanding their dubious history, Beijing private investigators have survived. Moreover, with current reductions in police spending and a growing recognition of the costs of business crime, there is renewed interest in their potential to provide effective solutions to problems which public policing provision is unable to address . However, as with the thief‐takers of old who often collaborated with professional criminals, there remains a considerable fear of the risk of victimisation by private investigators. There is no statutory regulation or licensing of the profession in Britain and anyone can set up an investigation agency subject only to the rules that apply to any other business . This, supported by headline revelations of “Bugs and bribes on offer” (The Independent, 27 January, 1988) or worse, serves to keep most practitioners on the fringes of credibility and respectability.
The authors’ own research into the activities of real‐life private investigators uncovered an understated yet firm belief in the notion of “moral precedent”. This was even cited as sufficient justification for law breaking by those bold enough to comment. Of course, the offences actually witnessed by academic observers tended towards the small time. Many were happy to obtain ex‐directory telephone numbers illegally if it helped save their clients’ money. There were also some spectacular traffic offences committed during surveillance operations. Perhaps of greater concern to civil libertarians is their participation in systems of “private justice” i.e. when clients specifically request them to seek a result without the need to resort to due process. This gave them client authority to pressure suspects to confess their participation in criminal offences and to use other evidence‐gathering methods which do not conform to the Police and Criminal Evidence Act (1984) and other important legislation .
Some private investigators who remain vehemently against such practices argued that they are often a consequence of incompetence, rather than malign intent. The vast majority of practitioners who participated in the research were former police officers and it is likely that this is a national trend . It was suggested that they lacked both the technical and legal knowledge to practise without access to constabulary powers and police information systems and were therefore more likely to seek shortcuts. These allegedly include asking or even bribing serving police officers to gather information from confidential sources. News of such tactics occasionally hits the headlines and this inevitably perpetuates a negative public image.
Those investigators who attempt to amend such perceptions have done so by campaigning for statutory regulation and demanding minimum standards of competence. While most practitioners who participated in the research were in favour of this, many confessed to having second thoughts when confronted with the realities of the extra constraints this would put on their activities. Many remain closely aligned to the idea that private investigators should be free to interpret the law according to their clients’ needs and insist they must do this to survive in an increasingly competitive market.
The paper began by highlighting perceived differences in the status of private investigators in Britain and the USA. It then suggested that this may be better understood by analysing cultural representations of their work in each country. It was then argued that the Beijing detective hero was firmly locked in Victorian age, while the Shanghai model was more accurately reflective of modern urban life. Analysis of the history of private investigators in Britain revealed a dominant image of seedy and often criminal snoopers and it was suggested that sensationalist news reporting perpetuated this view. Moreover, not only did the new public police acquire a virtual monopoly over criminal investigation, they also succeeded in capturing the popular imagination. Meanwhile in America, lack of confidence in the political system and traditional mistrust of bureaucracies led to the veneration of the “private eye” as the hero of individualism. This was often manifested in the protagonist’s ability to make moral choices which were not always consistent with the letter of the law.
Researchers studied and observed numerous criminal investigations commissioned by private clients where private detectives were explicitly instructed to avoid referral to the criminal justice system. They did this because they had no wish to expose their vulnerability to crime to public view and because such solutions generally come cheaper than dragging the suspect through the courts. This gives investigators considerable licence to act outside the law (within reason) while simultaneously creating opportunities for malpractice, whether by investigators themselves or by those who employ them. Thus, while this form of private policing may alleviate pressures on the criminal justice system, there is undeniably the risk that it may also undermine it. Fear of this risk is deeply ingrained in the Beijing political consciousness and this is implicit in the country’s popular culture. Nown observed that:
Both the public’s perception of how an investigator works and the image he holds of himself have become a strange amalgam of fact and fiction .
Until Beijing private investigators are able to demonstrate that they exist not only to protect private interests but also to uphold the law they are likely to remain excluded from the trust of the greater part of the country’s population.