Formal and informal modalities for policing cybercrime across the Taiwan Strait

Abstract

Cybercrime across the Taiwan Strait has become a global issue. Due to the large number of Internet users and the special political situation across the Taiwan Strait, the Republic of China (Taiwan hereafter) and the People's Republic of China (China hereafter) are two countries where malicious computer activity is rampant. Malicious computer activity across the Taiwan Strait has an impact not only on Taiwan and China but also on many other countries. For example, it has been reported that there have been computer attacks against the USA originating from computers in Taiwan but controlled by command and control servers in China. It is important to understand the current policing measures taken by Taiwan and China against cybercrime; however, there is limited empirical research on this issue. To fill this gap, this paper will, based on interviews conducted in Taiwan and China in 2008–2009, discuss current problems and issues that the Taiwanese and Chinese governments face when policing cybercrime. It will also examine whether current existing semi-governmental and informal cooperative measures against cross-Strait crime are adequate in addressing the problem of cross-Strait cybercrime.

Keywords:

• cybercrime
• policing cybercrime
• Taiwan Strait
• mutual assistance
• informal police-to-police cooperation
• guan-xi

Notes

1. He has been re-elected again in 2012 and will be serving until 2016.

2. A DDoS attack is an attack which makes websites or other network services unavailable to Internet users.

3. Dual criminality refers to a behaviour that is criminalised in both the requested and requesting countries for extraditions.

4. ‘Realpolitik’ (German: real ‘realistic’, ‘practical’ or ‘actual’; and politik ‘politics’) refers to politics or diplomacy based primarily on practical considerations, rather than ideological notions.

5. Interestingly, Taiwan and China are both not signatory to the Convention on Cybercrime for different reasons: China has not sign the Convention not only because that Chinese laws and regulations do not fit in the Convention but also that China was not invited when the Convention was drafted; Taiwanese government has expressed interest in signing the Convention but it is not recognised as a qualified signatory as it is not recognised by the Council of Europe as a country (Chang 2012).

6. He was Commissioner of the Crime Investigation Bureau when the Agreement on Mutual Assistance was signed.

7. There are doubts about the similarity and differences of guan-xi and social capital, especially in the field of anthropology, where some argue that guan-xi is an essential and defining elemental part of Chinese culture, whereas others believe that guan-xi is little more than a Chinese word for social capital which can be found in all societies, see more discussions at e.g. Gold et al. (2002), Jacobs (1979), King (1991), Smart (1993), Yang (1988). Here, the original expression guan-xi is used to avoid any misunderstanding that might cause by using other words like social capital.

8. The United Kingdom has signed but not yet ratified the Convention on Cybercrime.