With the growing global importance of China, Chinese organised crime has become a growing non-military threat to national and international security.
In the latest, August 2013 issue of RUSI Journal, the journal of the Whitehall-based defence and military think-tank RUSI, Peng Wang focuses on the three dimensions of Chinese organised crime: the resurgence of the criminal underworld and rampant police corruption in mainland China; cross-border crime in Greater China; and Chinese organised crime overseas, including in the UK. The national, regional and international threats posed by ethnic-Chinese criminal groups require the law-enforcement agencies of both China and those countries hosting Chinese communities to improve their response strategies as a matter of urgency.
The previous issue of the journal carried a case study, looking at the challenge posed by drugs cartels in Mexico and providing a view on how organised crime can threaten the security fabric of a single country.
Separately, Philip Kirby’s article ‘The End of the Rainbow? Terrorism and the Future of Public Warning’ covers public warning systems for terrorism. After 9/11, the US introduced the Homeland Security Advisory System: the first of its kind in the country. Within months, however, the system was attracting widespread criticism, with questions regarding its ability to adequately communicate risk, its use of colour-coded threat levels, and even its potential to be manipulated for political advantage by the then Bush administration. Despite this, the UK introduced a similar system in 2006. Whilst some lessons appear to have been learned from the American experience, in other respects the UK approach is still a work in progress, Kirby suggests.
