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Crime, Law & Social Change 41: 293296, 2004. 293
Bertil Lintner, Blood Brothers: The Criminal Underworld of Asia (New York,
NY: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003), ISBN 1-4039-6154-9, 470 + viii pp. $29.95.For people interested in Asian crime and Chinese secret societies, the year
2002 and the first half of 2003 are really a wonderful time period. During
these eighteen months, several milestone like books on Chinese/Taiwanese
and Japanese organized crimes were published in America, China, and Japan.1
One of such publications is Blood Brothers: The Criminal Underworld of
Asia written by Bertil Lintner. Because of the publication of this book, it
seems appropriate to assert that the study of Asian crime has become an
independent and interdisciplinary subject in criminology and sociology since
2003.The structure of Blood Brothers is quite succinct and straightforward. By
using geopolitical area as the criterion of categorization, Lintner divides this
book into eight chapters: the criminal activities involved by Asian underground elements in pre-1950 Shanghai (chapter 1); in Macau (chapter 2);
in Japan (chapter 3); in the Far East of Russia (chapter 4); in the four countries of Indo-Chinese peninsula Cambodia, Thailand, Burma, and Malaysia
(chapter 5); in Indonesia, East Timor, and Indonesias waters (chapter 6);
in Australia (chapter 7); and in the US (chapter 8). Each of these chapters
shows that traditional and modern Asian organized crime groups are not only
active, resourceful, and influential; they also have the potentials to undermine
the stability of Western societies or even to threaten the national security of
Western countries.Overall, Blood Brothers should be awarded a five-star rating for the
following reasons: First, Lintner, in a writing style which combines features
of Asian history, criminology, gangology, and sociology, uses abundant
literature to describe and analyze the origins and developments of Asian
crime.2 Asian crime students, in one way or another, can find relevant literature about the Chinese secret societies or the other Asian gangs in this book.
Such an approach, undoubtedly, paves the way for Asian crime researchers to
probe organized crime activities in East and Southeast Asia in the future. It
also reminds sociologists and criminologists that Asian criminal groups, with
their long history of preying on civil societies, should not be considered as
non-traditional, as some sociologists and criminologists argue.3The second...