(still peanuts compared to the 200,000 pan-ops working just in Securitas (which ate up Pinkerton and Burns in 1999-2000)
(also - note Shenyang is the Flint Michigan of China, see: http://www.chinastudygroup.org/index.php?type=article&id=45 for more)
In China, private eyes spy from legal twilight zones
Knight Ridder | 23 jan
by Tim Johnson
SHENYANG, China - Out of China's chaotic race to capitalism, an army of private detectives has emerged to find abundant work tracing bogus goods, tailing swindlers and capturing philandering spouses on videotape.
By some estimates, 700 to 1,000 small investigations companies now ply their trade, employing tens of thousands of paid informants, stalkers, disguise artists, cameramen and part-time snoops.
Like much business in China, the industry exists in a legal twilight zone. Banned by the central government in 1993, private detective agencies became semi-legal again after a 2002 court ruling. Even so, there's no central registry, no federal licensing and only fuzzy legal interpretation about how gumshoes may operate.
"My understanding is that anything that is not specifically banned is legal," said Kang Yongchun, the deputy director of the Kedun Detective Office (www.kedun-detective.com) in Shenyang, an industrial city about 400 miles northeast of Beijing.
Detective agencies in China do little advertising, preferring to maintain a low profile. But they were thrust into the spotlight after the brutal beating death of a detective Dec. 13 in Beijing.
A disgruntled vendor had hired the 39-year-old detective, Huang Lirong, to snoop on the owner of an herbal medicine shop. Huang's body was dumped in front of Beijing Hospital hours after the medicine shop owner spotted him and confronted him, the China Daily newspaper reported.
Looking philosophical, and exuding the confidence of a lengthy career in law enforcement, Meng Guanggang, the owner of the Kedun Detective Office, said: "Private detectives are people who walk on the edge. You try to accomplish your goal by all means. If you think it's right, and within the law, then go ahead and do it."
In China's rough-and-tumble environment, business owners often view signed contracts as less than ironclad agreements. Swindles are common. Debts mount. Police rarely delve into such disputes.
"If you've been cheated by a swindler, you can report the case to the police. But you have to produce evidence. You have to tell the police where the guy is, where the company is," Meng said.
While Meng is low-key, other detectives take their cues from popular fiction and B-list movies, employing a practiced bluster to sell their skills.
"I'm a rare talent. They can't find a talent like me," Wei Wujun, perhaps China's most widely publicized private detective, announced to a reporter.
Like many detectives, Wei, who operates from Shanghai and the southwestern city of Chengdu, spends a lot of time, video camera in hand, tailing men who cheat on their wives.
"We stay in the next room and record everything," Wei said as he slapped a videocassette in a VCR to show some footage. "See? The lens is not directed at the bed. We just want to prove that they did that. We try to protect their dignity and privacy."
Under new Chinese law, wronged wives may receive assets from their unfaithful husbands if they prove infidelity. Courts now accept videotaped evidence as such proof.
Laws prohibit private investigators from carrying guns or recovering private debts, but Wei, like others, finds ways to help clients, even mounting "sting" operations.
Wei said a software company summoned him when it discovered an employee pilfering software source code and selling it on the sly.
"We set up a trap. I went in with a guy who is a close friend of that staff member, and acted as a potential buyer," Wei said, asserting that he solved the case.
When some 150 private detectives, lawyers and other experts gathered in late December in Hangzhou to discuss the outlook for private investigations, much of the talk centered on "competitive intelligence," such as tracing counterfeit goods and identifying thefts of industrial know-how.
"In China, they are able to manufacture everything from pins to airplanes. They can counterfeit anything," said Ponnosamy Kalastree, the regional executive director for the Council of International Investigators, an industry group based in Seattle.
So the market is booming for investigators to check into purloined manufacturing technology. They also profile potential business partners for clients, probe shipping fraud and track down "vanished" business partners.
"China is a big country. It is a heaven for people to disappear," said Kalastree, who heads a security firm in Singapore. "Their technology is still not very advanced for tracing missing persons."
U.S. and European security consulting companies are present in China but they largely stick to insurance fraud and safeguarding foreign products from counterfeiting.
"Most of the work we do is brand protection," said Ewen Turner, the Shanghai- based managing director for northern China for Pinkerton Consulting and Investigations, the 154-year-old security firm headquartered in New York.
Turner said private investigation in China "is still very much a fledgling industry" and local private eyes run the gamut "from legitimate firms to one- man offices to professional informants who go around city-to-city sniffing around markets."
"There are people whose sole purpose is to go follow trucks around," he said.
Since business success in China depends on personal networks - knowing influential people - private investigators often come from backgrounds in government. They rely on senior officials to help them in their work.
Wei, the Shanghai-based detective, spent 13 years as an instructor in the People's Liberation Army, and boasts that government officials moonlight on his staff of "several dozen" investigators.
"I can exert pressure on local officials," Wei said.
Meng said his firm had helped crack corruption cases.
At his office in Shenyang, former beat cops loitered, some still in uniform. About a third of the staff members are former police officers, Meng said.
A bulletin board of press clippings attests that Meng's firm attracts media attention. Many other private investigators prefer to keep the profession in the shadows, fearful that powerful officials will turn on them.
When investigators trace shady business dealings in China, Kalastree said, the clues sometimes lead to government offices. "The people involved in the business may be government officials themselves. They (private investigators) do not want to step on any toes."
------------------------------------------------- This mail sent through IMP: http://horde.org/imp/