The Laboring Poor and Banditry
While the archival records reveal little about the psychology of criminals and criminality, they do shed important light on the identities and personal backgrounds of bandits. In Chapter 7 the author examines the social composition of members of bandit gangs and sworn brotherhoods: age, marital status, geographic mobility, and occupations. Significantly, and contrary to the usual interpretation of banditry in the scholarly literature, the evidence from Guangdong demonstrates that banditry was not merely an occupation of younger men but also of older, more mature adults, many of whom were married with families. Most convicted bandits and brotherhood members came from China’s laboring poor, those individuals who were highly mobile, lived on the fringe of respectable society, and earned only a subsistence living. The fact that such a large number of bandits and brotherhood members were mature working family men suggests that they turned to crime in times of desperation or as a necessary supplement to honest work. Unemployment and chronic underemployment, the author maintains, forced many among the working poor to commit crime; stealing became an important, though normally only occasional, part of their livelihoods and life cycles.