UC Irvine

This dissertation is inspired by Garland’s Culture of Control, which provides an ideological lens through which to understand responses to street crime. The present study aims to utilize the lens, exploring white-collar crime to investigate what I call the Culture of No Control in regard to corporate crime. Two economic giants—the United States and China— are utilized in this study, as the prosecution rate for white-collar crime has reached a 20-year low in both nations, and both are deeply influenced by neoliberalism. Although these trading partners possess different local ideologies, their white-collar punishment trajectories look surprisingly similar. As such, comparing different local ideologies and observing how they moderate neoliberalism can provide a holistic understanding of the formulation of Culture of No Control. To identify specific ideologies within both the Chinese and American media—the main institutions responsible for promoting them—this dissertation applies discourse analysis to media reports, comparing 612 American media reports and 404 Chinese media reports from the 1990s to the 2000s. This enables exploration of the ideologies underlying punishment for two specific types of financial crime: fraud and those categorized by the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA).

The results reveal that non-issuing of financial crime is accomplished in both countries using different local processes. While the American media justifies non-punishment using the idea of privatized justice, a Hamiltonian approach, and socialized victimization, Chinese media reports marginalize fraud by over-emphasizing State-Confucianism and normalizing GuanXi—the personalized social networks of influence. While the two countries’ white-collar policies differed in the 90s due to different local ideologies, after corporate scandals in the 2000s—the Enron case in the U.S. and the YinGuangXia case in China, in particular--both countries embraced non- punishment through their own practices and ideologies, the reality of which is reflected broadly in media reports. In sum, though neoliberalism works to shape both societies, the trivialization of financial crime is accomplished in both China and the United States using different local mechanisms.