Bus stops, billboards and popular magazines in contemporary Taiwan are replete with advertisements for services such as monitoring spouses, apprehending adulterers, legal advice, and even emotional repair. The cover of every Taipei phone book, and even some spaces in public restrooms display advertisements that offer a helping hand to the suspicious spouse and double as public service announcements warning the would-be philander that hired eyes are everywhere. Taipei has long been a metropolis amenable to the logistics of illicit sex, but over the last few decades, the figure of the affair detective has in essence colonized the Taiwanese cityscape, and recast illicit intimacy as an eminently knowable thing. Starting from this remarkable social
visibility, this thesis has asked what significance zhengxinshe hold for the intimate lives of Taiwanese people, and on the level of methodology endeavored to ask how the researcher may approach such a complex socio-legal phenomenon. It has done so by training a critical eye on this social visibility itself, and by using empirical legal materials to query the concrete dynamics of intimate disputes related to extramarital intimacy in and out of the courts.
Four decades ago when the figure of the private detective offering extramarital investigation services first appeared in the public eye under the guise of the zhengxinye industry, its social visibility was literally relegated to the margins—tiny, vaguely worded classified ads placed at the bottom of the page among other similarly seemingly
clandestine advertisements for loan sharks and erotic toys. In print media reportage, zhengxinshe as private detectives were lambasted as out of line (越軌), usurpers of state investigatory power, and enmeshed with images of lawlessness, criminality, and violence. Flash-forward to the present, and the figure of the affair detective has cut a new profile—as a spymaster of covert surveillance technologies, a connoisseur of the law and the justice system, and even a caring aid to the afflicted spouse with a decidedly feminized visage. Yet, to the present, the zhengxinshe phenomena is still characterized by an entangling of the legal and illegal, and the parties to disputes in which
zhengxinshe intervene, whether they positioned within the bounds of culturally and
legally sanctioned heteropatriarchal monogamy or beyond them, at turns find themselves with and against the law.
Research often begins by problematizing the familiar. That de facto affair detectives registered as and called zhengxinshe collect evidence of affairs, albeit often by bending or breaking the law, has become, in essence, common sense. This is a state of affairs that subsumes both the role of state actors and the various shades of
disputants’ legal consciousness and agentic behavior under the industry’s visually and discursively rich, yet critically impoverished public visibility. Whether it is the media, the individual, or the researcher, in taking for granted the existence of the phenomenon, one may all too easily ratify and normalize the unjust processes and outcomes produced therein. Whereas previous attempts have failed to transcend a law-and-order approach, this thesis has narrowed in on concrete disputes involving zhengxinshe in order to reveal the complex ways in which laws and the justice system figure into the dynamics of the zhengxinshe-as-affair detective phenomenon. It has revealed that it is not simply the malfeasance—well-intentioned or otherwise—of a freewheeling, unregulated industry that produces unjust and troubling outcomes, but rather the combination of the specific
design of laws related to marriage, divorce, and the family and the behavior of agentic disputants including zhengxinshe employees in concert with the operations of a biased judicial system. In nuanced, and yet poorly understood ways, zhengxinshe are able to skillfully appropriate both the symbols and the substance of state power in order to further the interests of their clients. Yet, this same behavior proves to be to the detriment of the rights and interests of the men and women whom they investigate.
In so far as this complex socio-legal phenomenon has many moving parts—the behavior of intimate disputants, the actions of zhengxinshe, the letter of the law, and the judicial system—there is ample reason to be circumspect in assigning blame for the unjust outcomes produced by the phenomenon. The critics of the illegality and criminality that inhere to the zhengxinshe phenomenon must look beyond the unregulated status of the industry to grasp how the law renders possible and further incentivizes confrontational, invasive, and even violent extramarital affair-related intimate disputes, and moreover, how the professional judiciary underwrites this
through an outsized attachment to the abstract value of the integrity of the institutions of marriage and the family. Drawing on sociology of law research and focusing on out-of-court bargaining and the “fungibility” of extramarital sex, the thesis set forth several reasoned hypothetical roles that the legal effects of extramarital sex may play in
intimate disputes. We noted that the present design of the statutory basis for divorce by judicial decree—heralded at the time of its revision in the early 1980s as a solution to the difficulty some couples have in escaping infelicitous marriages—may actually be used to trap one spouse in marriage. It was also suggested that the threat of a criminal adultery prosecution provides the “offended” spouse with considerable leverage to pursue a variety of material and emotional goals, many of which have little to do with the abstract ideal of protecting the institutions of marriage and the family. Furthermore,
it was suggested that the high evidentiary burden of proving extramarital sex to the satisfaction of the criminal adultery statute, combined with the aforementioned variability of jurisprudential standards among judges likely incentivizes spouses to engage in extreme forms of evidence collection.
These hypothesized roles of the law were brought to bear in the observation of several concrete intimate disputes. Case studies revealed how evidence of extramarital intimacy collected by zhengxinshe is leveraged by their clients in both courtroom confrontations and out-of-court bargaining, and by highlighting specific junctures in judges’ reasoning, it became clear how judicial discretion and bias may serve the purposes of those hiring zhengxinshe and be detrimental to the interests of other disputants. Beyond this, the case studies shed light on other more nuanced and provocative trends and phenomena related to the role of zhengxinshe in intimate disputes that demand further study, compelling us to further examine, for instance, the role of “intimate contracting” between spouses, a phenomenon that is perhaps made possible and encouraged by zhengxinshe. We observed the apparent—and worrying—
dexterity with which a zhengxinshe was able appropriate resources of the law
enforcement and judicial systems, not just symbolically, but in substance as well. The co-opting of such resources by zhengxinshe and their clients has real and harrowing ramifications for the fates of disputants, but also blurs the distinction between with the law and against the law. No doubt thanks in part to the ignorance or compliance of various state actors, the demarcation between “with” and “against”—that “edge” which zhengxinshe are said to tread—is revealed as a shifting and malleable thing. This
observation calls for further attempts to uncover similar instances in judicial documents, and suggests just how fruitful an ethnographic investigation of disputants’ legal
consciousness may be.
This investigation, offers insights for the way we think of criminal adultery, marriage, and the normative question of who should be able to obtain and use
knowledge of illicit intimacy and how, such that overarching commitments to justice and gender equality are not sacrificed to serve the more narrow interests of particular individuals. Along these lines, on the point of criminal adultery, it seems that the focus of previous critiques of the criminal adultery statue’s ineffectiveness, incompatibility with the rule of law and constitutional principles, and failure to achieve substantive gender equality may be extended. That is, the criminal adultery statue (and arguably civil damages for the breach of marital fidelity as well) is not only problematic for the commonly asserted reasons. Zhuajian and other cultural scripts that feed off of the legal sanctioning of extramarital intimacy seem almost designed to produce inequity in disputants’ intimate lives—both those with and against the law—far beyond what one would presume based on a plain-letter reading of the law. Further empirical research that pays closer attention to adjudication and out-of-court bargaining in the context of intimate disputes related to extramarital intimacy will likely reveal patently unjust and even perverse outcomes in which this law plays a pivotal role. In a sense, then, the zhengxinshe phenomenon indexes the unjustness of criminal adultery. Following the
extreme behavior of affair detectives past the short attention span of the tabloid media to where things really get interesting—adjudication and out-of-court bargaining—
promises to yield more rhetorical ammunition for the fight to repeal the criminal adultery statue.
Similar assertions may be made concerning marriage by judicial decree.
Divorce law is not currently as controversial, and discussions of divorce by judicial decree do not irritate the cultural sensibilities of the public in the same way that debates over criminal adultery do. However, there is indeed a need for renewed discussion of
the role of the state in deciding when and how marriages should end. Our empirical investigation of intimate disputes has revealed how the current divorce law delineates the parameters of intimate dispute in ways that enable and even encourage coercion and out-of-court bargaining effects that do not accord with the ideals of justice. Here again, the behavior of zhengxinshe may be seen as indexing broader problems. Attention to divorce disputes in which affair detectives play a role may reveal problematic areas of the substantive and procedural dimensions of the current regime of divorce law.
Moreover, even when—or perhaps especially when—divorce is not pursued, affairs detectives may be used to exact civil penalties from their spouses. In such cases, how might closer attention to the violence and coerciveness that accompanies the
intervention of a zhengxinshe into an intimate dispute compel us to rethink the parameters of marriage and divorce?
The concept of social visibility was introduced for two reasons: in order to overcome the methodological obstacles presented by the studying of the historical emergence and present activities of an industry that is secretive and unregulated; and in lieu of ethnographic research, to derive some insight into the legal consciousness of disputants by focusing on one source of readily available information that likely informs their disputing behavior. The thesis acknowledges that much of the past of the socio-legal phenomenon we wish to understand in the present is simply unrecoverable.
Instead, I have proposed tracing the history of what can be seen—the history of the social visibility of zhengxinye. The thesis compared the social visibility of zhengxinye when it first emerged as an industry of de facto affair detectives and the present day. To some extent, this has allowed us to untangle the positive and negative elements of this visibility, and posit that the fact that a certain vagueness regarding the industry’s illegality and criminality solidified early on and has continued to the present with the
lasting effect that the media and the inquiring public alike have not developed a more critical lens through which to view the zhengxinshe phenomenon.
Our concrete disputes are also related to media coverage, further suggesting a dialectical relationship between the social visibility of zhengxinshe as affair detectives and actual disputing behavior, for instance when a defendant in a criminal adultery trial referenced a newspaper article that reports one of the complainant’s witnesses to be an undercover gangster working in a zhengxinshe. Furthermore, reportage of the disputes of the other case studies focused on the salacious details of the disputes and the eye-popping sums of money involved. In other words, the social visibility created thereby conveys none of the nuance of each disputant’s interests, and more importantly, of the behavior of law enforcement officials and the chain of judicial decisions that decided their fates. One need only imagine how such a partial and one-sided representation of extramarital affair-related intimate disputing behavior might skew public opinion.
Taken in isolation, the tawdry details of zhuajian may be cause for the reader’s derision of particular disputants or perhaps bemusement at their expense. But when viewed more fully, the picture of these disputes is not merely one of libidinous husbands, jealous wives, brazen mistresses, and freewheeling affairs detectives. It is, rather, also a picture of laws, law enforcement, and judicial behavior that seem to exacerbate and warp the rifts in people’s intimate lives, instead of wielding state power to ensure equitable resolutions to intimate disputes—in both emotional and material terms.
The concept of public visibility, however, potentially has further utility and more in-depth research along these lines is needed. A preliminary survey of internal government documents ultimately excluded from this thesis provocatively suggests the promise of a fine-toothed analysis of the changing public visibility of the industry over the last four decades combined with a rigorous history of the government’s attempts to
regulate zhengxinye. Regulatory history in and of itself can be more misleading than enlightening. Indeed, the CPU research simply traces the changing norms of a set of regulations (the Zhengxinye Guanli Guize, 徵信業管理規則), and arrives at several misleading and even false conclusions. But an alternative approach suggested here would differ in two respects. First, by examining internal government documents about the regulations’ implementation and revision, it would be possible to shed light on the government’s goals. It would further be possible to combine what might otherwise be a bland regulatory history with our history of the changing public visibility of zhengxinye.
By examining these two histories in parallel, the researcher would no doubt arrive at a much better idea of how zhengxinshe came to be Taiwan’s unregulated industry of de facto affair detectives. An initial survey of government documents seems to reveal that by effectively allowing zhengxinshe to offer private investigator-like services, but denying them the legitimacy of being legally defined and regulated as private
investigators, the government both contributed to the formation of the legal gray space in which the businesses operate, and helped foment a public visibility infused with rich and diverse references to traditional culture, female empowerment, civic responsibility, and the appropriation of symbols of state authority. Thus, where previous research sees the government’s role as botched regulation, a more robust and revealing approach would focus on how the nuanced and often invisible actions of government agencies helped to shape a unique and tangled public visibility that no doubt informs the
disputing behavior of Taiwanese in direct and indirect ways through the present. Such an investigation would furthermore promise to strengthen the assertion that the
zhengxinshe phenomenon is uniquely Taiwanese in nature, and that any concrete action taken to address it ought to be cognizant of Taiwanese history, culture, and a more thoroughly revealed picture of the government’s contemporary behavior. Thus,
ultimately, further research of the public visibility of zhengxinshe may be able to do more than describe and explain the phenomena. It may also hold the key to introducing researchers, the public and policymakers, to a more critical understanding of the
phenomena—one that can separate conventional (and thin) views related to the
separation of public and private and the hegemony of heteropatriarchal monogamy from the empirical reality of the aforementioned collusion among bureaucrats, law
enforcement officials, and the professional judiciary that encourages the unjust and patently illegal elements of zhengxinshe-assisted extramarital affair investigations and zhuajian in particular to remain common sense.
This thesis has strongly suggested that government actors have a previously under-acknowledged role in propagating such injustices. This is in part possible
because the public visibility of the zhengxinshe industry that has developed over the last forty years tends to minimize the role of government actors, instead focusing
exclusively on zhengxinshe, those who hire them, and those who are investigated by them. In addressing the problems that are seen as attendant to the industry, it may be well time to more closely examine police, bureaucrats, judges and prosecutors.
Moreover, I believe this may hold the key—or perhaps one key among many—to understanding the complexity of legal consciousness of people embroiled in intimate disputes in which zhengxinshe intervene. When such disputants conceive of themselves as with the law or against the law and act accordingly, they are no doubt behaving to some degree in accordance with longstanding—albeit—evolving cultural scripts that are in no small part derived from the public visibility of the zhengxinshe industry. Insofar as this public visibility elides, rather than foregrounds the role of state actors, it is difficult for the public and researcher alike to make strong, overarching claims about justice in such disputes. This assertion is supported by the case studies of Chapter Four,
but could be productively extended by deepening the historical work begun in Chapter Three. To make stronger claims about justice in the context of such dispute processing, we need to ask not only what zhengxinshe and disputants do with, against, and at the edge of the law, but also how the behavior of government actors has created and reproduced this ideological and substantive legal terrain, and how it has been refracted through public visibility.