This is a long and paradox-ridden story I believe best started with the double life of the Chinese word hua (花). In the dominant usage, hua connotes the flower—a thing of beauty cultivated, bought, sold, and displayed, often in public, for the appreciation of any person with even the simplest of aesthetic sensibilities. But for centuries in Chinese culture, hua has also connoted lasciviousness, or more precisely, the insatiable male libido—a thing that some labor to keep in check, and others strive to indulge to no end.
This second concupiscent hua may also be put on display and appreciated by men, but this is something most often done in the shadows of clandestine spaces—the love hotel, hostess bar, or brothel—far away from the sunlight that gives life to its floral twin.1 On the streets of Taipei in 2010, however, I observed a cleverly effected slippage between these two lives of hua, the lovely and the lustful. This slippage spoke volumes about the curious phenomenon of affair detectives in contemporary Taiwan.
The 2010 Taipei International Flora Exposition held in cooperation between the Taipei City Government and the International Association of Horticultural Producers (IAHP) mobilized a staggering amount of public resources to transform a large swath of central Taipei City into a park and exposition space, and attracted several million
1參見黃淑玲，男子性與喝花酒文化：以Bourdieu的性別支配理論為分析架構， 台灣社會學 ，5期，
頁73-132（2003年）；See also, ANN ALLISON,NIGHTWORK:SEXUALITY,PLEASURE, AND CORPORATE
MASCULINITY IN A TOKYO HOSTESS CLUB 7-30,145-50 (1st ed. 1994).
visitors from Taiwan and abroad. As the Taipei mayor described it, “This is the first international exposition held by [Taipei], and we have successfully showcased our soft power in flower art, cultural creativity, ‘going green’ and state-of-the-art technology.”2 Thus, under the safely apolitical rubric of civic beautification, Taiwan gained pride of place on a particular international stage alongside the dozen or so other nations that have hosted large-scale IAHP events. Even after the Expo wound down in April 2011, it continued to provide symbolic support for the Taipei’s numerous, and at times controversial, beautification and urban renewal projects. To this day, in verdant lots once home to dilapidated buildings throughout the city, one may find signs adorned the adorable faces of the Expo’s mascots, its five-color logo, and the slogan “the power of beauty” (美麗的力量).
In this public visual space so closely tied into discourses of municipal
betterment and international recognition, one may have spotted a curious interloper.
For a time in 2010, the sides of busses in Taipei were covered with a large
advertisement for Guohua Zhengxinshe (國華徵信社). Like many Guohua ads for at least a decade if not longer, this one featured a man zoomorphized into the likeness of an ape, playing off the Southern Min (閩南話) expression for apprehending an adulterous spouse (掠猴, lia̍h-kâu), which literally means “to catch a monkey.” Unlike similar advertisements before and since, however, this one adopted a color scheme that
mimicked the promotional imagery of the Flora Expo. Playing on the dual meaning of hua, the advertisement read Bie Huaxin, Xin Huabo (別花心，欣花博)──“Don’t
philander. Enjoy the Flora Expo.” Thus, into a state-sponsored, family-friendly large-scale event most centrally about beauty—one tied in to larger projects of urban renewal
2Department of Economic Development, Taipei City Government, Message from the Mayor (Dec. 17, 2012), http://www.taipei-expopark.tw/ct.asp?xItem=102618&CtNode=7927&mp=4.
and Taiwan’s precarious soft-power foreign policy—a zhengxinshe deigned to invoke the specter of the prurient, and draw attention to what most would consider an unseemly side of Taiwanese life.
Anyone who believes that, justly or unjustly, Taiwan society is still governed by the cultural logic (家醜不外揚) that shames adultery into the shadows, should find this most public invoking of adultery to be a sobering dose of another sort of reality. There is much to be read into this ingenious, if flippant, hua double-entendre. One need only look more closely at the wording of advertisement’s text to see why. We would expect an advertisement for affair detective services to appeal to the plight of the aggrieved spouse, and indeed, most others do. In this advertisement, however, Guohua speaks directly to the would-be philanderer in a tone of gentle admonishment. Yet, if
adulterous spouses were to heed this advice, would not the zhengxinshe soon be out of business? It would seem then, that this Guohua advertisement is operating on a different level. In hijacking the Flora Expo’s visual and discursive enactments of civil engagement, Guohua has in effect placed itself in the morally laudable position of issuing a public service announcement—a messaged carefully coded to seem as if it is more concerned with promoting the conjugal wholesomeness of the Taipei citizenry than with soliciting clients. “Men of the city, be faithful to your wives. Satisfy your appetite for the ‘flowery’ in a family-friendly space bathed and sunlight instead of in a love hotel,” read the advertisement’s subtext. This is the most breathtaking instance I have seen of a zhengxinshe attempting to express this curious—and suspicious—sort of social concern, but certainly not the only one. Other carefully placed advertisements throughout the city have suggested similar messages: As a man holds his penis and relieves himself in a public restroom he may read a placard over the urinal that both urges him to step closer to “maintain a cleanly environment” and reminds him a
zhengxinshe is only a phone call away, if not closer. As a man or woman unlocks the
door to her apartment building, her or she may notice a sticker that urges caution when coming home late at night, again, care of a private investigation firm. Such
advertisements may be read on many levels, but the thrust of the message seems to be:
Rest assured that hired eyes are everywhere, unless that is, you are an adulterer.
The print media gives us a decidedly less benign view of zhengxinshe. On a nearly daily basis, newspapers run salacious and at times almost farcical accounts of detectives, police, and spouses breaking down doors and storming love hotels, of wiretapping and clandestine videotaping and photography, of the planting of GPS tracking devices on the undercarriages of cars. The reader may take continual delight in the titillating details of men and women literally caught with their pants down, or from the safe distance of the printed page mock the preposterous excuses that the
apprehended offer to law enforcement officers and in court. Just as often, however, this reportage documents the injury to people’s bodies, property, and other interests that occurs when methods of extreme evidence collection are employed by zhengxinshe.
While much of this may lawlessness and criminality be attributed to the
overzealousness of “detectives” who have their clients’ best interests at heart, often the zhengxinshe employee emerges as a much less benevolent figure. The “unscrupulous” (
不肖) employee may overcharge an unwitting client for subpar or even bogus services.
And at times, newspapers tell us, the investigated parties may be blackmailed without the client’s knowledge. Moreover, some self-identified zhengxinshe seem to be nothing more than organized crime syndicates (詐騙集團) bent on extorting a profit from the kind of down-and-out and vulnerable consumer who would seek the aid of a private
investigator. In the public eye, then, the activities of the zhengxinshe industry, always of dubious legality, often stray into the territory of the patently criminal. Zhengxinshe,
it is commonly said, operate at the edge of the law (遊走法律邊緣), an apt, yet vague descriptor borrowed for the title of this thesis.
The affair detective that we may observe in the rich and nuanced public visibility described above is at once a self-styled force for good in a society where
heteromonagmous intimacy is both the hegemonic ideal and a thing in constant peril, and at the same time the unpredictable and freewheeling vigilante that at any moment may cross the thin line of the law, dragging along with him the unwitting client. The basic contours of this social visibility crystallized at least two decades ago, and have achieved the status of common sense (常識). Perhaps to its fault, the media incessantly repeats this “thin” discourse without the critical angle or intrepid journalistic spirit that would ask more incisive questions. Yet such questions abound and they are on the minds of casual observers and those of a more scholarly persuasion alike. From a more pragmatic standpoint, one wonders: What exactly are zhengxinshe? How many are there? How do they obtain personal information? What special techniques do they employ? What sort of suspicious relationships do they have with the police,
government officials, and gangsters?
The observer with an eye to gender equality and sexuality and culture in Taiwan may be preoccupied with somewhat different set of questions: Are zhengxinshe empowering women to take control of their intimate lives, or preying upon harried wives to turn a profit? Does the panopticon-like presence of zhengxinshe
advertisements suggest that the Taipei cityscape, long dotted with love hotels and seemingly given to the logistics of illicit sex, has in effect been colonized by the industry to the effect that illicit intimacy has been recast as an eminently knowable thing? And of course, we must also consider things from the point of view of those men and women who are investigated. From this other, but no less important, point of view,
are zhengxinshe a kind of hardnosed sex police? Are the rights and interests of those who engage in extramarital intimacy being unduly and unjustly curtailed? And finally, from a perspective attuned to gender equality we must ask: do zhengxinshe as the champions of criminal adultery, restrict what has always been a freer male sexuality, or on the whole, do they simply tighten the vice on women’s already circumscribed sexual autonomy in and out of marriage?
All of these questions share in common the desire to go beyond what the media shows the Taiwanese public in order to view to a richer picture of social reality. This is no simple task, but I will attempt to make some headway in this thesis. Along these lines, it seems as though for each question raised there exists a corresponding methodological or practical challenge. For instance, as is often acknowledged, extramarital intimacy is by nature clandestine and therefore difficult to observe.
Moreover, the zhengxinshe industry has long existed in a regulatory vacuum, meaning that the government collects little information about it systematically, and what data there is, government agencies seem loath to reveal.3 Of course, the industry itself, with its endemic illegality, is not a reliable source of information. And yet, even though these basic questions are difficult to pursue, the public visibility of zhengxinshe is a deluge of information. To borrow a journalistic turn of phrase, the phenomenon of zhengxinshe as affairs detectives exists in a complex and overdetermined “world of incident”—too much is going on to know just where to start, much less draw definitive conclusions from what may be readily observed. When faced with such a situation, it is the researcher’s task to define more narrowly the problematic—to cut through the din and pursue at least a few questions with scholarly rigor.
3 For instance, during a discussion with an employee of the Bureau of Economics, it was suggested that that tax authorities periodically audit zhengxinshe. The results of these audits may yield valuable insight into what zhengxinshe do and how they do it, but of course this information is not public. Because of
“personal privacy,” all of my requests to the tax agency were rejected, even when I suggested that they redact identifying information and release some information for research purposes.
Thus, I will ask two main questions in this thesis. First, how did such a public visibility develop and what does it mean? Second, what role do affairs detectives play when they intervene in extramarital affair-related intimate disputes? With this first question, rather than asking what social reality lies behind the visible (a tempting question indeed), we are instead turning a critical eye on the public visibility of zhengxinshe as “affair detectives” itself in an attempt to tease out a few of the
discourses that constitute this visibility including those surrounding gender, sexuality, rule of law, justice, and the sticky dichotomy of the public the private. This public visibility, despite its flaws and misleading aspects, represents the greatest source of information about the phenomena. One critical strategy of this thesis, however, is to look not only at what is visible today, but rather to trace the emergence of this public visibility to its origins over forty years ago. This longue durée examination of the emergence and development of the phenomenon hints provocatively at the behind-the-scenes role of government agencies in shaping the legal and discursive gray space in which the zhengxinshe industry operates.
This approach hopes to accomplish several objectives. First, we will for the first time be able to offer some explanation of how zhengxinshe came to be Taiwan’s de facto industry of private investigators. This, in turn, will allow us to destabilize the overly simplistic notion that zhengxinshe are Taiwan’s private detectives, and problematize the attendant assumptions about law and order and public and private.
The “edge of the law” at which zhengxinshe are often said to operate is not simply the result of a litigious public demanding a free market solution to their evidence-collection needs. It seems, rather, to be the product of a complex history of selective and non-regulation. Once we have realized this, our attention is naturally drawn to the nuanced and myriad ways that this industry attempts to co-opt the symbols and substance of state
power in the pursuit of profit, and what this state of affairs means for parties to disputes in which zhengxinshe intervene. Finally, in lieu of ethnographic research, this foray into this public visibility and its development may n some level serve as a proxy for the public’s understandings of zhengxinshe.
The second question concerning the role that affair detectives play in the
processing of extramarital affair-related intimate disputes represents a marked departure from the attention to public visibility. As suggested by the thesis’s subtitle, “The Role of Taiwan’s Zhengxinshe in Intimate Disputes,” our focus will shift to what I will call
“intimate disputes.” This shift acknowledges that to understand what affairs detectives do, we must first conceptualize and examine the types of disputes into which they intervene. After defining the intimate dispute as a triadic dispute involving one married couple and an “adulterous” third party, I will examine how laws related to extramarital intimacy underlie and structure these disputes.4 This shift represents the realization that if our goal is to examine what it is that zhengxinshe as affairs detectives do, our first task must be to determine how extramarital affair-related intimate disputes are
structured by the normative environment and the behavior of law enforcement and the professional judiciary, and how these disputes are processed both in and out of the courts.5
According to commonsense understandings, the simplest answer to the question of what zhengxinshe do is that they collect evidence, albeit often by extreme and
4This narrow definition may at times seem to exclude important circumstances, such as intimate disputes involving homosexual relationships, and extramarital affairs where both “adulterers” are married. The intent of this definition is not to ignore these important other factors, but rather to distill a large part of intimate social experience down to a level where the ways in which the law underlies and influence disputes can be more feasibly explored (Chapter Two). Throughout the process of research, the author kept his eyes open for circumstances that exceeded this narrow definition.
5Todo this, the thesis relies on a sizeable number of judicial documents. Rather than looking for broad statistical trends across a whole category of lawsuit types (案由), however, our approach is to use case studies to reconstruct several intimate disputes. Since these disputes span many courtroom confrontations, it is possible indirectly observe out-of-court disputing behavior. However, since these represent are cases that have gone to court, what happens out of court is not likely representative of most such disputes in general
invasive means. Certainly this answer by itself cannot satisfy us. Indeed, zhengxinshe discover and document illicit intimacy. “Evidence,” however, is an epistemic construct of the legal system that may be used both in the fact-finding function of the judicial system and out of court as leverage in bargaining. Thus we must cast a broader net, and ask how the knowledge of illicit intimacy created by zhengxinshe shapes the processing of intimate disputes related to extramarital affairs, and what roles the letter of the law and the operation of the professional judiciary play in defining and ratifying this knowledge. Again, based on limited empirical data6 this thesis will not be able to offer definitive conclusions about how the intervention of affairs detectives into people’s intimate disputes influences them or determines the outcomes of disputes in general, but we will reveal a picture of intimate disputing of uncommon depth. We will see that through the particular logistics of their evidence collecting practices, zhengxinshe provide their clients with an inordinately powerful tool in both litigation and out-of-court bargaining that allows these clients to further their interests, but at the detriment of the rights and interests of those who are investigated. More significantly, we will catch provocative glimpses of how the activities of the industry go beyond the appropriation of the symbols of state power in their public visibility to recruit to their side the very substance of state power. It is with attention to this nuanced and previously
unexamined collusion between state actors and affair detectives that we may come closer to understanding the way that this industry shapes the intimate lives of Taiwanese people.
Ultimately, the answers to all of the above questions lead to the same quandary:
Are affairs detectives good or bad? But, of course, this immediately reveals itself to be
6Newspaper articles, presumably written mainly to feed the appetite of the public for the salacious and the violent, tend to focus on the more outlandish aspects of intimate disputes involving zhengxinshe.
Research based on court documents is also hampered by the fact that in all probability the vast majority of intimate disputes never go to court. The case studies in Chapter Four, for instance, suggest that those
Research based on court documents is also hampered by the fact that in all probability the vast majority of intimate disputes never go to court. The case studies in Chapter Four, for instance, suggest that those