Chinese hire detectives to watch children

Older Chinese see today's children as lazy and greedy

By Duncan Hewitt BBC correspondent in Shanghai

In China, increasing numbers of parents are reported to be hiring private detectives to investigate their children's activities.

State media said more and more parents are concerned that their teenage children are staying out at night and spending long hours in video arcades and night-clubs.

It is contributing to a booming trade for private detective agencies, which are technically illegal in China, but have become increasingly popular, with their main business up to now investigating extra-marital affairs.

The head of one private detective agency told the Yangtse Evening News in the city of Nanjing that carrying out surveillance on wayward teenagers was one way of helping parents to understand their children.

He said his firm was regularly called on by parents to follow their children out of school hours.

Wrong crowd

The paper quoted the case of a middle-aged mother who was worried that her son was always drinking, smoking, fighting and going to night-clubs.

Once it was bicycles, now it is nightclubs

She complained that he often stayed out all night in video-game arcades and received pager messages from strange girls.

The mother said her son hardly spoke to her and she did not know what he was thinking.

One private detective told the paper that there were now increasing numbers of what he called 'problem children' in China, who behaved in what he described as mysterious ways which their parents could not understand.

The head of one detective agency told the BBC that most clients wanted to investigate teenage sons between the ages of 13 and 18, but he said his firm had also carried out surveillance on girls aged between 15 and 18 who did not come home at night.

He said some of them had been spotted meeting rich men who gave them clothes and other presents.

Others, he said, spent much of their time in night-clubs and in some cases, used drugs.

Generation gap

Experts say the increasing popularity of these private detectives services highlights a growing generation gap between many Chinese parents raised in more austere times, and children growing up in a vastly changed society.

Private detective agencies are technically banned in China.

But companies using titles such as 'social research centres' and 'information agencies' are doing a roaring trade.

Estimates say that around 80% of their business is gathering evidence of extra-marital affairs, often using high-tech surveillance equipment.

Such firms were given a major boost last month when China's revised law on civil lawsuits ruled that secretly filmed video footage could be admissible as evidence in court, provided no other laws had been broken in obtaining it.

But experts say the ruling only adds to the confusion about the legality of the private investigation firms.