Hear, hear.
Every nation has its examples in history of being peaceable aswell as crime-ridden in their societies. China would actually be an outstanding example, at times democratic, gender equal, LGBTQ open, and classless, aswell; as being fascistic, hierarchical, warfarous, crime-ridden, dangerous and grotesquely unequal.
Qing Dynasty prisoners, whose fate relied on hand-outs from passersby:
Class: the Manchu minority ruled as the elite, alongside Mongols, Tatars and Tibetans, over the Han Chinese merchant classes and vast legions of the impoverished, urban and rural.
Beijing operated its Forbidden City for the rulers, then the Imperial city for the elite minorities, with finally a vast Chinatown-in-China - the Chinese City - south of the world's largest city walls for the Han Chinese masses, who formed the crime ridden poor. It is in effect ghettoisation on a grand scale for the world's largest city. A sure recipe for crime and ultimately implosion:
Just looking at the recent history - the country endured the
world's worst civil war in the 19th Century, which wiped out 700 of the classical cities. One side was theocratic, operated an ethnic hierarchy, and ruled over a suppressing Imperialist empire with strong xenophobic tendencies, which at the height of total war was executing 30,000 Hakka people a day in mass genocide, and had just conquested Xinjiang and Tibet back into the fold.
The other side was democratic, distributed land equally, promoted Christianity, and banned foot-binding, polygamy and the male/female/child brothels, whose armies were made up of both men and women, in a classless society. Their aim was to free the Han Chinese people from the elitist system after 300 years of foreign subjugation under the Manchurians.
The ruling, xenophobic Manchus oft portrayed as the 'baddies' by the Chinese also tolerated all religions, cultures and 200 ethnic groups, and their ruler banned the worst practices of torture, corruption and bureaucracy, and launched Learn From the West thinktanks (before she realised the returning ideas of French style democracy threatened her power base).
On the flipside the God-worshipping Taipings, the 'goodies', who had launched their rebellion from the Han Chinese heartlands also operated a strict separation of sexes, was a militarised regime, and went on mass book burning sessions whereby the Yangtze heartland lost all its ancient Buddhist libraries - utterly intolerant of other faiths. It also had its own instances of genocide, including the murder of all the Manchu men in its capital, followed by the burning of all the women outside the walls.
Ultimately 30-60 million people died in the world's second ever worst conflict, and China lost 700 of its classical cities in a world gone mad, haunted by brutality, genocide and famine.
This of course went on to even more recent, living memory of a time when the nation disbanded into mass crimes for for a decade, in which child soldiers travelled the country doing what they wanted, when they wanted - desecrating history (including 300 temples in Tibet, and thousands more in China), and generally operating as a vast gang over society. The
Cultural Revolution was called by Mao after he had been voted out (following the world's worst famine, resulting from the Great Leap Forward), in which millions of teenagers marched onto Beijing and took the army. The country effectively handed the reins of power to the children - the Red Guards - who promoted equality and classlessness, but to a religious, idealised zeal, that purged away the Communist Party between 1966 and 1976.
An estimated 400,000 to 1.5 million people were killed (some put it as high as 10 million), with an equal number disabled, and 36 million targeted with violence, brutality and public humiliation. Minorities were also targeted alongside (790,000 were brutalised in Inner Mongolia for example, with 23,000 beaten to death and 120,000 maimed). 100,000 died in a single factional struggle in Guangxi alone, in which the army had to intervene, with instances reported of cannibalism.
This happening in a country that a year before had one of the lowest ever crime rates, and most peaceable societies, that for millennia has been endorsed in harmonic society making (Confucianism).
In short any country/ society/ people/ race can be crime-happy, as well as peaceable. Take a snapshot of Shanghai in the 1920s, with the worst excesses ever of capitalism - drugs, prostitution, racism, organised crime and hideous inequality, where every time the train pulled into Shanghai station an average two women would commit suicide. Take also a snapshot of any of the tranquil, timeless villages and water towns surrounding the city at the same time. Similarly 1990s 'border-town' Shenzhen bathing in its newfound capitalism that mirrored 1920s Shanghai, with tourist guides issuing travel warnings for its bevvies of prostitutes, drug gangs, smugglers and hustlers, in a lawless, unequal society that the Party had little control over (it's now much reformed and one of the richest cities in the country).
Btw, Chinatowns in the 19th Century were notorious centres of lawlessness, opium dens, drugs, thieves and prostitution, which drew up Anti-Chinese Acts and legislation, and even murderous race riots and anti Chinese mobs after Chinese labourers were favoured for being cheaper to hire. There was an unsaid policy to import Chinese labourers, coolies and slaves but no women less they start to breed. America is still known as 'Mei Guo' in China, the tongue-in-cheek reference to the 'Beautiful Country' as advertised to thousands of labourers, but who arrived to find themselves enslaved into building the railroads.
1800s San Francisco - whole generations of men never found wives due to a complete dearth of women (but resulted in high interracial marriages with Black women).
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