What these crude figures estimates 137 suggest is that They are less Chinese are a familiar sight in most British cities. exotic, less strange; as a group, more acculturated, more Westernised. They also symbolise the regeneration of a great nation, reinvigorated China, one of the world's great powers. Chinese behaviour is no longer obscurely difficult to interpret; its motivation understandable.
Conclusions 51 The two cases discussed above have, one would think, intrinsic interest for criminologists and criminal lawyers: each is curious, fascinating. When capital punishment was a legal penalty, a verdict of guilt resulted in a mandatory death sentence in most cases (although only some of those convicted finally met the hangman). The last executions in Britain took place on August 13, 1964, when Gwynne Owen Evans and Peter Anthony Allen were hanged, the one at Manchester's Strangeways Gaol, the other at Liverpool's Walton Prison (both were convicted of the same crime).52 In Hong Kong, the last to hang suffered at Stanley Prison on November 16, 1966. Since that date it has become customary in Hong Kong to commute a death sentence into imprisonment for life, despite the fact that the Murder (Abolition of Death Penalty) Act, 1965, has not become law in the Colony. Because murder trials have become less final, less gladiatorial, largely as a result of the amelioration of punishment, public interest in such events appears to have waned (noticeably in Britain),53
The great era of domestic murder, as public dramaturgy, is over, overwhelmed by other forms of violence, horror, brutality, of which the media provides daily a surfeit for the public.
This article focuses mostly on problems of cultural understanding and misunderstanding. A younger generation of Englishmen is less likely to be as puzzled by Chinese murder as were Marshall Hall and Travers Humphreys. The change has come about from a number of factors demographic (more Chinese in Britain, many of superior education), cultural (a better understanding of Chinese culture and society, at least among the educated or sophisticated), and political (the vastly improved