In the seventh episode of the third season of Mr. Robot (Sam Esmail; USA Network, 2015-2019), Whiterose calls Phillip Price, the chief executive of E Corp, the largest corporation in the world, to account. She reminds him that she installed him as CEO for one purpose only, to protect her plant, and that Angela Moss has been allowed to carry on with her lawsuit because he failed to control her. She orders him to hire his own replacement and to handle the logistics of moving the plant to the Congo. The woman giving those orders lives two lives: in public she is Zhi Zhang, Minister of State Security of the People’s Republic of China; in private, a transgender woman who can only be herself behind closed doors. She also leads the Dark Army, the Chinese hacker organization without which Elliot Alderson and fsociety could never have wiped out the debts of millions of people by attacking E Corp. The plant is the one at Washington Township, where years earlier a toxic leak from E Corp killed several people, among them Elliot’s father and Angela’s mother. There she is building a machine that, she believes, can change reality. To get it, the Dark Army carries out bombings against E Corp buildings that cause a massacre, and eliminates anyone who gets in the way, Angela included. In the last season, when her plan fails, Whiterose kills herself. A minister who uses her state’s resources for private ends, in alliance with a corporation, is the subject of critical criminology.
// The theoryThe crimes of power
Critical criminology broadened the discipline’s object of study beyond ordinary crime. In his 1988 presidential address to the American Society of Criminology, William Chambliss defined state-organized crime: acts the law defines as criminal committed by officials in pursuit of their job. Ronald Kramer and Raymond Michalowski later coined the concept of state-corporate crime, the harms arising from collaboration between a government and a company. Penny Green and Tony Ward, in State Crime (2004), systematised the field. Their common conclusion is that these crimes cause more harm than street crime and are almost never punished.
State and corporation, together
Whiterose is the embodiment of what critical criminology studies: a senior state official who uses that state’s resources for criminal ends, in secret alliance with the head of a corporation. Her Dark Army works as a parallel intelligence service, and her attacks are presented to the world as the work of terrorists, not of a government. The victims are citizens, and impunity is guaranteed by the perpetrators’ own position. Mr. Robot shows what Chambliss and Kramer described: the gravest crimes are committed not in the street but in offices.
// The subjectA woman against the clock
BD Wong plays Whiterose as a fascinating, contradictory character. She is cold, calculating and ruthless, but also deeply wounded: her public life requires her to deny her identity, and her obsession with the machine is tied to a pain from the past. Her relationship with time, the watch, the alarms, the counted minutes, suggests someone who feels it is running out. The series does not reduce her to her gender identity or make it the cause of her villainy, and her end shows her defeated by the same blind faith that drove her.
Her first meeting with Elliot, in the eighth episode of the first season, already sets out her terms. She explains to him the difference between them:
In the penultimate episode of the second season she does the same with Angela. She keeps her for hours in a room, puts a series of strange questions to her and then points out that in all that time Angela never thought of walking out through the door. Angela answers that it was locked. Whiterose is not after a confession, but a conversion: she does not want proof, she says, she wants belief. That is how power works in the cases critical criminology studies: it does not need to break the law in the open, because it sets the rules of the room.
Whiterose
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// The crackFiction is not the real state
Mr. Robot rests on the idea of a group of Chinese hackers in the service of a minister with personal ends, which blends state crime with individual crime. Critical criminology mainly studies crimes that respond to institutional logic, not the private obsessions of a senior official. Whiterose’s machine is a personal project, not state policy.
The series also uses a trope, the Chinese hacker as threat, that critical criminology would itself examine with suspicion, because fear of external enemies has historically served to justify surveillance and repression within countries’ own borders.
Trying the powerful
Research on state and corporate crime shows that prosecuting it depends on independent institutions: judges who do not answer to the government, a free press, international bodies and protected whistleblowers. Cases like the Bhopal chemical leak (1984), with thousands dead and very limited criminal prosecution, show how hard it is. The Washington Township leak in Mr. Robot is inspired by that kind of industrial catastrophe, and in the series only vigilante justice ever touches those responsible.
Three key ideas
- Critical criminology studies state crime (Chambliss, 1989) and state-corporate crime (Kramer and Michalowski): grave harms committed by governments and companies, almost never punished.
- Whiterose, China’s Minister of State Security and leader of the Dark Army, allies with E Corp’s head and organizes attacks that cause a massacre.
- The crack: the series blends state crime with personal obsessions, and uses the Chinese-hacker trope that the theory itself would view with suspicion.
Sources · further reading
- Chambliss, W. J. (1989). “State-Organized Crime”. Criminology, 27(2), 183-208.
- Kramer, R. C., Michalowski, R. J. and Kauzlarich, D. (2002). “The Origins and Development of the Concept and Theory of State-Corporate Crime”. Crime & Delinquency, 48(2), 263-282.
- Green, P. and Ward, T. (2004). State Crime: Governments, Violence and Corruption. Pluto Press.
- Pearce, F. and Tombs, S. (1998). Toxic Capitalism: Corporate Crime and the Chemical Industry. Ashgate.
Case-file questionsFrequently asked questions
Who is Whiterose?
Whiterose (“Zhi Zhang”) is a villain from Mr. Robot, analysed on KRIMINIS through the lens of criminology. Every meeting lasted as long as she had decided.
Why does Whiterose (Zhi Zhang) become a villain?
Critical criminology studies the crimes the state and the corporation commit together. Whiterose holds a ministry in China, runs an army of hackers and gives orders to the head of E Corp.
Which criminological theory explains Whiterose?
Whiterose's case is analysed through Critical criminology. Critical criminology holds that some of the gravest harms are committed by states and corporations, often in collaboration, and go unpunished because those who should prosecute them are part of the same power. Whiterose, of Mr. Robot (Sam Esmail, 2015-2019), is the leader of the Dark Army, a network of hackers working in the shadows for its own ends. At the same time she is Zhi Zhang, China’s Minister of State Security, and the secret partner of Phillip Price, head of the giant corporation E Corp. To take over a power plant where she is building a mysterious machine, she orchestrates attacks that cause a massacre.
