Taiwan is unhappy with Kenya and China. It has said Nairobi was pressured by China to deport its nationals, who had been charged with or held on suspicion of committing cyber crimes in Kenya, to China instead of Taiwan.

China considers Taiwan as part of its territory awaiting reunification, by force, if need be.

There are several elements to this. The main one some “big picture” commentators are talking of is about China really not being different from the Western powers when it comes to interests. It too will arm-twist smaller nations.

However, a colleague noted something “small” but very interesting. She said until now, we all thought that the cyber criminals being busted by Kenyan security were all Chinese. Now we know that they were not. Several were Taiwanese.

The intriguing thing here, she said, is that when it comes to crime, the Chinese and Taiwanese are as thick as thieves.

Look at it this way. Assume the police broke up a smuggling ring in Nairobi and it turned out it was being run by Ethiopians and Eritreans. The two countries are, otherwise, bitter rivals and fought a border war between 1998 and 2000.

However, this is only just another reminder that criminals are forward-looking and cooperate better than the honest folks.

Anyone who follows the East African Community (EAC) project, will be familiar with a popular story in those circles about thieves and East African integration.

In 2004 EAC leaders formed a committee on fast-tracking integration chaired by the then Kenyan Attorney General, Mr Amos Wako. It was to draw up a road map to help “expedite the process of integration so that the ultimate goal of a political federation is achieved through a fast track mechanism”.

The committee travelled all over East Africa. When it was in Kisumu, it met several “stakeholders”, including the fishermen on Lake Victoria. The fishermen told them to speed things up. That the criminal networks that operate on Lake Victoria were already fully integrated so that when a fishing boat was stolen in Kisumu at nightfall, by daylight it would have arrived in Mwanza, Tanzania, and being sold.

In the view of the fishermen, without a unified police force, the thieves in the region could not be beaten.

Car thieves in the region do even better, covering even countries such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo that are not yet part of the EAC.

Also, a techie in Kampala tells of losing her iPad that was loaded up with a critical project she was working on. It took her a couple of hours to figure out it was missing and when they ran a tracer on it, they found it. The only complication was that it was in Kisangani, the heartland of DR Congo.

So why are criminals so successful? Anyone who has been robbed or cheated will agree that not everyone can be a criminal. A lot of crime requires not just courage, but exceptional talent. For example, only a handful of smart fellows in Kenya can hack an ATM.

But criminals also understand that borders, bureaucracy, taxes and unwieldy processes impose a very high cost or inconvenience on doing business. If a country requires Africans to produce bizarre documents, including land titles and marriage certificates of all of immediate families, it is creating a market for forged documents.

If a government takes a year to issue a passport and requires you to prove that your great grandfather was also a citizen of the country, it creates an opportunity for con men to issue fake passports within a week.

In these digital times, one of the most valuable commodities is a regional or global network. One of the things a network gives you is access to specialised skills that might not be available in your hometown or country.

By necessity, then, if you are to be a successful global criminal, you must take a light view of borders and people’s nationality.

A few years ago, Newsweek had a revealing report about pornography and the internet. It said the first people to master the use of the internet were pornographers. The most successful media and other companies online in the early days succeeded by studying how these ungodly people used the net.

Governments and good people too would get the same advantages if they learnt to cooperate like criminals and master technology the way the fellows on the dark side have.

The author is editor of Mail & Guardian Africa. Twitter@cobbo3