This book traces the transition in the regimes of regulation and punishment of all social levels from late imperial to modern China, an area long neglected in Chinese studies. The book is particularly significant for its theoretical framework; it is not a simple narrative history of policing but, rather, draws on Michel Foucault's theoretical work on governmentality, punishment and control, using his genealogical method to construct a 'history of the present'. Whilst most Chinese Marxist accounts of history have assumed the sublimation of past as a precondition for present, Dr. Dutton illustrates that 'feudal remnants' play a part in the social regulation of contemporary China. Although the regime of punishment is no longer dominated by the physical, the psychology of that system remains: today, the file rather than the body is marked. China was the first nation to use statistical records as a basis by which to plot and police its people, and contemporary Chinese institutions for policing rely heavily on the maintenance of traditional notions of community mutuality. The current regime centres on work and production, rather than on the family and Confucian ethics, and is by no means a new version of traditional dynasties. Rather, its form of policing and modes of regulation have resonances of past. The transition that has occurred, therefore, has been from patriarchy to 'the people'. The first section of the book deals with mechanisms of surveillance from within the collective, particularly traditional modes of policing households, which were dependent on the centrality of family in Confucian notions of state. The following section discusses the emergence of prisons and the failure ofmodern Western penal systems in China, mainly because of their incompatibility with the notion of an individual subject. Section three analyses the household registration systems of the post-liberation period, concluding that they did not constitute reintroduction of the feudal system but were, in fact, similar to the Soviet system of labour registration. The final section discusses the other side of the ordered society; that is, reform through labour programmes and the notion of the prison as factory producing a clash of proletarians from within the Gulag.

Crime long has been a silent partner in China's march to modernization, leading the regime to make law and order as central a priority as economic growth and the promise of prosperity. This groundbreaking study offers the first comprehensive and up-to-date analysis of Chinese crime, policing, and punishment. A multidisciplinary group of leading scholars draw on a rich body of empirical data and rare archival research to illuminate seldom-explored theoretical dimensions of legal ideology and reform as well as the linkages between crime and control to broader themes of law, modernization, and development. The authors balance comparative perspectives with an understanding of China's unique historical and cultural experience. This context is critical, the authors argue, as crime and control are at the root of modernity and how it is defined. In many ways the PRC is reliving the experiences of other industrializing countries, yet at the same time the practices of China's police and prison system also are painted with thick layers of historical memory. Order has become increasingly important in legitimizing the Chinese regime, but its practices and ideas of policing are often missing from our picture of Chinese social and political development. This important book's discussion of the paradoxes of policing and the problems of order bridges that gap and demystifies developments in China. All those interested in modern and contemporary Chinese politics, law, and society, as well as in comparative criminology and law, will find this work an invaluable resource. Contributions by: B rge Bakken, Frank Dik tter, Michael Dutton, James D. Seymour, Murray Scot Tanner, and Xu Zhangrun.

This book documents a systematic investigation into various aspects of policing in the People's Republic of China, including its scholarship, idea, origin, history, education, culture, reform, and theory. It approaches the study of Chinese policing from an indigenous perspective, informed by local empirical data. In proposing an innovative theory of community policing entitled «Police Power as a Social Resource Theory», the book seeks to look at crime as a personal problem, and police as a social resource, from the perspective of the people and not the state.

Using a conceptual framework, this 2007 book examines the processes of legal reform in post-socialist countries such as China. Drawing on Bourdieu's concept of the 'field', the increasingly complex and contested processes of legal reform are analysed in relation to police powers. The impact of China's post-1978 legal reforms on police powers is examined through a detailed analysis of three administrative detention powers: detention for education of prostitutes; coercive drug rehabilitation; and re-education through labour. The debate surrounding the abolition in 1996 of detention for investigation (also known as shelter and investigation) is also considered. Despite over 20 years of legal reform, police powers remain poorly defined by law and subject to minimal legal constraint. They continue to be seriously and systematically abused. However, there has been both systematic and occasionally dramatic reform of these powers. This book considers the processes which have made these legal changes possible.

Beginning with the bloody communist purges of the Jiangxi era of the late 1920s and early 1930s and moving forward to the wild excesses of the Cultural Revolution, Policing Chinese Politics explores the question of revolutionary violence and the political passion that propels it. "Who are our enemies, who are our friends, that is a question germane to the revolution," wrote Mao Zedong in 1926. Michael Dutton shows just how powerful this one line was to become. It would establish the binary division of life in revolutionary China and lead to both passionate commitment and revolutionary excess. The political history of revolutionary China, he argues, is largely framed by the attempts of Mao and the Party to harness these passions. The economic reform period that followed Mao Zedong's rule contained a hint as to how the magic spell of political faith and commitment could be broken, but the cost of such disenchantment was considerable. This detailed, empirical tale of Chinese socialist policing is, therefore, more than simply a police story. It is a parable that offers a cogent analysis of Chinese politics generally while radically redrafting our understanding of what politics is all about. Breaking away from the traditional elite modes of political analysis that focus on personalities, factions, and betrayals, and from "rational" accounts of politics and government, Dutton provides a highly original understanding of the far-reaching consequences of acts of faith and commitment in the realm of politics.