Punishment in contemporary China has experienced dramatic shifts over the last seven decades or so. This book focuses on the evolution, development and change of punishment in the Maoist (1949-1977), reform (1978-2001) and post-reform eras (2002-) of China to understand the shaping and transformation of punishment within the context of a range of socio-cultural changes across different historical periods. It aims to fill the gap of existing research by developing a distinctive theoretical framework for the China’s penality, exploring it as a separate and complex legal-social system to observe the impact social foundations, political-economic genesis, cultural significance and meanings have exerted on penal form, discourse and force in contemporary China. It sheds light on the sociology of punishment in this socialist Party-state by investigating law reform, penal policy, social control, crime prevention and sentencing as interconnected elements in the criminal justice and penal system. This book will be of great interest to those who study Chinese criminal law, penal and policing system, as well as to law academics, criminologists and sociologists whose research interests lie in the fields of comparative criminology and criminal justice.

This book is a richly textured social and cultural study exploring the profound effects and lasting repercussions of superimposing Western-derived models of repentance and rehabilitation on traditional categories of crime and punishment.

China's infamous death penalty record is the product of firm Party-state control and policy-setting. Though during the 1980s and 1990s, the Party's emphasis was on "kill many," in the 2000s the direction of policy began to move toward "kill fewer." This book details the policies, institutions, and story behind the reform of the death penalty.

This book examines the death penalty within the changing socio-political context of China. The authors' treatment of China's death penalty is legal, historical, and comparative, focusing on its theory and the actual practice.

This book considers 'law on display' in Chinese courts. As the first sustained study of criminal trials, rallies, and campaigns in Chinese courts, it offers an account of how law and punishment is constructed and represented both in practice and in rhetoric.

This work investigates inequality and social exclusion in contemporary Chinese society, specifically in the context of urbanization, migration and crime. Economic reforms started in the late 1970s (post-Mao) fuelled a trend of urbanization and mass migration within China, largely from rural areas to more economically developed urban regions. With this migration, came new challenges in a rapidly changing society. Researchers have extensively studied the rural-to-urban human movement, social changes, inequality and its impact on individuals and society as a whole. This volume provides a new perspective on this issue. It forges a link between internal migration, inequality, social exclusion and crime in the context of China, through qualitative research into the impact of this phenomenon on individuals’ lives. Using a series of case studies drawn from interviews with inmates – men and women – in a large Chinese prison, it focuses on migrant offenders’ subjective experiences, and analyses issues from the rarely-heard perspectives of migrant lawbreakers themselves. The research demonstrates how factors – including: the hukou system, rural-urban, class and gender inequalities, prejudices against rural migrants, and other structural problems – often lead to migrant offending. The author argues that to mitigate the effects of criminalisation, the root causes of these problems should be examined, emphasizing radical reforms to the hukou policy, cultural change in urban society to welcome newcomers, positive programs to integrate migrant workers into urban societies and improve their opportunities, rather than inflicting harsher penalties or reducing migration. While the research is based in China, it has clear implications for other regions of the world, which are experiencing similar tensions related to national and international migration. This work will be of interest to researchers in criminology and criminal justice, particularly with an interest in Asia, as well as those in related fields such as sociology, law and social justice.

The volume presents an extensive investigation into the process of reforms of detention powers in today’s China and offers an in-depth analysis of the debates surrounding the reformist attempts. The chapters in this collection demonstrate that legislative and institutional reforms in this area result from political opportunities - openings and tensions at the central institutional levels of political authority - and contingent social and political factors. The book examines legal and institutional reforms to institutions of detention and imprisonment that have occurred since the 1990s, with a particular focus on the 21st century. Its content follows three particular lines of enquiry concerning the issue of deprivation of liberty in contemporary China. The first deals with the academic and theoretical debates on the subject of imprisonment and detention. The related chapters explain the difficulties encountered in this area of research and understandings of the discourses of reform through labour in Western and Chinese scholarship. The second deals with the specific issues of criminal and administrative forms of deprivation of liberty, examining in particular the institutional and legislative dimensions, considering the relationship between reforms and criminal justice policy agendas. The third assesses the meaning of institutional reforms in the context of the changing state-society relationship in contemporary China.