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.

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.

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: Børge Bakken, Frank Dikötter, Michael Dutton, James D. Seymour, Murray Scot Tanner, and Xu Zhangrun.

In a groundbreaking work, Klaus Muhlhahn offers a comprehensive examination of the criminal justice system in modern China, an institution deeply rooted in politics, society, and culture. In late imperial China, flogging, tattooing, torture, and servitude were routine punishments. Sentences, including executions, were generally carried out in public. After 1905, in a drive to build a strong state and curtail pressure from the West, Chinese officials initiated major legal reforms. Physical punishments were replaced by fines and imprisonment. Capital punishment, though removed from the public sphere, remained in force for the worst crimes. Trials no longer relied on confessions obtained through torture but were instead held in open court and based on evidence. Prison reform became the centerpiece of an ambitious social-improvement program. After 1949, the Chinese communists developed their own definitions of criminality and new forms of punishment. People's tribunals were convened before large crowds, which often participated in the proceedings. At the center of the socialist system was reform through labor, and thousands of camps administered prison sentences. Eventually, the communist leadership used the camps to detain anyone who offended against the new society, and the crime of counterrevolution was born. Muhlhahn reveals the broad contours of criminal justice from late imperial China to the Deng reform era and details the underlying values, successes and failures, and ultimate human costs of the system. Based on unprecedented research in Chinese archives and incorporating prisoner testimonies, witness reports, and interviews, this book is essential reading for understanding modern China.

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.

Featuring experts from Europe, Australia, Japan, China, and the United States, this collection of essays follows changes in the theory and policy of China's death penalty from the Mao era (1949–1979) through the Deng era (1980–1997) up to the present day. Using empirical data, such as capital offender and offense profiles, temporal and regional variations in capital punishment, and the impact of social media on public opinion and reform, contributors relay both the character of China's death penalty practices and the incremental changes that indicate reform. They then compare the Chinese experience to other countries throughout Asia and the world, showing how change can be implemented even within a non-democratic and rigid political system, but also the dangers of promoting policies that society may not be ready to embrace.

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.

Against the backdrop of rising populism around the world and democratic backsliding in countries with robust, multiparty elections, this book asks why ordinary people favor authoritarian leaders. Much of the existing scholarship on illiberal regimes and authoritarian durability focuses on institutional explanations, but Tsai argues that, to better understand these issues, we need to examine public opinion and citizens' concerns about retributive justice. Government authorities uphold retributive justice - and are viewed by citizens as fair and committed to public good - when they affirm society's basic values by punishing wrongdoers who act against these values. Tsai argues that the production of retributive justice and moral order is a central function of the state and an important component of state building. Drawing on rich empirical evidence from in-depth fieldwork, original surveys, and innovative experiments, the book provides a new framework for understanding authoritarian resilience and democratic fragility.

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.

Criminal punishment in America is harsh and degrading--more so than anywhere else in the liberal west. Executions and long prison terms are commonplace in America. Countries like France and Germany, by contrast, are systematically mild. European offenders are rarely sent to prison, and when they are, they serve far shorter terms than their American counterparts. Why is America so comparatively harsh? In this novel work of comparative legal history, James Whitman argues that the answer lies in America's triumphant embrace of a non-hierarchical social system and distrust of state power which have contributed to a law of punishment that is more willing to degrade offenders.