Civil society groups can strengthen an autocratic state's coercive capacity, helping to suppress dissent and implement far-reaching policies.

Where other books have discussed selected social practices in China, this volume is unique in its coverage of the entire social control apparatus of that country. The contributors to this comprehensive study describe the design and operation of the Chinese social control system. Drawing on data gathered in China, the book introduces readers to China's unusual blend of formal and informal devices at the individual and neighborhood level up through the formal criminal justice system. This social control approach stresses citizen involvement and emphasizes prevention rather than reaction. The various chapters describe how the criminal justice system operates when these devices fail. The book's primary conclusion is that the low rates of deviance in China are a consequence of extensive social control efforts at the grassroots level. These grassroots devices are carefully controlled by the government. At the same time, however, China is rapidly changing. There is an extensive development of a formal criminal justice system and rapid economic development. The contributors predict that China's crime rate will rise as these trends continue. Professional criminologists, as well as students and scholars of criminology, delinquency, and comparative criminal justice systems, will find this book a valuable resource.

Where is the line between digital utopia and digital police state? Surveillance State tells the gripping, startling, and detailed story of how China’s Communist Party is building a new kind of political control: shaping the will of the people through the sophisticated—and often brutal—harnessing of data. It is a story born in Silicon Valley and America’s “War on Terror,” and now playing out in alarming ways on China’s remote Central Asian frontier. As ethnic minorities in a border region strain against Party control, China’s leaders have built a dystopian police state that keeps millions under the constant gaze of security forces armed with AI. But across the country in the city of Hangzhou, the government is weaving a digital utopia, where technology helps optimize everything from traffic patterns to food safety to emergency response. Award-winning journalists Josh Chin and Liza Lin take readers on a journey through the new world China is building within its borders, and beyond. Telling harrowing stories of the people and families affected by the Party’s ambitions, Surveillance State reveals a future that is already underway—a new society engineered around the power of digital surveillance.

China is more than a socialist market economy led by ever more reform-minded leaders. It is a country whose people seek liberty on a daily basis. Th eir success has been phenomenal, despite the fact that China continues to be governed by a single party. Clear distinctions between the people and the government are emerging, underlining the fact that true liberalization cannot be imposed from above. Although a large percentage of the Chinese people have been part of China's long march to freedom, farmers, entrepreneurs, migrants, Chinese gays, sex pleasure seekers, and black-marketers played a particularly important role in the beginning. Lawyers, scholars, journalists, and rights activists have jumped in more recently to ensure that liberalization continues. Social dissatisfaction with the government is now published in the media, addressed in public forums, and deliberated in courtrooms. Intellectuals devoted to improvement in human rights and continued liberalization are part of the process. This grassroots social revolution has also resulted from the explosion of information available to ordinary people (especially via the Internet) and far-reaching international influences. All have fundamentally altered key elements of the moral and material content of China's party-state regime and society at large. Th is social revolution is moving China towards a more liberal society despite its government. Th e Chinese government reacts, rather than leads, in this transformative process. Th is book is a landmark--a decade in the making.

During the past decade Xi Jinping has reasserted the Chinese Communist Party’s dominance of state and society, tightening political and social controls to consolidate the Party’s monopoly on political power in China. This volume brings leading China experts together to examine the changing mechanics of authoritarian rule in China, and the Party’s systematic efforts to neutralise potential threats. The book examines critical but little understood changes to the architecture of state, which enables more effective top-down rule and the efficient operation of an increasingly professional bureaucracy. It also explores the policies and mechanisms the Party has used to squash dissent and prevent criticisms. This volume will be of interest to anyone who wants to understand how the CCP has consolidated its rule at home and how it relates to the Party’s global ambitions for China’s great national rejuvenation.

The first volume brings together the best work to have been published on Chinese society and politics in the Maoist period (1949-76). Volume II, meanwhile, collects the key research dealing with both the theoretical implications and the empirical complexities of the post-Mao evolution at the highest level of the political leadership. The distinctions between urban and rural are especially significant in the People's Republic, not least because of China's system of residential registration which denies rural residents any right to live permanently in a city, and the final two volumes are organized with these fundamental distinctions in mind. Volume III gathers the best work on topics including: urban spaces (e.g. the creation and dismantlement of the socialist city, the creation of virtual cities, and the making of Olympics Beijing); the newly prosperous constituencies (including China's 'new rich' and the development of a huge and increasingly self-identifying middle class); China's working class; internal migration; and, urban social change. Volume IV includes work brought together under themes such as rural politics; family farming; changes in rural society in a period of economic reform; and, China's ethnic minorities.

The emergence of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in late 2002 and 2003 challenged the global public health community to confront a novel epidemic that spread rapidly from its origins in southern China until it had reached more than 25 other countries within a matter of months. In addition to the number of patients infected with the SARS virus, the disease had profound economic and political repercussions in many of the affected regions. Recent reports of isolated new SARS cases and a fear that the disease could reemerge and spread have put public health officials on high alert for any indications of possible new outbreaks. This report examines the response to SARS by public health systems in individual countries, the biology of the SARS coronavirus and related coronaviruses in animals, the economic and political fallout of the SARS epidemic, quarantine law and other public health measures that apply to combating infectious diseases, and the role of international organizations and scientific cooperation in halting the spread of SARS. The report provides an illuminating survey of findings from the epidemic, along with an assessment of what might be needed in order to contain any future outbreaks of SARS or other emerging infections.

In Policing China, Suzanne E. Scoggins delves into the paradox of China's self-projection of a strong security state while having a weak police bureaucracy. Assessing the problems of resources, enforcement, and oversight that beset the police, outside of cracking down on political protests, Scoggins finds that the central government and the Ministry of Public Security have prioritized "stability maintenance" (weiwen) to the detriment of nearly every aspect of policing. The result, she argues, is a hollowed out and ineffective police force that struggles to deal with everyday crime. Using interviews with police officers up and down the hierarchy, as well as station data, news reports, and social media postings, Scoggins probes the challenges faced by ground-level officers and their superiors at the Ministry of Public Security as they attempt to do their jobs in the face of funding limitations, reform challenges, and structural issues. Policing China concludes that despite the social control exerted by China's powerful bureaucracies, security failures at the street level have undermined Chinese citizens' trust in the legitimacy of the police and the capabilities of the state.

In the past decade, China was able to carry out economic reform without political reform, while the Soviet Union attempted the opposite strategy. How did China succeed at economic market reform without changing communist rule? Susan Shirk shows that Chinese communist political institutions are more flexible and less centralized than their Soviet counterparts were. Shirk pioneers a rational choice institutional approach to analyze policy-making in a non-democratic authoritarian country and to explain the history of Chinese market reforms from 1979 to the present. Drawing on extensive interviews with high-level Chinese officials, she pieces together detailed histories of economic reform policy decisions and shows how the political logic of Chinese communist institutions shaped those decisions. Combining theoretical ambition with the flavor of on-the-ground policy-making in Beijing, this book is a major contribution to the study of reform in China and other communist countries. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1994. In the past decade, China was able to carry out economic reform without political reform, while the Soviet Union attempted the opposite strategy. How did China succeed at economic market reform without changing communist rule? Susan Shirk shows that Chine

This report is designed to provide Congress with a perspective on the contemporary political system of China, the only Communist Party-led authoritarian state in the G-20 grouping of major economies. China's Communist Party dominates state and society in China, is committed to maintaining a permanent monopoly on power, and is intolerant of those who question its right to rule. Nonetheless, analysts consider China's political system to be neither monolithic nor rigidly hierarchical. Jockeying among leaders and institutions representing different sets of interests is common at every level of the system.