Policing China

"Evaluates the police bureaucracy in modern day China using interview and archival sources. Argues that despite projecting the appearance of a strong security state, the police bureaucracy in China is weak and plagued by problems of resources, enforcement, and oversight in virtually every area of policing except protest response"--

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.

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.

This is the first book to look at women in policing in the mainland of the People’s Republic of China. Informed by empirical data as well as rich secondary information drawn from a wide range of published materials, and written by a former police officer in China, this book offers a detailed discussion of key issues concerning women in the Chinese police. Mainly drawing on face-to-face interviews with police officers and student probationers in multiple force areas, Women Police in Contemporary China offers rich insights into women’s lives in Chinese policing. The book first discusses how Chinese women were introduced to the male-only organisation and their representation in the Chinese police today. It elaborates women’s experiences as female officers in the police and, more specifically, their everyday work, contributions to policing, women police’s own perceptions of their roles and positions in the police profession and the gendered challenges and concerns facing them. It also looks at police occupational culture from a gendered lens. This book is illuminating reading for all those engaged in policing studies, gender and justice, policymaking, comparative criminal justice and all those interested in a woman’s role in the Chinese police.

This book examines the politics of policing in Greater China, including mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macao. As the author shows, police ideological indoctrination is strongest in mainland China, followed by Hong Kong, and Taiwan, where the police is under increasing political stress, in the aftermath of rising public protests and socio-political movements. Macao's police, on the other hand, is far less politicized and indoctrinated than their mainland Chinese counterpart. This book demonstrates that policing in China is a distinctive and extensive topic, as it involves not only crime control, but also crisis management and protest control, governance and corruption (or anti-corruption), the management of customs and immigration, the control over legal and illegal migrants, the transfer of criminals and extradition, and intergovernmental police cooperation and coordination. As economic integration is increasing rapidly in Greater China, this region's policing deserves special attention.

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.

With nearly 20 percent of the worlds population located in China, what happens there is significant to all nations. Sweeping changes have altered the cultural landscape of China, and as opportunities for wealth have grown in recent years, so have opportunities for crime. Police Reform in China provides a rare and insightful glimpse of policing in

What if the job of police was to cultivate the political will of a community to live with itself (rather than enforce law, keep order, or fight crime)? In Sentiment, Reason, and Law, Jeffrey T. Martin describes a world where that is the case. The Republic of China on Taiwan spent nearly four decades as a single-party state under dictatorial rule (1949–1987) before transitioning to liberal democracy. Here, Martin describes the social life of a neighborhood police station during the first rotation in executive power following the democratic transition. He shows an apparent paradox of how a strong democratic order was built on a foundation of weak police powers, and demonstrates how that was made possible by the continuity of an illiberal idea of policing. His conclusion from this paradox is that the purpose of the police was to cultivate the political will of the community rather than enforce laws and keep order. As Sentiment, Reason, and Law shows, the police force in Taiwan exists as an "anthropological fact," bringing an order of reality that is always, simultaneously and inseparably, meaningful and material. Martin unveils the power of this fact, demonstrating how the politics of sentiment that took shape under autocratic rule continued to operate in everyday policing in the early phase of the democratic transformation, even as a more democratic mode of public reason and the ultimate power of legal right were becoming more significant.