Punishment In Contemporary China

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.

An examination of the enormous changes in Chinese society in the first half of the 20th century through the lens of the Chinese prison system. More than a simple history of prison rules or penal administration, the text offers a social and cultural analysis of the Chinese prison system that explores the profound effects and lasting repercussions of superimposing Western-derived models of repentance and rehabilitation on traditional categories of crime and punishment.

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.

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 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 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.

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.