Policing and Punishment in China

Book excerpt: 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.