Policing and Punishment in China: From Patriarchy to 'the People'

By Michael R. Dutton

This book traces the transition in the regimes of regulation and punishment through late imperial to modern China, an area long neglected in Chinese studies. Policing and Punishment in China 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'. While most Chinese Marxist accounts of history have assumed the sublimation of the past as a precondition for the present, Dr Dutton illustrates that 'feudal relics' do play a part in the social regulation of contemporary China. The regime of punishment is no longer dominated by the physical, but the psychology of that system remains today, so that a person's file is marked rather than their body. China was the first nation ever to use statistical records as a basis by which to plot and police its people, and contemporary institutions for policing rely heavily on the maintenance of traditional notions of community mutuality. However China's current regime is not a new version of traditional dynasties; a transition has occurred and it has been that from patriarchy to 'the people'.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 052140097X
• ISBN13: 9780521400978
• Release Date: September 1992
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Length: 401 Pages
• Weight: 1.87 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.5" x 1.0" x 6.5"