Criminal Justice in China: A History

New
Hardcover
2009
$44.90

In a groundbreaking work, Klaus Muhlhahn offers a comprehensive examination of the criminal justice system in modern China, an institution deeply rooted in politics, society, and culture. In late imperial China, flogging, tattooing, torture, and servitude were routine punishments. Sentences, including executions, were generally carried out in public. After 1905, in a drive to build a strong state and curtail pressure from the West, Chinese officials initiated major legal reforms. Physical punishments were replaced by fines and imprisonment. Capital punishment, though removed from the public sphere, remained in force for the worst crimes. Trials no longer relied on confessions obtained through torture but were instead held in open court and based on evidence. Prison reform became the centerpiece of an ambitious social-improvement program. After 1949, the Chinese communists developed their own definitions of criminality and new forms of punishment. People's tribunals were convened before large crowds, which often participated in the proceedings. At the center of the socialist system was reform through labor, and thousands of camps administered prison sentences. Eventually, the communist leadership used the camps to detain anyone who offended against the new society, and the crime of counterrevolution was born. Muhlhahn reveals the broad contours of criminal justice from late imperial China to the Deng reform era and details the underlying values, successes and failures, and ultimate human costs of the system. Based on unprecedented research in Chinese archives and incorporating prisoner testimonies, witness reports, and interviews, this book is essential reading for understanding modern China.

Synopsis

In a groundbreaking work, Klaus Muhlhahn offers a comprehensive examination of the criminal justice system in modern China, an institution deeply rooted in politics, society, and culture. In late imperial China, flogging, tattooing, torture, and servitude were routine punishments. Sentences, including executions, were generally carried out in public. After 1905, in a drive to build a strong state and curtail pressure from the West, Chinese officials initiated major legal reforms. Physical punishments were replaced by fines and imprisonment. Capital punishment, though removed from the public sphere, remained in force for the worst crimes. Trials no longer relied on confessions obtained through torture but were instead held in open court and based on evidence. Prison reform became the centerpiece of an ambitious social-improvement program. After 1949, the Chinese communists developed their own definitions of criminality and new forms of punishment. People's tribunals were convened before large crowds, which often participated in the proceedings. At the center of the socialist system was reform through labor, and thousands of camps administered prison sentences. Eventually, the communist leadership used the camps to detain anyone who offended against the new society, and the crime of counterrevolution was born. Muhlhahn reveals the broad contours of criminal justice from late imperial China to the Deng reform era and details the underlying values, successes and failures, and ultimate human costs of the system. Based on unprecedented research in Chinese archives and incorporating prisoner testimonies, witness reports, and interviews, this book is essential reading for understanding modern China.

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More Information

Format: Hardcover
Pages: 330
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 17 Apr 2009
ISBN 10: 067403323X
ISBN 13: 9780674033238
Book Overview: In this ambitious work of prodigious research and thoughtful analysis, Muhlhahn takes readers beyond a simple account of legal and institutional development to offer a more nuanced interpretive framework. This is an important contribution that significantly advances our knowledge of twentieth-century Chinese criminal justice. -- Jonathan K. Ocko, North Carolina State University and Duke Law School This book rewards readers with the first comprehensive description of twentieth-century Chinese legal punishment as discourse, norm, and experience. Muhlhahn offers images of human dignity even in the most dehumanizing circumstances. He argues that in China a civic legal tradition has taken root and survived despite the interventions of totalitarian regimes and revolutionary struggles. A must-read for anyone with a serious interest in human rights in China. -- Wen-hsin Yeh, University of California, Berkeley In an outstanding study that stretches from imperial times up to the present, Muhlhahn takes punishment, not rights, to be at the core of the Chinese criminal justice system. In doing so, he changes the way we think about Chinese social control and deepens our understanding not just of the criminal justice system but of China more generally. This is an erudite work with a big argument. It is also exciting and novel, and I recommend it highly. -- Michael Dutton, author of Policing Chinese Politics This is the most important work in a generation on criminal justice in China, past and present. Muhlhahn explores the theories, values, politics, and personal experiences that have defined crime and punishment in modern Chinese states. He puts forth compelling and chilling new research on communist reform through labor concentration camps--a vast system that within a decade of the founding of Mao's New China had enslaved tens of millions of Chinese. This is a book, then, not only on criminal justice, but also on criminals in power. -- William C. Kirby, Harvard University

Media Reviews

Here is an example of the best kind of Sinological scholarship together with the blackest possible indictment of the Chinese criminal-justice system...Muhlhahn shows that China's criminal-justice system today has arisen from political violence, and the result is suffering that for millions [has] encompassed pain, anguish, fear, loss, grief, and the destruction of a coherent and meaningful reality. -- Jonathan Mirsky Far Eastern Economic Review 20090703

Author Bio

Klaus Muhlhahn is Professor of Chinese History and Culture and Vice President at the Free University of Berlin. His Criminal Justice in China: A History won the John K. Fairbank Prize in East Asian History from the American Historical Association. Muhlhahn has published widely on modern Chinese history in English, German, and Chinese and is a frequent commentator on China for the German media.