Description
Book SynopsisMühlhahn offers a comprehensive examination of the criminal justice system in modern China, an institution deeply rooted in politics, society, and culture. Based on unprecedented research in Chinese archives and incorporating prisoner testimonies, witness reports, and interviews, this book is essential reading for understanding modern China.
Trade ReviewIn this ambitious work of prodigious research and thoughtful analysis, Mühlhahn 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. Mühlhahn 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, Mühlhahn 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 PoliticsThis is the most important work in a generation on criminal justice in China, past and present. Mühlhahn 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
Here is an example of the best kind of Sinological scholarship together with the blackest possible indictment of the Chinese criminal-justice system...Mühlhahn 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 *
Table of Contents* Introduction * The Right Degree of Pain: Imperial China * The Prison Regime: Republican China * Trials of Terror: War and Revolution, 1937--1949 * Reform through Labor: The Communist State * Conclusion * Abbreviations * Archives * Notes * Acknowledgments * Index
