Abstract
It has been widely observed that China has gradually developed into a security state over the past three decades. Much research has focused on how the police, the cornerstone of the party-state’s coercive power, has played a vital role in exercising social control in China. Their successful management in controlling popular protest has been regarded as one important reason for the resilience of authoritarianism in China. However, over the past decade, a growing body of literature has started to question the discourse of authoritarian resilience and argued that if many insiders and stakeholders of the party-state such as the police, de-mobilized soldiers, and civil servants, are ‘unhappy’, we may have to rethink the overall strength of the Chinese party-state’s resilience.
Suzanne Scoggins’s Policing China: Street-level Cops in the Shadow of Protest is a timely contribution to the debate. Using data from 112 interviews with 56 police officers conducted between 2009 and 2015, it argues that, on the surface, the Chinese police bureaucracy may look very strong if we focus on how the immediate threat to the party-state – popular protest – has been successfully managed by the police. However, if we look deeper into the everyday practice of the police, numerous problems exist and the police force is far from being a ‘well-oiled machine’ (p. 4).
On the one hand, the book argues that the high policing (mainly referring to political policing), euphemistically referred to as ‘stability maintenance’, is well developed in China. High policing has political significance and obtains full support from central to local governments. Officers are well trained and the apparatus fully funded; protocols are well developed and fully operational. From the interviews conducted, officers were generally satisfied with the police capacity to control popular protest.
On the other hand, low policing, referred to as non-politically motivated regular police work, can largely be regarded as a failure. At the beginning of the book, Scoggins clearly states that ‘this is a book about police failure’ (p. 2). Although international media have often portrayed Chinese police as omnipresent, with world-class technologies in the age of digital surveillance, frontline police officers generally struggle to get their daily work done. Scoggins argues that, despite an increasing budget for China’s internal security, the lion’s share is allocated to high policing, which eats up what could be used for everyday police work. In addition, comparatively speaking, China’s police–citizen ratio is among the lowest in the world. To cope with the manpower shortage, a large number of low-paid, minimally educated, and under-trained auxiliary police officers are recruited. Sometimes they cause more trouble than they achieve success in solving cases. The failure of everyday policing actually gives rise to abundant tension between police and citizens, which paradoxically contributes to a significant share of popular protests. Scoggins calls such a dilemma a ‘loop of conflict’ (p. 11).
A critical question that the book poses is that, if the party-state can successfully run its model of high policing, can it be reproduced in everyday police work? Scoggins’s answer is ‘hardly’, because the success of high police work is, to a large extent, secured at the price of low policing. Limited resources can only be used for what the police deems to be important, with stability maintenance given top priority by the party-state (p. 111).
Scoggins originally planned to study effective policing practices in China. After entering the field, the more she talked to grassroots officers, the more she realized that the opposite may better reflect the reality on the ground. My own research on the crime rate in Guangzhou showed that the crime data were systematically manipulated by the local authority.
The book has numerous strengths. Theoretically, it contributes to the debate about China’s authoritarian resilience by arguing that everyday crime management is part of the state’s coercive power. It argues that when the police would rather bribe a victim to withdraw a reported case instead of investigating the case, the state’s capacity is low (p. 139). More importantly, the seeming success of high policing may be contradictorily undermined by the very success it seeks to achieve. The book calls for a rethinking of the Chinese party-state’s coercive power and resilience.
The book is eloquent in its arguments and descriptions. For instance, Scoggins uses an apt metaphor to illustrate the tension between high and low policing (p. 12): If protest and dissent are the wildfire that the stability maintenance regime is trying to put out, then everyday crime management is the vulnerable dry vegetation, sitting far enough in the distance to pose little immediate threat but nevertheless constituting a vulnerability if the winds change.
Scoggins points to the low status of the auxiliary police: ‘these auxiliary or assistant police xiejing are the adjunct professor of the policing world: a low-paid, overworked, and often unappreciated underclass of security workers’ (p. 54). Discussing the limited resources and energy of the police at the top, she writes that ‘the plate of the ministry is indeed quite full’ (p. 114). In her description of the difficulty of predicting the future of the Chinese police, she admits that the study is ‘chasing a moving target’ (p. 125).
Following in the footsteps of the pioneering works of a group of international scholars such as Børge Bakken, Michael Dutton, and Sue Trevaskes, Scoggins has successfully cemented her position as a top non-Chinese scholar on Chinese policing. The book will be of interest to readers in the areas of political science, sociology, and criminology in general and to those whose research focuses on policing and Chinese studies in particular.