Abstract
All the essays in Routledge’s new edited volume bear on China and criminology, though few of the 33 contributors take up the more self-reflective topic of what might constitute a distinctively Chinese criminology. As such, the book’s title is a slight misnomer. A more accurate, albeit more clunky, title would have been The Routledge Handbook of Crime and Criminal Justice in China. This will surely disappoint a small clutch of cross-cultural epistemologists. Let them be disappointed. The larger English-speaking criminology community clamors for a descriptive, introductory resource on China. This volume is a long-awaited and sorely needed contribution on the region.
This book will be most useful to the academic looking to be brought up to speed on a single aspect of crime or criminal justice in China. Each of the 25 chapters is self-contained, and typically provides a standard background narrative on imperial, Maoist, and post-reform China before jumping into contemporary subject matter. For the casual audience the historical summary repeated with slight variation in nearly every chapter is helpful; for the seasoned sinologist or the cover-to-cover reader the redundancy is distracting.
The Handbook is divided into five parts covering historical themes, the Chinese legal system, methods of inquiry, forms of crimes in China, and regional perspectives from Greater China (Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau). As editors Cao, Sun, and Hebenton note in their introduction, in China the discipline of criminology is situated within the field of law, rather than in the social sciences. It is therefore unsurprising that the broadest and most accessible section of the book exposes the plumbing of the legal system. The pipes connecting the legal order and the Party are also laid bare.
The section on forms of criminality (drugs; prostitution; migration; domestic violence; white-collar crime) similarly provides plenty of nuts-and-bolts description, and it may also provoke unexpected insights for a non-Chinese audience. Jianhua Xu’s chapter on migrant workers, for example, exposes the way in which rapid urban development, demand for cheap labor, and a restrictive system of residence permits has created and criminalized a drifting underclass workforce. Xu does not mention race as a factor in this group’s composition. In fact, many demographic categories that western criminologists are primed to consider—such as ethnicity and religion—receive scant attention in the Handbook. Why these categories lack relevance in the Chinese context is itself a foundational criminological question that could be fruitfully addressed head-on in the future.
The section on historical themes bravely canvasses multiple millennia in four brief chapters. Ancient history is well represented. Chapters covering the 20th century all suggest that in China criminology cannot be understood without first understanding modernity. Sadly absent is a stand-alone chapter on the influence of Marxism and Soviet law on crime and punishment under Mao. As a historical moment in which radical criminology counted as academic orthodoxy, it merits a highlight. The section on methods of inquiry amounts to ruminations on absence, confirming what most readers likely already intuit: it is hard to get good data in China.
The final chapters on “greater China” provide just enough comparative impetus to get readers excited and leave them wanting more. This reader was spurred to wonder at what other useful criminological foils for China exist beyond its immediate neighbors. To China qua regional gorilla we might add China the second-world superpower (cf. the former Soviet Union), China the revamped authoritarian state (cf. late-century Latin America), China the emerging economy (cf. Brazil, Russia, and India), and China the state of “exception”, unabashed about its use of capital punishment, unashamed about its prisons and sure of its fundamental centrality on the world stage (cf. the USA). All of these comparative criminological projects would be welcome; for now, Routledge has provided a great place to start the discussion.