Content area
Full Text
Crime Law Soc Change (2009) 52:433455
DOI 10.1007/s10611-009-9205-1
Lena Y. Zhong & Peter N. Grabosky
Published online: 3 April 2009# Springer Science + Business Media B.V. 2009
Abstract Policing in China has undergone tremendous change during the economic transformation of the past three decades. This paper describes the plural policing bodies that have existed during pre- and post-reform periods in China. In the pre-reform period the policing bodies were generally public in nature with the public security police playing an important role in providing professional guidance to the other policing bodies. In the post-reform period, there has been a transition from a monopoly of public policing to an integration of public/private policing, with the public security police still playing a leading role in the policing network. Apart from the emergence of private policing (the security service industry), there is also a trend towards privatizing some previously public policing bodies in line with the movement toward strengthening the rule of law and towards privatization in general.
Social control in China entails the integration of formal and informal mechanisms. During a visit to China in the early 1980s, Clark and his delegation of American criminologists and legal scholars were intrigued by the unfamiliar coexistence of such a highly centralized government supported by a legendary bureaucracy and hierarchical social structure, side by side with a world-renowned heavy reliance on informal or peoples control of conflict and unacceptable behavior [5, p173]. But Klein and Gatz, members of the same delegation, observed that in China social control is formally invested in less formal structures (f)ormal agencies make informal groups the locus of social control [24]. Zhong analyzed such social institutions as the household registration system, the neighborhood committee, the work unit and the public security bureau both prior to and following the introduction of economic reforms [63]. Based on her field work she delineated the changing roles
L. Y. Zhong
Department of Applied Social Studies, City University of Hong Kong, Kowloon, Hong Kong e-mail: [email protected]
P. N. Grabosky (*)
Regulatory Institutions Network (REGNET), ARC Centre of Excellence in Policing and Security, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, The Australian National University,Canberra ACT 0200, Australiae-mail: [email protected]
The pluralization of policing and the rise of private policing in China
434 L.Y....