Suchergebnisse

"Evaluates the police bureaucracy in modern day China using interview and archival sources. Argues that despite projecting the appearance of a strong security state, the police bureaucracy in China is weak and plagued by problems of resources, enforcement, and oversight in virtually every area of policing except protest response"--

A state's coercive apparatus can be strong in some ways and weak in others. Using interview data from security personnel in China, this study expands current conceptualizations of authoritarian durability and coercive capacity to consider a wide range of security activities. While protest
response in China is centrally controlled and strong, other types of crime control are decentralized and systematically inadequate in ways that compromise the state's coercive power and may ultimately feed back into protest. Considering security activities beyond protest control exposes cracks
in China's authoritarian system of control—an area where it is typically perceived to thrive—and calls into question our understanding of regime resilience as well as our current approach to assessing the role coercive capacity plays in authoritarian resilience elsewhere.

The study of policing in China is a small but growing subfield with critical insights for law and society scholars. This article examines the fundamentals of policing, tracing the organization's history and institutional basics before turning to a review of the emerging literature. Scholars have made headway analyzing topics like policing practices, social control, public relations, and police perspectives, but there is still much work to be done. Partly because research on the police faces methodological challenges, the literature is uneven, leaving gaps in our knowledge about key issues such as police corruption, regional variation, and the relationship between police and private security groups. By outlining what we do and do not know about policing in China, this article parses the field's best answers to questions of how police officers and the Public Security Bureau enforce state mandates and respond to challenges on the ground.

Facing heavy caseloads, administrative drudgery, and low pay, China's street-level police are frustrated. Front-line officers from six cities report that discontent encourages shirking, corruption, and waste. Grievances and feelings of powerlessness have not been reduced by recent reforms, and give us cause to rethink the image of police as effective arms of a highly securitized state.