Frank Dikotter. Crime, Punishment and the Prison in Modern China, 1895-1949
Author(s)
Buove, Thomas
Abstract
The subject of prison reform in late Qing and republican China has often been overlooked in English-language scholarship. As Frank Dikotter’s research demonstrates, the topic of prison reform can serve as a springboard for a multifaceted study of the cultural and intellectual history of this important period in modern Chinese history. According to Dikotter, prison reform combined the “local appropriation of global ideas” with distinctly Chinese “moral and cognitive traditions.” Characterizing the history of prison reform as a global history, the author notes that “internationally circulated discourses and practices of punishment intersected locally with concrete ideological and political configurations” and “engendered new varieties of incarceration”. The author convincingly argues that prison reform was not simply a case of Chinese reformers imitating the West but also a shared goal of modernizing elites worldwide. In China the abolition of extraterritoriality was an important motivation for reform but the goal of obtaining “moral parity” with advanced nations around the globe was equally important. Similarly, the complete reform of criminals through education resonated with Chinese tradition, and the use of model prisons as a “dominant pedagogical strategy” had roots in imperial China.
