This book addresses a major lacuna in Western research on 20th-century China. It provides a history of the judicial system devised by the Communist Party, from the first policy experiments in the late 1920s until the death of Mao Zedong. This is a formidable challenge, especially when going beyond an analysis of structures to include the actual workings of the system. Qiang Fang draws upon a wealth of archival documents, mainly from the Shanghai Municipal Archives but also from the huge collection of county-level archives held at Shanghai Jiaotong University. This is difficult material to work with, since the files are often highly disparate and context-specific.

The argument is structured in seven chronological chapters. All take a larger claim as point of departure in order to replace long-held assumptions with a more nuanced perspective. The red thread that holds all chapters together is stated in the subtitle: building on fear. This could be read in two ways: either as the effect induced by the Communist judicial system (and to a certain extent by repressive legal organs everywhere), or as the fundamental mode of how the CCP perceived its political environment. It is the latter aspect that the book foregrounds, for example by claiming that even Mao's death “failed to liberate the Party from the persistent fear of losing power” (p. 18). This ever-changing threat assessment is thus to account for the “judicial pendulum,” swinging from pure instrumentalism to “liberal” perceptions of universal legal principles. In the chapters and at the very end of the conclusion, however, there is also evidence for the first reading.

Chapters one and two are devoted to the pre-1949 period and mainly rely on published sources. Against the backdrop of the bloody onslaught by Kuomintang forces, the notion of fear for CCP survival clearly resonates. That the external threat was also instrumentalized within brutal inner-party feuds could have been reflected more strongly, especially in the sections on the killings of supposed “AB tuan” members. Makeshift judicial organs instilled fear to strengthen particular leadership claims, as Ying Xing, Joseph Fewsmith and others have shown. Against certain trends in recent Chinese scholarship, the Yan'an period is described as an aberration rather than as a cornerstone of CCP judicial institution-building.

Building on Glenn Tiffert's arguments, Fang in chapter three convincingly shows the continuing influence of older legal traditions in the first years of the PRC. Chapter four is a detailed study of the sifa gaige campaign of 1952–53, aimed at eradicating the influence of former Kuomintang judges in the system, one of the most under-researched legal topics of the early PRC. Chapter five questions whether the mid-1950s should be perceived as “golden age” of the legal system, since, with the exception of the Hundred Flowers period, continuity prevailed in actual case work. The book relates this shift to Mao's fear of a Hungarian-style public uprising. This deserves further scrutiny, for here the fundamental reason of what keeps the “judicial pendulum” swinging becomes most obvious: rudimentary attempts at functional differentiation within the CCP's system of governance clashed with the political utility of keeping the populace and local party members in the dark about who was actually bound by judicial norms and institutions. Chapter six combines the years from 1957 to 1965, which is somewhat puzzling, since, as the author clearly points out, the attempts at fusing legal institutions during the early Leap displayed a very different dynamic if compared to the attempts at restorative justice in the early 1960s. Still, the chapter presents an important step in analysing a period that remains in dire need of additional research. The final chapter builds on research by Xu Lizhi and others to offer a more complex view of the legal system during the Cultural Revolution. Here it is mainly local gazetteers that the analysis draws upon.

The book is no doubt a valuable addition to the field. A more rigorous peer review might have pushed the author to refine or rethink some of the larger arguments and pointed at gaps in the bibliography. Thus, for example, the most reliable Chinese reference work on the judicial system of the Mao era, Han Yanlong's two volume history from 1998, is not listed. The same goes for Western scholarship that has come to set the standard in the field, such as Neil Diamant's many publications on law-related topics. The publisher, finally, should have placed more emphasis on professional editing given the many inconsistencies or outright mistakes, especially in the bibliography. But this should not distract from the fact that the monograph offers many unique insights into the formation of the CCP's judicial system. It will hopefully stimulate additional research on this important yet still under-researched topic.