Policing China, by Suzanne Scoggins, is a strong book. It attempts to give a generalized description of Chinese police into the Xi Jinping era and lays the foundation for other important work to follow. The study of the police in China is an onerous task, as Chinese politics has never been transparent and has been in constant change over the past 40-plus years, as has China's police force. Looking at the long term, the original reform of the late 1970s has lost its momentum. It has become increasingly clear that China's policing strategy, like its politics more generally, resembles a pendulum, having swung back toward the Mao era since Xi Jinping came to power in 2012.
Scoggins's book captures the motion of this change; she is able to penetrate the calm surface and dig deep into the routine life of police officers. Probing their actual experience, Scoggins laments that one begins to realize just how much of what one always believed to be non-problematic turned out to be highly problematic.
The principal theme or argument for Scoggins's book is the discrepancy between the policing of protest and the policing of everything else. She investigates this through interviews with 112 people, 56 of them police officers, in eight cities across three provinces with different levels of economic development. Although she does not make use of the information on the differences in geographical location, rank and services among her interviewees, she is able to draw a common theme through these conversations.
The book has six chapters plus an Introduction. Scoggins is straightforward about her book in the introductory chapter. It is “a book about police failure” (p. 2) – a conclusion that contradicts the propaganda of the Chinese government: little to no protest is reported in official media, official crime statistics are low and the streets are said to be safe. Beneath the thin surface of success and calmness, police officers say that official statistics systemically under-report crime, stations continue to lack adequate resources and officers, and no one has anything to say about effective policing.
Chapter one opens with a few sharp questions. Who are the Chinese police? Here the change is happening faster than the author's writing. Even though Scoggins is fully aware that the People's Armed Police (PAP) is no longer a branch of the police, she continues to include them in her subsequent discussion, mainly because a few of the 56 officers interviewed are from that group. The PAP had its origins in the PLA Internal Guard, which in 1982 became a civilian force rather than a branch of the military and was renamed. However, in 2018, nine years after the People's Armed Police Law was adopted, the PAP was moved out from the Ministry of Public Security and returned to its military roots.
As for the question of who oversees the police, Scoggins presents at face value the Chinese government structure (figure 8, p. 30), which appears to be similar to that of any Western nation. In reality, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has an office that is in full control, and the minister of public security works under the Party secretary of the ministry. Sometimes, the minister also holds the position of Party secretary, sometimes not. This arrangement exists at every level of the public-security structure from top to bottom, as it does for other branches of government.
What is the mission of the Chinese police? The first and foremost priority of Chinese police is “serving the Communist Party” (p. 32). This point should be discussed in more detail because this pledge of allegiance is the root cause of the discrepancies between the successful policing of protest and the failure of routine policing.
Chapter two is about uneven resources and manpower concerns. The chapter's argument that China has a comparatively small police force should be qualified. Excluding xiejing (police assistants) and chengguan (urban management officers) – each of these forces having a manpower of over a million – the regular police in charge of preventing crime is indeed comparatively small. Chapter three is on the limitation of police reforms. Together with chapter five on the politicization and boundaries of authoritarian resilience, Scoggins reveals the reform's swing between revolutionary police and professional crime-prevention police.
Chapter four is about controlling the local police. Because of the country's huge geographic and demographic size, it has been extremely difficult to run a centralized system, but it is precisely such a system that has been in place. Inevitably, there is a tension between the local levels and the centre, with the former being an easy scapegoat for every wrong-doing, police included.
Chapter six is on the consequence of poor policing and its impact on the state–society conflict. It leaves us with several ominous predictions. It warns that the failure of the police feeds “back into a loop of protest and dissent” (p. 134), and “for the foreseeable future, it looks as though the Chinese police will continue to toil in the shadow of protest control, making do on the front line as best they can, given operating constraints, a lack of support from above, and an increasingly contentious relationship with the public” (p. 142).
This book is a must read: Scoggins has revealed the emotional frustration of police officers on the streets, perhaps the least studied area of Chinese police, with extraordinary care and insight. It could be a supplemental reading for a course on Chinese politics in general, and policing in particular, in the disciplines of China studies, criminology, legal studies and sociology.
