This important book heralds a new chapter in the comparative study of Chinese law and society. The author's key achievement is the integration of extra-legal “administrative detention” and other similar infamous and disturbing Chinese police measures within a single frame of analysis, addressing the seemingly extra-legal together with the formally legal, as a complete system. On this basis, the “zones of exception” in which police abuse unfolds can be exposed as key tools perpetuating Chinese Party-state power.

Sapio's approach sets aside the optimistic but unwarranted assumption made by many Western observers that Chinese police lawlessness is anomalous, and will eventually be abolished as China develops a more perfect “rule of law.” Sapio, instead, develops her own comprehensive, and timely, understanding of them. She is inspired by the philosopher Giorgio Agamben's recent critiques of Western “rule of law” after Guantánamo, especially his explorations of how exceptional measures are built into the law—the Law of the book's title—a law which serves more as a tactic in the manipulative exercise of sovereign power, than as the rational foundation of political democracy. The insightful but Eurocentric Agamben seldom discusses the non-Western world (his meditation on Tiananmen 1989 in The Coming Community is one exception), but his writings have clearly enabled Sapio to see China in a new way. It is also clear that she has read him both independently and creatively to propose her own analysis of the contemporary Chinese state.

The book is well organized, which is necessary, since it presents and analyses a tremendous wealth of information, above all from contemporary Chinese sources. First, in an introduction, Sapio exposes the current paradoxes of Chinese legal and police practice in the light of her theoretical considerations. Then, in Part One, she reviews (with brief but illuminating glances towards history) the state of Chinese law as regards provisions of exceptions and emergency powers and how they have been “normalized” under the reform era's emerging “rule of law.” Three illuminating examples are examined: first, how the 1982 reform-era constitutional safeguards for the freedom of religion can be, and are, suspended whenever religious practices are deemed to threaten the state, and next, the normalization if not legalization of two apparent anomalies from the preceding, all-out exceptional Mao era. This is, first, the parallel judicial system run inside the Communist Party to detain and “discipline” its own members, itself increasingly “legalized”; and secondly, the curiously similar exceptional police measure used to “stop and question” any citizen outside of existing criminal procedures, which also has come to be established as a new normal. In sum, contrary to the expectations of some, the Chinese “rule of law” is normalizing the suspension of the very rights supposedly introduced by it.

In Part Two, three more chapters examine how marginalized Chinese experience such suspensions, i.e. when they end up in China's increasingly legally institutionalized zones of exception—and how these zones are maintained and regulated to preserve the power over exceptions inside of the legal order, and as an exclusive state prerogative, with the acquiescence of more fortunate citizens. Sapio discusses citizens’ encounters with a variety of uniformed agents, including “para-police” forces; the camps for internment to which people may be sent without judicial procedures, in particular the recent merging of drug addict camps with older-style camps for “re-education through labor”; and finally the coercive interrogations, or torture, that authorities subject citizens to in order to extract confessions or simply to intimidate, sometimes with fatal outcomes. Sapio explores all this in painful detail—overwhelmingly derived from public sources like newspaper accounts, and published laws or regulations (meticulously cited, with a comprehensive “List of Legal Documents”). Their public presence—including gruesome pictures of people tortured to death—underscores how these acts cannot be explained simply as aberrations, but actually reinforce the normality of the exceptional as a spectacle of power. As Sapio underlines, the outcries and criticisms they provoke are reduced and channeled into demands for retribution only on the terms of the very system inside of which these exceptions are institutionalized to perpetuate Party power.

This extraordinary book is deeply inspiring, and full of dark, troubling insights. Perhaps most powerfully, Sapio's book provides a new basis for deeper comparisons of the emerging Chinese “reforming Leninist” model with the “rule of law” and its suspension in Western countries. Actually, because the Chinese Communist Party as both ideology and institution can be compared to the church in the West (which also has its own internal discipline and parallel judiciary!), Agamben himself also contributes to this broader endeavor: with his recent work The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011) discussing the duality and division of labor between church and king in the European tradition of spectacular sovereignty.