This book is a study of Chinese criminal justice in the twentieth century. Sandwiched by a chapter on imperial China and another on developments since 1978, the original research is presented in three chapters on the periods 1900–1937, 1937–1949, and 1949–1978 (the last is the centerpiece that constitutes one-third of the book). Using printed sources such as government documents, legal texts, memoirs, and witness interviews, Klaus Mühlhahn offers an analysis of how criminal justice was conceived and practiced in twentieth-century China and why. He investigates three dimensions of the subject: legal discourse, social norms and values, and the human experiences of those who encountered the physical and psychological violence of the criminal justice system. Although the Chinese judicial and penal systems in the late Qing and Republican era have been examined in a few recent works, and those in the Maoist era and after have received still more scholarly attention, by covering the entire twentieth century, Mühlhahn is able to highlight several themes of continuity and change in Chinese criminal justice.

The first of these was an emphasis on reforming offenders through labor. This was attempted by the Republican governments through organizing work by inmates inside prisons and by the Guomindang (GMD) and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) through establishing prison or labor camp systems. The efforts grew out of a tradition in Chinese criminal justice that sought to reform offenders through punishment (except the death penalty) and, for the CCP, were also informed by Marxist discourses on labor and further reinforced by theories and practices learned from the Soviet Union.

Another continuity that is well explicated existed between GMD and CCP practices of using criminal justice as a means of defining friend and foe. The arbitrariness and harshness of suppressing perceived enemies prevailed in both the GMD prison camps and the CCP anti-counterrevolutionary and reeducation campaigns. In the Maoist era, the practice developed further and reached the most catastrophic proportions during the Cultural Revolution. With the expansion of the labor camp system and the diminishing role of the formal judiciary, not only was the judicial system not independent, but also its functions were shared by other agents of the state. Punishments or sanctions of offenders were carried out at three levels: informal, administrative, and criminal. Besides the preexisting tradition, theories, and practices mentioned earlier, Mao theorized and justified the use of criminal justice as a weapon of class struggle in the hands of the socialist state on behalf of the masses. As a result, all criminal acts (and any acts that were viewed as criminal) could be and were considered acts to sabotage the socialist society, and offenders were defined as the enemy. Practically, no one could safely self-assume to be a member of the people, hence the turmoil, violence, and terror seen in the Cultural Revolution.

As Mühlhahn points out, a crucial difference between imperial China and twentieth-century China was the growing power of the nation-state. Whereas the imperial government ruled over the vast country with a small bureaucratic staff that relied on the cooperation of local elites in maintaining social order, twentieth-century China saw the rise of an intrusive state and its increasing capacity to regulate society and punish deviations. One would add that the capacity often fell short of the state's design, and that population and societal complexity grew dramatically during the twentieth century, which partially offset the effect of the expansion of state capacity. In the concluding chapter, Mühlhahn notes the reversal of Maoist theory and practices in criminal justice, and he identifies several problem areas that have continued in post-Mao China. Actually, some of the problems have stemmed more from the inability of the party-state to enforce rules, regulations, and laws within the party and state systems as well as in society than from the increasing capacity of the state.

The human experience of criminal justice constitutes a salient feature of the book, even if the stories are somewhat familiar to students of modern China. In using witness interviews (and memoirs, for that matter) as sources, Mühlhahn is aware of the methodological pitfalls, and he aims to strike “a balance between a more conventional, objective reconstruction of the past and an empathic, subjective response based on the stories of victims and survivors” (p. 13). Leaving aside whether such a distinction really exists, it is worth noting that who ended up publishing memoirs or getting interviewed, and under what circumstances, were not “objective” occurrences, which may have skewed in a certain way what is learned to have transpired as the history of criminal justice. When the focus is on prisoners as victims of criminal justice, the victims and perpetrators of common crimes become invisible and the social function of criminal justice obscured, which is an issue especially relevant to the periods before and after the Maoist era. Moreover, a comprehensive understanding of criminal justice has to fully take into account the material dimensions of the judicial system and practices, and the negotiations and compromises between them and discourses and social-cultural norms. These quibbles aside, Mühlhahn has accomplished what he set out to do, and the book makes a valuable contribution to the literature on criminal justice in modern China.