This engaging book offers prodigious empirical research on China's police from the 1930s to 2002 and a provocative perspective on Chinese politics. A short introduction and conclusion establish a theory that draws on Carl Schmitt to link Mao's question “Who are our enemies and who are our friends?” to the extraordinary police technologies that united the latter and defeated the former. The first four of five substantive chapters deal with policing politics during the Jiangxi Soviet era, the Yan'an era, the 1950s, and the Cultural Revolution. The last substantive chapter depicts the reform era's transition from politics to economics. The book sheds light on the origins of and prospects for contemporary Chinese politics, but also provides subtle tools for understanding what was more crudely labeled “totalitarianism.” Michael Dutton demonstrates that studying police technologies can yield important insight into politics in general. In an age when important leaders are again casting politics in Manichean terms, Dutton's tale is surely relevant, but how far his police perspective can be extended will remain controversial.

The account of the Jiangxi Soviet era (1931–34) is vivid. A small group of recently defeated Communists already committed to zero-sum politics fled from the cities to the countryside where they were surrounded by superior military forces. Dutton chronicles how paranoia repeatedly led to inflating flimsy evidence of perfidy, how commitment required torturing the accused, and how this in turn generated evidence that the plots were far more extensive than anyone had imagined. In the Futian Incident alone, 14 thousand people were massacred, and this cycle of excess, he argues, sapped the strength of the Jiangxi Soviet and precipitated its collapse.

While Dutton's attention goes more to the policing of enemies than the mobilizing of friends, he persuasively finds that the two were flip sides of the same coin. The extraordinary commitment that won the revolution depended on the vicious hatred of enemies. On the other hand, many cadres understood that the excesses of the Jiangxi period had to be restrained. With slogans like “cure the disease to save the patient,” the Yan'an Rectification intended to provide restraint, but as the binary opposition of enemies and friends still dominated, restraint was still punctuated by periods of terror. In the 1950s, leaders like Dong Biwu argued that such methods should be replaced by a constitution and laws, only to be designated enemies themselves. During the Cultural Revolution extremes of friend–enemy politics meant that even the police became enemies.

The final substantive chapter shows how Deng Xiaoping and others used the technologies of enemy–friend politics to bring an end to that politics. The account of the rise of financial incentives for police and “private policing”—as much as a third of urban police work is provided by “private firms” that are owned by police departments—provides insight into the abuses of the post-Mao period. On the other hand, Dutton's claim that the reform era represents a binary transformation from politics to economics pays insufficient heed to his argument that Chinese policing is indelibly marked by its origins in friend–enemy politics and raises questions about the limits of his argument. Despite contemporary China's flood of contracts and laws, politics remains under the influence of zero-sum thinking. There is as yet little space for loyal opposition, and those who act as such are still subject to vicious reprisals.

Dutton's structural argument is at the heart of this book's strengths and weaknesses. Drawing on the work of Michel Foucault, he identifies a “hard cold disciplinary machine … that enabled Mao to transform and condense this friend/enemy relation into the raison d'être of the state” (p. ix). But Foucault serves only as an “adjunct” to the politics of distinguishing friends and enemies. Sometimes Dutton qualifies his argument to explain that the object of his analysis is “the politics of commitment,” but in many other passages, he expressly follows Carl Schmitt to argue that the friend–enemy distinction is the basis of all politics, and that “politics” is the fundamental object of his analysis.

Dutton does a masterful job of explaining how this style of politics resulted in inhumanity, but his argument would be more persuasive if it offered a more systematic explanation of how agents were able to resist the “disciplinary machine.” At times it seems that the structures are so powerful that macabre excesses are inevitable. At other points, fatigue sets in, Mao makes a decision and/or lesser figures issue reports detailing the outrages of the last campaign, and a period of restraint follows. In the end, Deng and his supporters replace politics with economics and, at least in Dutton's view, the machine is undone. The lack of a systematic explanation for why these turning points occur leads to broader questions about the importance of agency. This synoptic account makes a powerful statement of the power of structures, but the story has been just as engagingly and persuasively told in ways that show the agents to have polarized politics and promoted violence to further their own political interests (see, for example, Frederick Teiwes and Warrun Sun's The End of the Maoist Era: Chinese Politics During the Twilight of the Cultural Revolution, 1972–1982 [2007]).

These doubts in turn lead to the question of whether or not politics really has to be about friends and enemies. Dutton considers Hannah Arendt's contrary claim that politics is about constructing the space within which freedom is possible, but waves this aside with the argument that only Schmitt's definition of politics allows us to understand commitment and passion. But for those who remain with Arendt, violence is the opposite of politics. For example, in Lenin and the End of Politics (1984), A. J. Polan adopts an Aristotelean definition of politics similar to Arendt's to reach the conclusion that Marx's commitment to science and Lenin's lack of tolerance for parliamentary debate and loyal opposition actually showed contempt for politics and an attempt to end all politics. Dutton makes the contrary claim that politics has ended in contemporary China, and his sense of loss over the decline of commitment—despite his vivid depiction of its costs—seems a related and inappropriate simplification. It could be that those of us who see more complexity in agents and their actions are, as Dutton argues, “bourgeois” (p. 311), but it could also be that there is much to be gained by allowing politics to be diverse.

Whether or not you accept the structural argument, this is a major work that presents exemplary empirical research and a provocative argument that helps us to better understand the broad sweep of contemporary Chinese politics and provokes productive thinking on the general nature of politics.