The End of the (Mass) Line? Chinese Policing in the Era of the Contract [1]
2000; Volume: 27; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2327-641X
Autores Tópico(s)China's Socioeconomic Reforms and Governance
ResumoThe Roman slave was held by fetters: the wage-labourer is bound by his own invisible threads. The appearance of independence is kept up by means of a constant change of employers, and the ficto juris of a contract. Karl Marx, Capital In our country we are establishing legal views on the commodity economy and these help us reflect upon traditional legal theories and legal systems.... The system of the contract ([CHINESE CHARACTERS NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]) is the most appropriate legal shell for the commodity economy. It clears away blockages in personal relationships caused by status-based evaluations that are formed because of low or high evaluations of bloodlines and pushes forward a process that releases the great capabilities of the society's productive forces. It also leads to a renewal of legal concepts and turns law into a holy writ of human freedom. Kong Li and Zhang Weiguo (1987) Introduction: Money Talks POLICE, OR AT THE VERY LEAST, THE NOW FAMILIAR WESTERN CONCEPT OF THEM AS law enforcement agencies, only began to arrive at the scene of the crime in China after economic [2] From this time onward, police increasingly claimed to base their operations on the law, not Party dictates. The problem was that as the Party dictatorship faded, the police sirens no longer seemed to stir the masses to action. Increasingly, it seemed as though the only thing that would open their eyes was money ([CHINESE CHARACTERS NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]). Neither was this attitude confined solely to the urban populace. As the old Maoist slogan about the forward march of socialism ([CHINESE CHARACTERS NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]) was parodied and replaced by a new colloquial expression that spoke of the forward march of money ([CHINESE CHARACTERS NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]), millions of peasants packed their bags and marched to the city in search of work and wealth. Some found it, but others lost their way. These losers, aptly named the floating blind ([CHINESE CHARACTERS NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII ]), became the rabble from which emerged the urban fear of a new, mobile, and dangerous class. [3] Although this transient or mobile group would remain one of the most intractable problems facing contemporary China, it was far from being the only one. Indeed, it was as though market reform had, quite literally, produced its nemesis, criminal reform. New crimes began to emerge just as old ones, long considered vanquished, reappeared. Moreover, all crimes, new and old, appeared in unprecedented numbers. The market not only produced a new money-making ethos and new social mobility, but also brought in its wake a dangerous and paradoxical situation: crime figures would rise just as the old social control structures fell. These latter structures would begin to crumble because they had been built upon the activism of local Maoist-inspired mass-line organs and kept in place by a tight system of demographic policing organized around the household register. This system had worked well in the era of the plan, but would prove to be far less successful in the depoliticized and fluid conditions produced by China's new marketized economy. From the pull of the cities, with their need for labor, through to the tug of a newly monetarized economy with its fetishization of material things, reform produced a new demographic and social mobility that eroded these old Maoist social structures and the ideological certainties upon which they were built. No longer could China claim to be the land where no one picked up other's things from the road and no one needed to lock their door ([CHINESE CHARACTERS NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]) Instead, it was the land of crime waves, where the new high tide of crime ([CHINESE CHARACTERS NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]) seemed never to recede (see Table 1). [4] Little wonder that this new and quite unprecedented wave of crime occasioned something of a social panic and this, in turn, led to calls by Party and government officials for a reform of policing. …
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