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Authoritarian Policing Under Xi Jinping

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Abstract

As President Xi Jinping expands and deepens his mark on the Chinese political system, how should scholars assess the impact of his administration on core institutions such as the police? This article employs a mixed methods approach by combining data from interview research with text analysis of ministerial level documents to explore reforms and rhetoric in the public security bureaucracy during the first six years of Xi’s tenure. The timing, nature, and practical execution of police reform shed light on the priorities of the Xi administration and its ability to make changes to the police bureaucracy and enforce law and order in Chinese cities. The paper assesses key policing reform rhetoric using Jean-Paul Brodeur’s framework of high and low policing to analyze which areas of policing have received the most attention and in what ways. Ultimately, I find that preferences for “high policing” style stability maintenance reforms supersede concern for “low policing” activities such as crime-fighting, resulting in the further politicization of policing in China.

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Notes

  1. Assessing at year six allows more time to consider the development of the 2015 reforms and permits the inclusion of interviews conducted in late 2018 and early 2019.

  2. The organization has a long history of resistance to change. Most recently, Susan Trevaskes demonstrates how political-legal organs reverted back to Mao and Deng-era campaign rhetoric and practices during the 2014 war on terror campaign, despite Xi Jinping’s new emphasis of “Party-rule-through-law.”.

  3. Interview with city police officer, Hunan, 2012.

  4. Interview with city police officer, Hunan, 2012; city police officer, Shaanxi.

  5. Interview with two city police officers, Shaanxi, 2012, interview with city police officer, Hebei, 2012, interview with city police officer, Hunan 2012. See also [53]

  6. Interview, 2012.

  7. The Ministry of State Security (guo’an) also handles certain national security issues that overlap with the work of the DSD and MPS more generally.

  8. Interview with PAP squad commander, 2012.

  9. Occasionally, internal documents have surfaced that provide insight into this relationship. Chinadigitaltimes.net. “Internal Document of the Domestic Security Department of the Public Security Bureau.” http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2010/01/internal-document-of-the -domestic-security-department-of-the-public-security-bureau-part-i/.

  10. The list of documents is too long for a printed appendix but is available online on the author’s website: www.sescoggins.com.

  11. Detention can apply to a range of crimes beyond high policing activities, and qualitative coding is essential for parsing the type. Documents that discussed detention in the context of social stability were coded as high policing, and documents that discussed criminal activity and detention were coded as low policing.

  12. Using R, I also compared segmentation results with stringi::stri_split_boundaries tokenization for Chinese in quanteda and determined jieba produces more accurate segmentation of Chinese text for this corpus.

  13. For these scores, the IDF is calculated by using a larger corpus of 143 ministry documents that appeared on the website with dates between 1990 and 2019. Keywords for public security (gongan) and public security agency (gonganjiguan) were removed from the reported results for all three categories.

  14. Interview with central ministry official, 2012; provincial ministry official, 2012.

  15. Interview with central ministry official 2012.

  16. Interview with central ministry official, 2012; interview with provincial level official 2012; interview with provincial level official 2017.

  17. Interview with ministry officer, early 2019.

  18. Interview with ministry officer, early 2019.

  19. The roots of China’s surveillance system extend back to 1998, with the MPS’s initiation of the “Golden Shield Project.” By 2007, the National Citizenship Information System was in place, linking information from the household registration system with user data from the major telecommunications companies.

  20. Interview with provincial ministry official, 2019.

  21. Frontline police were disarmed in the mid to late 1990s under the 1995 Police Law. Since 2014, however, limited squads of patrol officers have been allowed to carry revolvers.

  22. Interview with provincial ministry official, 2018.

  23. Interview with local station officers, Shaanxi, 2012.

  24. Interview with provincial ministry officer, early 2019.

  25. Interview with ministry officer, 2017.

  26. References to the masses appear nine times in the documents posted to the ministry’s website between 1993 and 2012. Only one reference to public opinion appears in that time frame.

  27. Interview 2017.

  28. Information about the Ministry of Public Security’s Grassroots Police Culture Group, the organization that produces these specials, is available here: http://special.cpd.com.cn/n33341888/index.html.

  29. Interview, 2017.

  30. Clashes between the police and the public are increasing. A Legal Daily report from 2012 notes that 22.2% of mass incidents were caused by conflict with the police (minjing chongtu).

  31. Interview, early 2019.

  32. Interview with ministry official, 2017.

  33. Interview, 2017.

  34. Interview with central ministry official, 2012.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Clark University, 950 Main St., Worcester, MB, 01610, USA

    Suzanne E. Scoggins

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Correspondence to Suzanne E. Scoggins.

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Scoggins, S.E. Authoritarian Policing Under Xi Jinping. J OF CHIN POLIT SCI 28, 251–271 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11366-022-09825-z

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