Policing Chinese Politics

Michael Dutton is a reader in political science at the University of Melbourne. He also has an appointment as a professor of politics at Goldsmiths College, University of London. He is the author of Policing and Punishment in China: From Patriarchy to “The People” and The Crisis of Marxism in China and the editor of Streetlife China.

• Preface viiIntroduction: A Theoretical Explanation 11. Friends and Enemies: The War Within 232. From Class to Nation: Limiting the Excess in Yan’an 713. The Government of Struggle: Institutions of the Binary 1334. The Years That Burned 1975. The End of the (Mass) Line? Chinese Politics in the Era of the Contract 247Concluding Reflections 301Glossary 317Notes 331References 375Index 395

“Eric Hobsbawm, with some irony and much love for the history profession, once remarked that ‘theoreticians of all kinds circle around the peaceful herds of historians as they graze on their rich pastures of primary sources.’ He endorsed the encircling of those pastures. Michael Dutton is one of those social science theoreticians who graze on the same rich fields, but at the same time he takes Asian studies and history into new and fascinating areas.”-BØrge Bakken, author of The Exemplary Society: Human Improvement, Social Control, and the Dangers of Modernity in China “Michael Dutton’s Policing Chinese Politics is a work of deeply committed political scholarship. It will be of great interest to scholars of Chinese politics and to historians and critics of the socialist movement.”-Piers Beirne, Department of Criminology, University of Southern Maine