Policing grassroots China: revolution and order maintenance

Based on the researcher’s fieldwork from 2021 to 2022 in Changshan County, Zhejiang Province, this dissertation examines how the Chinese party-state has reengineered revolutionary means to serve conservative ends through three intertwined projects – community policing, conflict management and COVID-19 management. Combining an analysis of policing institutions with considerations of the cultural dimensions of local governance in China, the researcher conducted in-depth ethnographic and historical research on three questions: First, what are longue durée continuities of Chinese policing and how have they interacted with revolutionary changes? Second, how does this revolution-born mode of policing actually operate in contemporary grassroots China? Third, what kinds of social and cultural logics are evident in the technologies of Chinese Grassroots Governance? By examining the above questions, the researcher concludes that Chinese policing sustains a model of revolutionary policing as a departure from Anglo-American and European conventions,arguing that policing is a political project of creating new orders. The imprint of the above projects has produced three key features that characterize the policing institutions, including (1) the grassroots China has consistently maintained an “illiberal” political-legal orientation to organize a comprehensive management of social order, (2) the coupling of the archaic forms of revolutionary technologies and the emergent system of technological control sustains a nonconfrontational framework, institutionalizing revolutionary governmentalities for hierarchical scaling of disorders and subjects; (3) a mediation-centric conflict management repertoire in the context of contemporary stability maintenance that blurs the distinctions between the state and society, civil and criminal justice, policing and mediation.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

E Asian Languages & Cultures

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2023

Author dc:creator

• Zhou, Lingxiao

Contributors dc:contributor

• Martin, Jeffrey
• Shao, Dan
• Greenberg, Jessica
• Wilson, Roderick

• Policing
• Grassroots
• Governance
• Revolution

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2023 Lingxiao Zhou

Language dc:language

en, eng

Handle dc:identifier

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/121322

OAI record oai:identifier

https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=etdms&identifier=oai%3Awww.ideals.illinois.edu%3A2142%2F121322