Abstract
To facilitate effective community supervision to reduce recidivism, Chinese penal authorities have collectively adopted the policy of restraining orders (RO), which aim to monitor selected offenders and restrict their activities while serving their sentences. Despite the burgeoning literature on its normative underpinnings in the context of Chinese community corrections (CCC), research has yet to empirically examine how RO works in practice and what it implies for both CCC in particular and Chinese penalty in general. Drawing on observational and interview data from various actors involved in the implementation of RO, we show how restraining orders function beyond the ostensible objectives of strengthening surveillance and ensuring orderly communities. More importantly, RO policy works to screen out a particularly risky group of offenders for targeted control, either through individualized treatment or appropriate self-governance, which is subsequently framed as “rehabilitative control” in Chinese penal governance. The evidence further reveals that while RO implementation is responsive to victims’ needs and mobilizes community actors, it symbolizes a modernist approach to Chinese social control described as “penal responsivity.” The use of ROs within the CCC to actually govern specific offenders (rather than merely as a tool of strict supervision) suggests emerging ends of Chinese justice that are increasingly geared toward collective interests, social harmony, and community stability, and that is, above all, directed by the Party-state.
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Notes
Restraining orders were introduced in the 8th Amendment to the Criminal Law of the People’s Republic of China in 2011. In terms of functionality, Chinese restraining orders are similar to curfew orders in some British jurisdictions or community orders in some American jurisdictions, but they emerged largely as part of the administration of community corrections.
This rehabilitative ideal and the reintegrative goal of punishment of CCC are explicitly stipulated in Chapter Five of the Law of Community Corrections of the People’s Republic of China (2020). It is the set of provisions in this chapter that has institutionalized rehabilitation as the primary goal of China’s community corrections system, and authorized service-based professional groups and community organizations to engage in what was conceived in China as a state monopoly.
In fact, Chinese state leaders have long been devoted to mobilizing community resources and working with community actors in solving social problems and maintaining social stability. This communist-driven and community-based strategy was called as “the mass line” (Qunzhong Luxian) and pervasively used by street-level bureaucrats for local governance. Community justice now is seen as distinct given that contemporary approaches to community safety and local governance and their associated institutional arrangements have been different from the before-reform periods.
This point is also illustrated by, and constitutes as a result of, the Chinese government’s recent political rhetoric about the “whole process democracy (Quang guocheng minzhu)” as well as its judicial aspiration of “letting the people in person experience justice” in everyday justice practices.
It is broadly acknowledged that the Chinese institution of ROs constitutes and contributes to Chinese penal modernity by which professional expertise and skills are respected and deployed, community resources and organizations are mobilized and involved, and the needs of offenders and victims are emphasized and addressed. However, the pathway to penal modernity in China is different from its formation in other jurisdictions (i.e., USA and UK): this transformative process in China was actively imposed by the Party-state as part of its state-building project, while the emergence of penal modernism in America was advanced and enabled by a wide range of social activists and longstanding social movements for the social welfare (see Garland, 1985).
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Acknowledgements
I dedicate this paper to all the participants in my fieldwork who are practicing, pursuing, or participating in the rehabilitative work in China's community corrections. I am grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments. My profound thanks also go to N.A. Weihe, who read and edited the earlier version of the paper.
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Jiang, J. Rehabilitative Control and Penal Responsivity: Implementing Restraining Orders in Chinese Community Corrections. Asian J Criminol (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11417-024-09422-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11417-024-09422-4