The politics of rehabilitation within Chinese community corrections: The rise of an enabling and embedded state in a rapidly modernizing society

Abstract

The sociology of punishment has long dealt with the relationship between state power and penal practices, and how this relationship defines the nature of the penal state. Literature has theorized the penal state through the lens of incarceration in affluent Western democracies. Less attention, nonetheless, has been allotted to non-custodial institutions in China with its distinctive structure of law and polity. This study, leveraging the recently established Chinese Community Corrections (CCC) as a specific site, scrutinizes how its operation articulates state power and constitutes the Chinese penal state. Drawing from ethnographic data on the CCC, we show that the organization and functioning of the CCC epitomize the rise of an enabling and embedded state in a rapidly modernizing society. The growth of such a Chinese state underlying the CCC indicates that China's march toward penal modernity is a form of pragmatism and statism. Through implementing rehabilitation, with seemingly paradoxical strategies of empowerment and entrenchment, the Chinese state is reconfiguring its penal power to adapt to major societal transformations in ways that would not undermine its governing authority and political legitimacy. Future theoretical and policy implications for the forms, functions, and foundations of the penal state in the still-evolving CCC are addressed.