Policing the People's Republic (From Social Control in the People's Republic of China, P 130-140, 1989, Ronald J. Troyer, John P. Clark, et al, eds. - See NCJ-120034)

• NCJ Number: 120041
• Author(s): D H Bracey
• Date Published: 1989
• Length: 11 pages
• Sale Source: Praeger Publishers
• Publication Type: Survey (Cross-Cultural)
• Language: English
• Country: United States of America

Annotation

The police in China have a major role in the nation's elaborate system of informal social control and are also a major element in enforcing the criminal law.

Abstract

Their activities rest on the view that the police cannot function without the support and cooperation of the people. Their functions also rest on the Chinese view that early intervention is proper to prevent deviance from becoming too extreme or causing too much damage. As a result, they combine community policing with far-reaching and lightly supervised powers of security administration, functioning in a variety of situations that police in Western nations would not consider to be the responsibility of the police. Their styles of policing include compensatory, therapeutic, and conciliatory responses, and a single incident may evoke more than one type of response. They work most closely with more than a million public security committees, which are elected by their peers at the levels of neighborhood, factory, institution, or village. They can also impose punishments ranging from detention to reeducation through labor, usually after conference with the neighborhood committee. Note.