Making good citizens: The reformation of prisoners in China's first modern prisons, 1907--1937

In the first decade of the twentieth century, the Qing state abandoned its long-standing highly ritualized beatings, banishments and executions in favor of a Western penal model of punishment based on incarceration and its purported aim of rehabilitating convicts. The penal reforms of this era initiated a process of interactions between theory, policy and social practice that brought about a radical transformation not only in the manner in which crime was perceived and punished in China, but also in contributing centrally to the establishment of the means and the mentalities of the modern Chinese state's project of transforming the minds of the people to make new citizens mobilized for the nation and state-directed social transformation.; Though focused primarily on the programs of moral instruction and education in the first Jiangsu and Beijing modern prisons prior to 1937, this study takes as its subject ganhua or reformation—the central principle and purpose of the modern Chinese prisons. Though an emanation of an international trend, penal reformation evolved in China amidst complex interactions between received assumptions and mentalities, new theory, competing discourses, specific codes, regulations, plans and policies and much untidy human practice carried forth in language and cultural expression distinctly Chinese. Not only was this form of transformative practice shaped with specific cultural formulas circulating in society, but it involved a wide range of contributors working within and beyond the state. Confucian-nationalist public moralists, Pure Land Buddhist lay devotee elites and clergy, academic social scientists and political party ideologues all would contribute to penal reform and the promotion of penal reformation as a means to disseminating their own visions of national and human salvation. Hence these transformative mechanisms of modern state power were formed, sustained, expanded and given meaning in relation to particular cultural structures and social practices.