The Compelling Ideal: Thought Reform and the Prison in China, 1901-1956
The Compelling Ideal: Thought Reform and the Prison in China, 1901-1956
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| ISBN-13: | 9780300186376 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Yale University Press |
| Publication date: | 05/27/2014 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| File size: | 7 MB |
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The Compelling Ideal
Thought Reform and the Prison in China, 1901â?"1956
By Jan Kiely
Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2014 Yale UniversityAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-300-18637-6
CHAPTER 1
Architects of Penal Reformation in the Late Qing Empire and Early Republic of China, 1900–1920
In the thirtieth year of the Guangxu emperor (1904), Jia Liaotou, a young man from Gong Village in Wanping County just outside of Beijing, was arrested for robbery. In keeping with imperial Qing laws and regulations, he was tortured under interrogation before the county magistrate. He gave an alias, Jia Wanhe, which was duly entered in the record. The magistrate sentenced Jia to be executed after the autumn assize review of capital cases. Yet, before long, Jia had his sentence commuted and changed to the new statutory punishment of imprisonment. The imperial government was beginning to implement a new system of laws and punishments modeled on foreign methods. Jia spent the next seven years in a grim county jail of wood and hardened earth, which had long housed prisoners awaiting trial or sentencing. Then, in the fall of 1912, at the end of a year that had begun with the abdication of the last Qing emperor and the founding of the Republic of China, Jia found himself among the first group of prisoners, most recently shorn of their hair-plait queues, moved into an imposing, freshly completed "new-style" prison compound—the Beijing No. 1 Prison. A striking Chinese-Western architectural hybrid, the prison, in Jia's eyes, must have seemed among the most palatial "foreign buildings" in the city. Within the massive walls, gates, corridors, cells, and common areas, Jia entered a strictly disciplined schedule of rising, washing, eating, working, attending lectures, and being confined in his cell at night. He lived under the watchful eye of the central observation tower and the guards in their foreign military-style uniforms posted throughout the wards and always, possibly, unseen and unheard, at his cell-door peephole. Jia had become an object of what the prison administration called the process of reformation— ganhua ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]).
Jia apparently thrived. He was soon pronounced reformed and, in March 1913, became the first convict to be paroled from the Beijing No. 1 Prison. Ten months later, in accordance with procedure, prison instructor Zhang Yifang, who had been responsible for guiding Jia in prison, went to check on the parolee. In Gong Village, Zhang learned, rather disconcertingly, the actual name by which Jia was known to his family and neighbors and that his former ward was now living in Langshan town (to the northwest of Beijing). Yet Zhang's concerns were quickly allayed by the glowing accounts he heard from Jia's mother and brother, the local policeman, and the mutual responsibility group leader from the village self-government assembly. Under the close supervision of the local authorities, Jia Liaotou, Zhang was told, had lived quietly with his mother and brother and worked diligently making cloth shoes—a skill he had acquired in the prison workshops. Every day he had come straight home after work and never went out in the evenings. In time, when his family grew too large for the village house, Jia Liaotou moved with his wife and son to Langshan, where he continued to make a living sewing shoes and, as a good filial son, regularly sent money back to his mother. Following up with the Langshan police, Instructor Zhang was informed that Jia was skilled and hardworking and that his shoemaking enterprise, which now included his brother and son, had prospered. The Langshan police even bought their own shoes from him. Jia Liaotou, the police concluded, upheld good conduct, remained on friendly terms with his neighbors, and "was not at all like he was before when he did not understand the difference between what was important and what was unimportant."
Plucked from one penal regime and ideology of punishment and cast into another, the north China villager Jia Liaotou was among the first people in China to be made an object of a system of discipline through institutional incarceration and instruction aimed at transforming the mind and character. Millions have followed in his footsteps. In the eyes of prison authorities, Jia was a transformed man—living evidence of the success of the few new-style prisons and the reformation process (ganhua). He was both an experiment within and a poster boy for the budding new penal system. His story said much about the new penal authorities' idealized conception of how reformation should work and what kind of reformed offenders they meant it to produce.
So behind the Jia Liaotou story is its author, the Beijing No. 1 Prison warden Wang Yuanzeng, who selected Jia for parole and promoted his case of successful rehabilitation as a testament to the promise of the new-style prison and its rehabilitative mission. Wang, standing front and center before his fellow officers, attired in his dark dress uniform with epaulets and firmly grasping his sword, looks out confidently from the formal photographs of the early years of the prison. As an ambitious young man from Jiading, Jiangsu (outside of Shanghai), Wang had, like so many of his fellow senior officials in the new criminal justice system, studied the European, American, and Japanese methods of policing and penology in Japan and toured exemplary prisons around the world. Returning to serve as an official in the Qing "New Policies" experimental judicial reforms in the northeastern (Manchurian) provinces, Wang had, along with most of his colleagues, easily traversed the turbulence of the 1911 Revolution into the judicial-penal bureaucracy of the new Republic. As the influential founding and long-serving warden of the prison built to be the national model, author of the 1913 Prison Code, and later director of the Prison Bureau into the 1940s, Wang was one of the leading architects, implementers, and supervisors of the modern Chinese prison system. Along with several key figures whose efforts he built upon, Wang played a vital role in formulating the institutional reformation mechanism that Jia Liaotou experienced.
The transition to a new penal regime committed to the rehabilitative ideal was, of course, not the work of these founding leaders alone. It was born of crises brought on by domestic and foreign forces and launched through regional and central government reform initiatives. European, American, and, above all, Japanese models provided the essential inspirations. Yet the designers of reformation envisioned it through their own distinctive cultural frames and terms. The resulting rehabilitative ideal, in just the manner that Warden Wang looked upon Jia Liaotou, was achingly hopeful and so compelling in its aspiration to make of offenders good people and citizens, one prisoner at a time.
CRISES AND INITIATIVES AND LATE QING PENAL REFORM
Wang Yuanzeng and Jia Liaotou grew up in a world in which the imperial government primarily punished convicted criminals, depending on the nature and severity of their crimes, by public display in the heavy yokelike cangue apparatus, public beatings with long heavy poles, branding, various degrees of banishment, and public execution, most often by decapitation. This late Qing penal regime was the consequence of the complex, two-and-half-millennium-long and ever-evolving Chinese legal tradition and its history of codified statutory punishments. Punishment was theoretically designed to redress a crime's disruption of the social-ethical order, even as, in a practical sense, the understaffed imperial bureaucracy wielded it to instill awe and encourage good behavior in the populace through highly ritualized symbolic performances of violence or separation that represented imperial power and Confucian status hierarchies. Imprisonment was not a standard statutory punishment (though it was used for members of the imperial family, Manchu bannermen, and eventually for some women and the insane), and jails existed for detention in the course of investigation, trial, and sentencing.
Yet, as Jia Liaotou discovered, change came quickly. The reformist administration of the last decade of the Qing Empire (1901–11) dismantled their penal system and replaced it, at least at the level of law and policy, with one of fines, terms of work detention or penal servitude in prison, and capital punishment carried out in prison. It was a radical and abrupt transformation that bequeathed to the new Republic a regime of punishments that emphasized the supposedly humane and internationally acceptable "deprivation of [a convict's] freedom" and rehabilitation in prison. These reforms were born of the crisis of 1900–1902, as the Qing government, chased into internal exile, negotiated for its survival and the withdrawal of the coalition army of eight foreign imperial powers that had occupied Beijing and much of surrounding Zhili Province during the brief Boxer War of 1900. Matters of legal, judicial, and penal reform had a significant place in the series of postwar treaties and the initial policy documents for the New Policies institutional and administrative reforms, through which the Qing leadership sought to gain the approval of the foreign powers, secure their dynastic sovereignty, and reconsolidate their state's power. The senior Qing officials who first launched the reform, principally the viceroys Zhang Zhidong and Liu Kunyi, had come to accept the view that the foreign powers' "extraterritorial rights" within the Qing Empire—once considered a petty treaty concession consistent with precedents allowing peripheral foreign trading communities to police themselves—were a root problem in the diminution of Qing sovereignty. Moreover, they knew that too often these "rights" had been a contributing factor in the "religious case" conflicts involving Chinese Christian converts or foreign missionaries that were associated with the Boxer catastrophe. The foreigners had, in part, claimed extraterritoriality and continued to argue for its necessity on the basis that the Qing justice system was barbarically cruel and unfit for civilized peoples. For decades, British, Americans, and others taking part in their countries' imperialist enterprises in coastal and riverine China had, with a thoroughly obtuse blindness to the brutality of their own recent penal history (to say nothing of colonial penal practices), expressed horror at the inhumane cruelty of Chinese punishments. In Western writings and images of China, Chinese punishments became a signifier par excellence of the racial inferiority and depravity of "Orientals." Taking the lead in the July 1902 negotiations in Wuchang, Viceroy Zhang Zhidong managed to have included in the 1902 Qing-British Treaty the vague promise that Britain would "relinquish her extraterritorial rights when she is satisfied with the state of Chinese laws, the arrangement of their administration, and other considerations warrant her doing so." From this point and for the next forty years, the imperative to attain an international standard (as defined by the Western powers and Japan) to bring about, as the Japanese had recently done, a negotiated end to extraterritoriality and ultimately the whole system of the foreign powers' imperialist treaty privileges, and so the revival of state sovereignty, was a primary propellant to the legal- judicial reforms. When Zhang Zhidong and Liu Kunyi recommended the appointment of the preeminent senior official expert on law and justice matters, Shen Jiaben, and his colleague, Wu Tingfang, to head the imperial government's Legal Revision Commission, they expressly noted the aim of working for the revocation of extraterritoriality. Launched in an urgent atmosphere of crisis, the shift to rehabilitative incarceration was linked to the grand purpose of saving the state.
There was another crisis—the long-standing crisis of the Qing administration of justice and punishments—that added a further impetus to reform. Just a part of a Qing bureaucracy long overwhelmed by domestic and foreign challenges, the late nineteenth-century judicial administration, and particularly its ability to detain and punish offenders, was in considerable distress. The civil administration's sacrosanct monopoly on capital punishment (in theory, requiring the approval of the emperor himself) had been lost with an expedient Taiping Rebellion-era (1853) edict permitting "on the spot" executions by regional military officials. Many accounts indicate that even regularly approved executions often degenerated into "carnivalesque" spectacles, with raucous crowds making comic-opera heroes of the condemned. The exile system was similarly troubled. Reformist officials pointed out that military banishment in the 1880s–1890s had become entirely unmanageable, with 70–80 percent of the convicts escaping. There had been piecemeal responses over the years to such breakdowns and to the increasing complexity and scale of social-order problems. Notably, reliance on de facto long-term imprisonment appears to have increased due to case backlogs and the pragmatic decisions of county magistrates. Hence the clarion call of the New Policies in 1901–02 offered a unique opportunity to address the many intractable deficiencies within the existing system. Early specific proposals put forth by leading officials from around the empire showed little interest in impressing or emulating foreigners and changing the penal regime; they focused on practical Confucian statecraft reforms to fix the system and make it possible for officials to better guide, order, and assist in improving the livelihood of the populace.
This was the case with the first calls for the reform of the jianyu (supervised jails)—the term adopted by the Qing in the seventeenth century for government office jails and that later would come to be used for the modern prisons. Consistent with existing jail regulations, substitutes and previous ordering initiatives concerning food rations, cleanliness, and order designed to counter the notorious crowding and misery and keep detainees alive to face interrogation, trial, or punishment, the first New Policies jianyu reforms struck at the corruption and extortionary practices of the local sub-bureaucratic petty functionary jailers. A similar pragmatic Confucian statecraft approach marked Interim Shanxi Governor Zhao Erxun's 1902 memorial proposing convict work-training houses (zuifan xiyisuo). This proposal, which led to the establishment of the first imperial-government-approved institutions for custodial punishment and inmate education, in fact, called for a discrete, practical solution to the collapse of the military banishment system, which was consistent with proposals and provisional local practices of the previous two decades. The aim was for convicts, in Confucian statecraft terms, to cultivate economic self-sufficiency in order to sustain a moral life.
Far from being a move to transform punishments, the establishment of work training houses, as with the similar reformatories (qianshansuo) set up in Hunan in the late 1890s and later in other cities, proceeded as part of provincial and local, often joint official and gentry-elite policing and social welfare initiatives following Meiji Japanese methods. The main intent was to remove vagrants, beggars, and minor offenders from newly paved and lighted city streets. The first Zhili work training houses in Tianjin (1904) and Baoding (1905) followed the plans the Tianjin prefect Ling Fupeng brought back from Japan. Although almost immediately afflicted with problems of crowding, inadequate food rations, rampant disease, and disorder, these institutions were the first to pursue standard work training and education curriculums to rehabilitate the convict. The emulation of foreign rehabilitative methods was initially, then, experimented with in the provinces and in a limited way.
In fact, for decades, there had been Chinese who, without any appreciable influence on imperial policy, had been writing admiring accounts of European prisons and circulating proposals for the adoption of orderly incarceration and rehabilitative methods. Beijing took even less interest in the prisons the British, French, Russians, and Japanese built in their treaty settlements (though, these were, for the most part, hardly exemplary of the latest trends in progressive penal reform). Indeed, they suppressed proposals to adopt foreign penal methods. As late as 1899, the newly appointed governor of Hubei, Zeng Su, was cashiered for writing a memorial merely praising "Western laws" which "consider prisons to be academies." The wariness continued until the specially appointed Legal Revision Commission in Beijing put forth their comprehensive proposals.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Compelling Ideal by Jan Kiely. Copyright © 2014 Yale University. Excerpted by permission of Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Acknowledgments, ix,Maps, xi,
Prologue, i,
ONE Architects of Penal Reformation in the Late Qing Empire and Early Republic of China, 1900–1920, 6,
TWO Guides to Reform: Prison Instructors in Jiangsu and Beijing, 1918–1927, 42,
THREE Objects of Reformation: Common Prisoners, 1912–1937, 84,
FOUR Reformation for Salvation: The Buddhist Movement in the Jails and Prisons of 1920s Zhejiang and Jiangsu, 123,
FIVE A Mechanism for All Offenses: The Nationalist Expansion of the Reformation Regime, 1927–1937, 161,
SIX The Indispensable Regime: Thought Reform in Wartime, 1937–1945, 214,
SEVEN Revolutionary Thought Reform: The Communist Version, 1946–1956, 255,
Conclusion, 297,
Selected Glossary of Chinese Terms, 311,
List of Abbreviations in the Notes, 315,
Notes, 323,
Index, 383,