This book is about the early twentieth-century institutional formation of the system of penal reformation (ganhua) in China, its subsequent expansion and extension, and the related initial emergence of the modern Chinese state's thought reform regime into the early 1950s. Formulated over several decades by a diverse array of people professing a range of political perspectives and aims and operating within and beyond the formal state in a variety of social-geographic settings, this system became a key constituent part of an evolving mode of modern governance. Subsequently modified and prolifera ... More

This book is about the early twentieth-century institutional formation of the system of penal reformation (ganhua) in China, its subsequent expansion and extension, and the related initial emergence of the modern Chinese state's thought reform regime into the early 1950s. Formulated over several decades by a diverse array of people professing a range of political perspectives and aims and operating within and beyond the formal state in a variety of social-geographic settings, this system became a key constituent part of an evolving mode of modern governance. Subsequently modified and proliferating on a mass scale through party-state projects for social and political transformation and mobilization for total war and revolution, the culminating regime of custodial and noncustodial forms of thought reform emerged as an indispensible feature of mid-twentieth-century Chinese state power. Examined through cases and stories of individuals who conceptualized, implemented, and experienced these systems, this book demonstrates how, in the half century before the founding of the People's Republic of China, the institutional mechanisms and modes of mind conversion were shaped by multiple participants, including central state and local officials, wardens and prison instructors, new academics, local social elites and philanthropists, Confucians, Christians, and Buddhist laity and monks, imperial Qing scholar officials, Nationalists and Communists, as well as by prisoners themselves. The potency of the system ultimately lay not in the attainment of its proclaimed ideal of reforming minds, but rather it inhered in what it justified, controlled, coerced, and compelled in the name and perpetual pursuit of that elusive ideal.