UC Berkeley UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title On Legitimacy: How the Prison-Labor Complex Changes with the Political Terrain in China Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9ng6w3mf Author LIN, MAO-HONG Publication Date 2016 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California On Legitimacy: How the Prison-Labor Complex Changes with the Political Terrain in China By Mao-hong Lin A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Juridical Science in the School of Law of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Jonathan Simon, Chair Professor Malcolm M. Feeley Professor Thomas B. Gold Summer 2016 © Copyright by Mao-hong Lin, 2016 All Rights Reserved Abstract On Legitimacy: How the Prison-Labor Complex Changes with the Political Terrain in China by Mao-hong Lin Doctor of Juridical Science University of California, Berkeley Professor Jonathan Simon, Chair The dissertation is centered on the dispute over the prison-enterprise dichotomy in the discourse of CCP administration and the scholarly discussion resulted from the financial crisis of the Chinese prison system in 2003. The official statements and the relevant studies by Chinese scholars have demonstrated their endogenous limitations that the prison system in China needs to be either in the form of combination of prison and enterprise or in the form of their separation for adapting itself to the tremendous shift in the state’s economic structure. Instead, setting off from a viewpoint of the school of punishment and society, the dissertation aims to take the historical, economic, legal and political parameters into consideration and then to unveil the full picture of penal labor camps in the Chinese socialist society. The dissertation employs a historical institutionist approach as the main theoretical backbone, trying to clarify the formation and development of the carceral mechanism from an economic point of view and to match the carceral strategies utilized by the state with the CCP regime’s legitimation plans in different periods of time. The dissertation finds that the prison system functioned with other social institutions as a massive social control mechanism in the pre-reform age; its orientation of special state-owned enterprise and its usage of forced labor as punishment made itself a prison-labor complex that allowed it to stand the following grand transformation in the economic structure. When in the post-reform era the prison system moved towards three distinct directions: its economic role was emphasized, its organization was restructured for the economic adjustments, and it underwent a large-scale legal reform. Finally, the dissertation finds that these changes of the prison system over time can be placed on the trajectory of the CCP’s legitimation plans when the CCP regime faced crises in different periods. 1 Table of Contents Chapter One Introduction ................................................................................................................................ 1 1. The Entanglement of Prison and Enterprise ................................................................................... 1 1.1. Crisis of the Prison System ........................................................................................................ 1 1.2. The Accounts of the Crisis and Their Limits ......................................................................... 3 2. Prison System in Communist China ................................................................................................. 4 2.1. Its Outline .................................................................................................................................... 4 2.2. Research Scope of the Dissertation .......................................................................................... 8 3. Chinese Prison in the Western Understandings .............................................................................. 9 4. The Present Analysis .......................................................................................................................... 11 4.1. Research Project ........................................................................................................................ 11 4.2. Structure and Agency Debate .................................................................................................. 12 4.3. Historical Institutionalism ........................................................................................................ 14 4.4. Analytic Framework .................................................................................................................. 16 4.5. Data Collection .......................................................................................................................... 18 5. Central Argument and Chapter Layout .......................................................................................... 19 Chapter Two Penal Labor Camps and Social Control in Pre-Reform China ........................................ 21 1. Introduction ........................................................................................................................................ 21 2. Installing A Centrally Controlled Economy ................................................................................... 21 2.1. Economic Recovery, 1949-1952 ............................................................................................. 21 2.2. Transition from Capitalism to Socialism, 1953-1957 .......................................................... 25 2.3. The Stampede of Chinese Dream, 1958-1965 ...................................................................... 28 3. The General Structure of Social Control ........................................................................................ 31 3.1. Household Registration System .............................................................................................. 31 3.2. Work Unit ................................................................................................................................... 33 3.3. The Party-State Mechanism ..................................................................................................... 34 3.4. Summary ..................................................................................................................................... 35 4. Penal Labor Camps ............................................................................................................................ 36 4.1. Organization .............................................................................................................................. 36 4.1.1. Position of Penal Labor Camps ..................................................................................... 36 4.1.2. The Party-State in the Penal Labor Camps .................................................................. 38 4.1.3. Financial Structure ........................................................................................................... 39 4.1.4. Management and Production ......................................................................................... 40 4.2. A Typology of Inmates ............................................................................................................ 42 4.2.1. Prisoner Card and Dossier ............................................................................................. 42 4.2.2. Classification ..................................................................................................................... 43 4.3. Mass Production of Workers in Unified Specifications ...................................................... 46 5. Post-Release Management ................................................................................................................ 49 6. Concluding Remarks .......................................................................................................................... 53 Chapter Three Prison Regulation and Market Development in Post-Reform China ........................... 56 1. Introduction ........................................................................................................................................ 56 2. Changing the Economic Track ........................................................................................................ 56 2.1. Recovery from the Cultural Revolution, 1976-1978 ............................................................ 56 2.2. Reform and Opening Up, 1979-1991 .................................................................................... 58 2.2.1. The Outset of Economic Reform ................................................................................. 58 2.2.2. Early Changes in the Rural Areas .................................................................................. 59 i 2.2.3. Early Changes in the Urban Areas ................................................................................ 60 2.2.4. Establishing a Planned Commodity Economy ............................................................ 62 2.3. Installment of A Socialist Market Economy, 1992-present ................................................ 65 3. Prison-Enterprise Combination in the Market .............................................................................. 68 3.1. Prison Administration