The Compelling Ideal: Thought Reform and the Prison in China, 1901-1956 9780300186376

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THE COMPELLING IDEAL

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THE COMPELLING IDEAL Thought Reform and the Prison in China, 1901–1956

Jan Kiely

New Haven & London

Published with assistance from the Mary Cady Tew Memorial Fund. Copyright © 2014 by Yale University. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity for educational, business, or promotional use. For information, please e-mail [email protected] (U.S. office) or [email protected] (U.K. office). Set in Electra LH type by IDS Infotech Ltd., Chandigarh India. Printed in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kiely, Jan, 1965– The compelling ideal : thought reform and the prison in China, 1901–1956 / Jan Kiely. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-300-18594-2 (hardback) 1. Prisons—China—History—20th century. 2. Corrections—China—History—20th century. I. Title. HV9817.K54 2014 365'.95109041—dc23 2013046778 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Claire and Angelica

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgments ix Maps xi Prologue 1 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

viii

Contents Selected Glossary of Chinese Terms 311 List of Abbreviations in the Notes 315 Notes 323 Index 383

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Although the assistance and support I received over many years cannot be adequately repaid with these acknowledgments, I would like to express my gratitude to those who made this book possible. My first debt remains to my dissertation supervisor, the late Frederic Wakeman, Jr., whose inspiration and tactical encouragements were vital and whose example always remained before me as I labored to write a history that might measure up to his expectations. I also feel enormously grateful for the training I received from my other formal teachers of Chinese history, Jonathan D. Spence, Yü Ying-shi, Stephen Uhalley, Jr., D. W. Y. Kwok, and Yeh Wen-hsin, and from my informal teachers, Philip A. Kuhn and Yin Hongbiao. I would like to acknowledge all the many long-suffering language teachers who have had to put up with me over the years, particularly the late Gregory Kuei-Ke Chiang for his patient guidance in Classical Chinese. I owe much gratitude furthermore to many librarians and archivists at the University of California at Berkeley’s C. V. Starr East Asian Library, Stanford University’s Hoover Institution East Asia Collection, the Harvard-Yenching Library, the Hopkins-Nanjing Center Library, the Nanjing University Library, the Nanjing Library, the Second Historical Archives of China (Nanjing), the Jiangsu Provincial Archives (Nanjing), the Zhejiang Provincial Archives (Hangzhou), the Academia Historica (Taipei), the National Taiwan Library (Taipei), the Capital Library (Beijing), the National Library of China (Beijing), the Shanghai Municipal Archives, the Suzhou Municipal Archives, the Shanghai Library, the Suzhou Library, the Universities Service Centre at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and the library system of the Chinese University of Hong Kong. I am also thankful for the funding support I received from the University of California at Berkeley, the Peking University Fellowship, the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation’s Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral ix

x

Acknowledgments Dissertation Fellowship, the Dean’s Research Grant and semester researchleave provided by Furman University through the auspices of Dean A. V. Huff, Jr., and the generous research support from the Johns Hopkins University during the years I served as co-director of the Hopkins-Nanjing Center for Chinese and American Studies. To all those, furthermore, who contributed to the editing and production of the manuscript by Yale University Press, particularly the anonymous reviewers and Laura Davulis, Ash Lago, Kate Davis, and Ann-Marie Imbornoni, I am most sincerely thankful. I would like also to thank Liu Haiping for all his assistance and support in Nanjing, Daniel Hellberg for putting me up in Taipei, and my research assistant at Hopkins-Nanjing, Alex Wiker, for his excellent work. I feel deeply grateful, moreover, to Billy So and Ann Huss, who arranged for me to have most of my first year at the Chinese University of Hong Kong free of teaching and administrative responsibilities, and I further wish to thank my CUHK colleagues Ann Huss, John Lagerwey, and David Faure for their unfailing support and encouragement. Finally, for unparalleled assistance, advice, debate, listening, criticisms, insights, and inspirational support beyond measure, I save my final thank you for Izumi Nakayama.

N HEILONGJIANG Harbin Shuangcheng

M O N G O L I A

Changchun JILIN

Shenyang

INNER MONGOLIA

g Mountains

River

Ta i h a n

Taiyuan Yulin NINGXIA

Fenyang

Yan'an

NORTH KOREA

Dandong (Andong)

Beijing (Beiping)

Ye l l o w

a (Hu n g )

Tonghua

LIAONING

Ninghe

SOUTH KOREA

Tianjin Baoding HEBEI (ZHILI)

Jinan

Qingdao

SHANDONG

SHANXI

Lintong

GANSU

N

Xuzhou JIANGSU

Lanzhou Fengxiang

HENAN

Xi'an

Hu

ai

Ri

ve

r

Shanghai

Nanjing

Hefei

SHAANXI ANHUI

Guanghua Pingwu

HUBEI

SICHUAN

Hangzhou Huizhou (Shexian)

Huanggang

Wuhan

Shangrao

iver i R

Ya

n

Wenzhou

Nanchang

Ya'an gz

ZHEJIANG

Jiujiang

Enshi

Chengdu Chongqing

Changsha JIANGXI HUNAN

GUIZHOU

Taibei

FUJIAN

Taihe

Xinzhu

Xifeng Guiyang

TAIWAN

Pingba

Tainan Gaoxiong

GUANGDONG

YUNNAN

Yilan

We s t ( X i ) R i v e r

Guangzhou

Hong Kong

GUANGXI

0

200

400 miles

China (partial), ca. October 1949. Cartography by Erin Greb. *Wuhan is the tri-city consisting of Wuchang, Hankou, and Hanyang.

r Yi R ive

SHANDONG

HENAN

0

50

100 miles

Xuzhou

Huaiyin

JIANGSU Yi

ng

Ri

v

H

er

u

ai

River

Sichahe

Xinghua Dongtai Gaoyou Rugao

Zhenjiang ANHUI Nanjing

Hefei

Nantong Jiangyin

Wujin

Wuxi Wuhu

Suzhou

Shanghai

Y

HUBEI a

z ng

ive i R

r

Xuancheng Jiaxing Hangzhou Dinghai

Huizhou (Shexian)

Shaoxing

Ningbo

Ri

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Fuchu

ZHEJIANG Nanchang

G an

Ri

Yongkang

Jiangshan Shangrao

ver

Ou

JIANGXI

Riv

er

Wenzhou

FUJIAN

Central-Eastern China. Cartography by Erin Greb.

Putuoshan Island

PROLOGUE

“Thought reform” is a peculiar term in English, still tethered, more than a half century after its introduction, to the Communist China of Mao Zedong. “Brainwashing,” however, the related word coined a few years earlier based on a literal translation of the Chinese xinao (wash brain), has developed a popular, fulsome life of its own. I was first struck by the Chinese origin of the word when, still an undergraduate, I saw the reissue of the 1962 John Frankenheimer film The Manchurian Candidate, an entertainingly campy Cold War political thriller starring Frank Sinatra and Laurence Harvey in which ludicrously Orientalized Russo-Chinese Communists apply near-mystical techniques of hypnosis and psychological mind control to make Laurence Harvey do their bidding. It seemed a tale entirely fantastical, much like similar films of the period about alien invaders from outer space. Not long after, I read the psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton’s 1961 study of the techniques and effects of 1950s Chinese Communist “thought reform,” Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism, based on interviews in Hong Kong with Chinese exiles and European and American missionaries. Detailed and sophisticated, Lifton’s “psychiatric evaluation” of those who had experienced thought reform, and his theory of “ideological totalism” could not easily be dismissed. Yet nothing in it struck me as at all related to the living China I had resided in during the early 1980s. Moreover, the project clearly originated amid the same early Cold War panic that had inspired The Manchurian Candidate. “Have the Chinese discovered new and obscure techniques?” Lifton had asked.1 The question, like the film, appeared to come from a remote time when it might have seemed sensible. The source of the word “brainwashing” and the fullest articulation of the American Cold War fear of it came from the books by the journalist Edward Hunter, who had also conducted exile interviews in Hong Kong.2 The idea of 1

2

Prologue special formulas concocted of “scientific” Pavlovian psychiatric-hypnotic and Chinese ways explained a lot for a generation of Americans who wondered how the China that had been a wartime ally, a long-standing mission field, and an endlessly promising market had been “lost” in 1949 and had become an implacable foe in the Korean War, where, somehow, they had managed to deny America a clear victory. “Thought reform” and “brainwashing” were terms born of a Cold War American paranoid fear of a Chinese Communist threat that might believably have some mysterious force that could threaten American peace and prosperity. This seemed like anti-Communist rubbish to those of a leftist, liberal, or, in any case, critical bent. But not a few on this leftish, liberal side of the political spectrum seemed interested in something they preferred to call the Maoist method of “re-education.” For them, making revolution by encouraging people to change their old-fashioned ideas seemed an enlightened alternative to the purges, mass executions, and hard-labor camps of Stalinism.3 What was striking to me from the remove of several decades, however, was how much both sides shared the same presumptions. Foremost among these was that the Chinese Communist methods were unusually capable of actually converting the minds of people. In essence, they all accepted the premise of the system of thought reform itself. This tendency is still with us. Even since the end of the Cold War, questions about whether the Maoist state was or was not able to transform the thinking of its people have remained current with regard to the formative period of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the state, society, and culture that emerged from it. In contrast to Lifton’s view that the effect of thought reform, finally, lay in undermining identity within the mind, it was my inclination, as a student of history, not to look for thought reform’s supposed power over minds in minds, but rather to investigate thought reform as part of historically formed concepts, patterns, structures, systems, and practices that constitute power. I also questioned many of the tendencies of scholars and journalists to label these methods as essentially “Communist,” or characteristically “Chinese,” or even solely “Maoist.”4 Buried beneath such assertions seemed to be some unacknowledged ideological and culturalist positions and ahistorical assumptions. A wellgrounded historical study might help clarify the picture. My plan to study the history of the early PRC in graduate school quickly ran into the practical problem that almost no archival materials from the period were openly accessible to scholars. Even when I shifted my focus back to political imprisonment in the Republican period (1912–49), the obstacles and pitfalls appeared to loom on all sides. At the time, almost nothing even on the subject of pre-1949 Chinese prisons had been written in English or Chinese based on

Prologue primary sources,5 so there was much fundamental groundwork to be done just to gain a sense of the early twentieth-century Chinese penal system. Then I was taken aback when, on preparing to head off to the archives and libraries in China in early 1997, my adviser suggested I prepare a “backup” topic in case archivists proved unwilling to let me see documents on what might be considered a politically “sensitive” subject. Over the subsequent years that led to my dissertation completed in 2001, and during another decade of off-and-on-again work on the project, the book evolved in unexpected ways. Other studies appeared in English, notably Dikötter (2002) and Xu (2008), and many more in Chinese that added much to our understanding of prisons, punishment, and the legal-judicial system in the Republican period.6 Fortunately, also, my adviser’s worry about sources proved unwarranted; I have been able to examine an extraordinary range of primary historical documents. It is from sifting through these materials that I had so many of my own expectations and assumptions about my topic, as well as my understandings of modern Chinese history, shattered. In putting the pieces back together in new patterns, I found myself returning to my earlier interest in thought reform, and seeing striking connections with Pan Min’s study (2006) of Japanese and Wang regime pacification campaigns in southern Jiangsu and Gao Hua’s works (2000, 2010) on wartime Yan’an, and so I produced the book before you.7 What the historical record reveals is how already in the late Qing and early Republican modern penal reforms of the early twentieth century, Japanese forms of high modernist penological theories interpreted by late imperial Chinese scholar-officials and their nationalistic Republican heirs had produced modern prisons devoted to the ideal of reforming the minds of convicts. The formation of this particular institutional regime had consisted of not just official policies and orders, but practices and practical adapted methods developed by mid-ranking wardens and guards in relation to their inmate populations. It was a process that generated much consensus even as it involved a diversity of figures operating within and outside state bureaucracies and within ministries in the capital, as well as in provincial prisons and county jails. Late imperial scholarofficials, Japanese advisers, early Republican ministers, legal reformers, wardens, instructors, foreign-educated academic social scientists and legal scholars, social elite public moralists, lay Buddhist gentry elites and monks, Nationalist Party radicals, legal reformers, senior officials, and security agents, officials who collaborated with the Japanese, and Communists, among others, all shared dreams of reforming minds through institutionalized incarceration and other means. This book is primarily about the early twentieth-century institutional formation of the system of penal reformation (ganhua) in China, its subsequent

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Prologue dramatic expansion and extension, and the related initial emergence of the modern Chinese state’s broader thought reform regime into the early 1950s. It tells this history, in part, through the stories of exemplary individuals and cases, initially centered on the capital city of Beijing and the historically prosperous Lower Yangzi region (Shanghai, Jiangsu, and Zhejiang); subsequent cases of the system as it expanded are drawn from a variety of regions, even as much attention remains on the Lower Yangzi and Beijing. The first four chapters focus on the four crucial formative realms (and the key contributors within them) to the emergence of the system of penal reformation between the early 1900s and the 1920s. These realms are, respectively, those of the initial theoretical-discursive and policy formation (chapter 1), the development of actual, common institutional methods and teachings in practice by wardens and instructors (chapter 2), the adaptation of this system to and interaction with the prisoners it sought to reform (chapter 3), and the extension of the regime beyond major cities by local authorities and elites with their own distinct (in this case religious) agendas (chapter 4). Chapters 5 and 6 discuss the expansion of the penal reformation system and its extension into and interconnections with a widening array of custodial institutions and noncustodial thoughtmolding programs to indoctrinate designated sectors of society as part of emerging campaigns of mass indoctrination. In these years, the Chinese Communist Party developed its own version of the reformative system alongside and mirroring much of what other governments had done before. Adding key features of their own, they expanded the vision on an unprecedented scale after 1949. The last chapter presents an image in motion of the culminating moment when the thought reform regime proliferated across China as an integral instrument of the CCP’s revolutionary conquest; it begins an exploration of the Maoist era, which will be pursued in a subsequent volume on the 1950s through the 1970s. A central purpose of this book is to demonstrate how historical examination reveals highly particular processes and contingencies in the formation of structures of authority that were thoroughly engaged in and enmeshed within the environments and lives of those who made and directed them and those who experienced them. Prisons and similar institutions and projects of thought reform were neither mystical nor all powerful before or after 1949. As with most such idealized projects elsewhere, they largely failed to measure up to their own ideal standards, often with horrifying consequences for those within their grasp. But their weaknesses and failures did not diminish their importance to state authority. Far from it; the institutions and the programs of thought reform were essential to the most significant state ordering projects, campaigns for social

Prologue transformation, and political expansion. But this is not because they possessed some secret recipe to remake the human internality—even if such a phenomenon could be shown to exist. The question here is not about whether state projects of conversion converted minds or not, but how they took shape and what role they played in the twentieth-century Chinese state, which we call modern. For there was something potent to the system that attracted the consistent interest of authorities and could not be ignored by those it targeted. The aim here is to question with historical analysis, relate the complex processes involved, and open vantage points on these structures of power and the world of the past in which they functioned. As Frank Sinatra says to Laurence Harvey at a key turning point in The Manchurian Candidate, “Now, let’s start unlocking a few doors.”

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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.1 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 (感化).2 6

Architects of Penal Reformation 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.”3 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

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Architects of Penal Reformation 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.4 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-millenniumlong 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

Architects of Penal Reformation 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.5 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.6 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

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Architects of Penal Reformation satisfied with the state of Chinese laws, the arrangement of their administration, and other considerations warrant her doing so.”7 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.8 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,9 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.10 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-

Architects of Penal Reformation office jails and that later would come to be used for the modern prisons. Consistent with existing jail regulations, substatutes 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.11 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-governmentapproved 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.12 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.13 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.14 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.”15 The wariness continued until the specially appointed Legal Revision Commission in Beijing put forth their comprehensive proposals.

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Architects of Penal Reformation Led by the aged senior official Shen Jiaben but staffed with a number of young scholars with foreign experience or language ability, the commission began with modest plans to eliminate cruel and humiliating punishments and to study and translate foreign codes. From 1905, however, and particularly with the acceleration toward constitutional government, their legal, judicial, and penal reform proposals launched a systemic revolution. They proposed a wholesale replacement of the existing system with one fashioned on European and Japanese models. In the final years of the Qing dynasty, while still only sporadically and experimentally implemented, this was a fundamental theoretical transformation.16 The new system would be articulated in a manner that made sense through the language, categories of thought, and beliefs of the late Qing officials and so was consistent with earlier Confucian statecraft reforms. But the urgency of the crisis and threat to the sovereignty and survival of the state this time made it possible for the blueprint for institutional change to be found outside the empire. THE JAPANESE PATTERN: OGAWA SHIGEJIRO’S DESIGN

The educated Chinese reader interested in current affairs had a first good chance to learn about the international penal reform movement in a 1906 article, “The Seventh International Prison Congress and Prospects for Prison Reform,” published in the leading new-style periodical, Eastern Miscellany. It was the translated report on this September 1905 gathering in Budapest by the Japanese delegate, Ogawa Shigejiro. By his account, it was evident that foreigners took prison reform to be a grand matter. The reader could learn from Ogawa’s summary that delegates from all the significant nations, large and small, gathered, as they did every fifth year, in a great hall to deliberate; the Austrian emperor had addressed the conference. Ogawa also pointed out that the study of crime, punishment, and prisons had its own history of progress over “150 years or so” and that prison reform related to “the rise and fall of national civilization.” He also considered it unfortunate that the Qing Empire had sent a mere diplomatic observer rather than a full-fledged, participating delegate like himself.17 Ogawa’s report made it clear that the main purposes of the advanced prisons were guarding (baohu) and reforming (ganhua). This matter-of-fact reference along with a similar one the same year in a report on Japanese prisons by the Tianjin prefect Ling Fupeng on his return from a tour of Japan appear to have been the first public and official usages of this two-character compound word, ganhua, with its meaning of prison “reformation” or “rehabilitation.” This

Architects of Penal Reformation combination of the character gan (感), meaning to “move” or “feel,” with the character hua (化), meaning to “transform,” had been combined in ancient texts and had been long used by Buddhists. Yet, in its new guise, like so many new words for modern foreign concepts adopted in this period, it was borrowed from the Japanese kanji neologism pronounced “kanka.”18 The introduction of the field of international prison reform and its core rehabilitative principle in Ogawa’s translated report is emblematic of the process through which late Qing reformers engaged with these ideas. They encountered them at a specific moment in their global history, carried out much of this through linguistic and cultural translations of the Meiji Japanese version, and, most remarkably, followed a blueprint largely designed by a single foreign expert—Ogawa Shigejiro. This was the great period of learning from Japan. Qing reformers often claimed their interest in Japan stemmed from similarities of language and culture to China and from their admiration for Japan’s ability to strengthen itself and stand up to the Western powers. Through their own governmental and legal reforms and development of industrial wealth and military power (and penal reform had been essential to this), the Japanese had negotiated an end to the Western imperialists’ extraterritorial rights. They had become an imperial power themselves, humiliating the Qing dynasty and carving off pieces of its empire in 1895 and, in 1905, defeating a European power, Russia, in a modern war. It was following this Japanese victory in 1905 that that Qing government announced its plan to prepare a constitutional monarchy that was greatly to emulate the Meiji government. Official inspection missions and students flocked to Japan, many of them investigating or studying the relatively recently developed Meiji legal, judicial, and penal systems. By 1909, nearly six hundred Chinese had graduated from Japanese police and penology schools (many of which had special programs for the large numbers of Chinese students); many others studied in law and government schools. These students translated Japanese texts, wrote about what they learned, and returned home to serve in central, provincial, and local administrations—formulating, in the process, the vocabulary of the modern Chinese legal system on a Meiji Japanese model. Chinese visitors, like many from other countries, were impressed with Japanese prisons. Following his studies in Japan, for instance, Wang Yuanzeng published Actual Affairs of Japanese Prisons in his hometown of Jiading in 1908. Certainly the building of the first “model prison” in Wuchang in 1905–07 and the subsequent proposals by Shen Jiaben (1907) and Dai Hongci (1909), which led the imperial government to plan for a system of modern prisons, had redefined the Qing administrative term jianyu in the sense of the Meiji Japanese kangoku—prison—a large

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Architects of Penal Reformation modern penitentiary designed in all its aspects to discipline and reform inmates sentenced to penal servitude. Tokyo’s Sugamo Prison was the ideal model and featured prominently on all inspection tours, including that of the Qing Ministry of Justice led by former Board of Punishments jail warden Dong Kang in 1906, which directly led to Shen Jiaben’s memorial calling for the “model prison.” Dong Kang’s tour report, as it turns out, largely consisted of a summary of his notes on the lectures given by the inspection tour’s foremost guide to the Japanese penal system—Ogawa Shigejiro.19 Information about modern penal reform entered China through multiple and diverse forms; but not all transmissions of information received equal attention. In the second stage of the Qing New Policies after 1905, the urgent focus was on learning from the rich and powerful countries those methods that could be best practically adapted.20 The late Meiji Japanese lens offered a distinctly positioned and refracted view of penal reform discourse. The age of the nineteenth-century European and American penitentiary had passed. The first Chinese students of penology could learn something of John Howard’s reforms, Bentham’s Panopticon, the Pennsylvania Eastern Penitentiary, Pentonville, the Auburn “silent system,” Sir Walter Crofton’s “Irish System,” the Elmira Reformatory, and so forth, but it was already processed, historicized, and fixed in a narrative of progress with its own conclusions about the highly rationalized, systematic scientific institutional solutions to the social or biological sources of crime.21 And, to an extraordinary extent, late Qing authorities ended up relying on a single Japanese narrator and architect—Ogawa Shigejiro—to provide them with the blueprint. Well before his arrival in Beijing in the spring of 1908, Ogawa Shigejiro was already the foremost authoritative foreign voice of penal reform in the Qing Empire. It was not just a matter of his report in Eastern Miscellany and his influence on Dong Kang; he had been lecturing to Chinese students in Japan, who became promoters of his version of “the science of punishment.” At least six of these Chinese students published books based on his lectures and his 1894 textbook, Penology (Kangokugaku), between 1905 and 1911. The two 1905 volumes by He Guochang and Liu Fan respectively, both titled Penology (Jianyuxue), became the standard Ogawa references in Chinese penology and criminology circles for decades. As a specially invited adviser to the imperial government and professor at the Imperial Capital Law School in Beijing in 1908–10, Ogawa wrote the Draft Prison Code, upon which all subsequent Republican prison codes would be based and designed the institutional icon “model prison” that would become the Beijing No. 1 Prison.22 Ogawa’s work in Beijing reprised, within a highly condensed period, his contribution in Japan; and it was his prominence in Japan that commanded the

Architects of Penal Reformation attention of Chinese officials and students. In the words of penologist Masaki Akira, Ogawa was the “real founder of the Japanese prison system.” As a combined government official and scholar-teacher, Ogawa had taken the lead in studying European prisons and penal reform, penned the cornerstone Japanese penology text, trained the first generation of prison officers, and drafted Japan’s 1907 Prison Code. But he was no faceless technocrat. Ogawa had grown up with Meiji Japan’s own struggle to salvage its sovereignty in the face of foreign imperialists, in part, through pursuing reforms of the criminal justice system. A native of Ueda, Nagano Prefecture, Ogawa had initially come to the study of penology through having been trained as an expert of international affairs and foreign languages, first at Keio, then in the German section of the Tokyo School of Foreign Studies, and finally in the law program of Tokyo Senmon Gakko (the forerunner of Waseda University). Admitted to a special law course taught by the pioneering Imperial Tokyo University law professor and expert on the British legal system, Hozumi Nobushige, Ogawa was introduced to Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon and European penal reform. He also had had the practical experience of working as a policeman, a prison warden, and as an official in the Prison Bureau—where he eventually became director. Particularly interested in German scholarship, Ogawa studied with the German penal scholar and prison warden Kurt von Sebach, during his brief 1890 sojourn in Japan (prematurely cut short by his untimely death). In 1895 Ogawa traveled to Paris to represent Japan at the Fifth International Prison Congress and stayed on in Europe to study the French, Swiss, and German prison systems. Even before going to China, Ogawa had become a fervent missionary for modern penal reform. He edited his own penology journal and was recognized as the outstanding Asian member of the club of world penology experts, who met in their periodic international conferences. There was great idealism in Ogawa, as Ono Shuzo has shown was evident in two utopian short stories Ogawa wrote in 1904 about the transformative potential of the modern prison. In his interest in prisons, criminals, juvenile delinquents, and later in social welfare, Ogawa exhibited a grand utopian sympathy for the unemployed and impoverished and a belief in totalistic, governmental institutional solutions to social problems.23 What Ogawa offered the Qing reformers was detailed technical information wrapped in an ideology in which he was a passionate believer. His faith was in a statist progressive, or perhaps, in James Scott’s terms, “high modernist,” vision of rational institutional systems totally curing the ills of society with scientific methods and so creating a utopian modern civilization. Unmoved by an ideal of state transformation of society so different from their own, Qing reformers initially focused on the techniques. In their quest to attain the standards of

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Architects of Penal Reformation “civilization” set by the foreign powers, the Qing reformers accepted Ogawa’s structural designs, organizational formulas, systematized methods of record keeping, and the structure of the rehabilitative curriculum. In Ogawa’s plans and in others modeled on the Japanese prisons he had helped shape, the reformation (ganhua) of the prisoner would be undertaken through work in prison workshops and education. The instruction of prisoners was to be divided between jiaoyu, the loan word from Japanese meaning “knowledge-based education,” and jiaohui, the loan word from Japanese referring to “moral education.” Convicts would be taught by a “moral instructor” (jiaohuishi)—preferably, Qing reformers added, speaking a Chinese “close to the local pronunciation”—in assembly lectures in “instruction halls,” group sessions for convicts classified according to the nature of their crimes, and individual instructions. The individual guidance was to take advantage of a convict’s moments of emotional vulnerability. This would be the organizational formula of the rehabilitative process in Chinese prisons for the next forty years and would influence methods used in China and Taiwan to this day.24 Accompanying Ogawa’s technical blueprint were strong opinions and theories about the nature of society and social problems and governance that challenged and were less adaptable to the basic beliefs of Qing officials. Although Ogawa did express concerns about problems of immorality in society, he had pursued his study of the pioneering European “sciences” of penology and criminology at this time of the ascendancy of the social sciences, when the dominant new theories turned to considering the criminal not as a morally deficient character, but rather as a product and even victim of failed biology, psychology, or social environment. Crime was a social illness that could be cured and even eradicated through scientific study and treatment and government social policy initiatives. On the basis of his own empirical observational studies, which aligned him with the sociological perspectives of the Italian socialist and social positivist criminologist Enrico Ferri and the German progressive penologist Franz von Liszt, Ogawa concluded that poverty and the absence of social discipline were at the source of most criminal behavior. Hence, he supported major government social reform, antipoverty and crime-prevention policies to counteract the social environmental roots of crime. To deal with those already convicted, the state needed not just modern prisons, but reformatories for juvenile offenders and the judicial tools of probation and indeterminate sentencing. The prison would treat each inmate as a hospital would treat a patient, keeping systematic, detailed personal records and maintaining continual surveillance to diagnose and categorize the inmate and provide “individualized treatment.” Yet, since Ogawa thought most criminals were products of several social

Architects of Penal Reformation environmental factors, he held that rehabilitation programs of education and labor, with an emphasis on the latter, would be sufficient. Inmates could demonstrate good conduct and achievements toward reform and, through the “progressive stage system,” advance up a series of ranks with improved treatment and responsibility and eventually earn a parole release.25 Decades before the Maoist theory of “reform through labor,” Ogawa had set forth a plan for rehabilitative incarceration that stressed the transformative potential of labor and related it to a broader aspiration to transform society. Prisons, in a practical sense, would teach functional work skills so ex-convicts could earn a legitimate living and, more broadly, would offer opportunities for honest labor that would transform the inmate’s character and allow him to attain human fulfillment. Prison labor was not to make the prisoner suffer, but, Ogawa held, would “cultivate diligence,” “train the body and order the mind and will,” and allow them to carry out “the sacred task of all people.” In this, Ogawa felt prisoners ought to be paid for their work and that selling the products of their labor was justified and enlightened.26 While Ogawa’s Chinese translator-editors, in some passages, tried to make a Confucian moralist out of him, the consistent thrust of his arguments rejected moralism and defined education, including the jiaohui instructions, in scientific medical terms. The instructor was to be a “doctor of the mind” who would “investigate the disposition and behavior of each prisoner” and educate him accordingly. They were not to be like the Buddhist monks who had preached in Japanese prisons, but rather properly trained and remunerated prison officers— specialists in the science of psychosocial behavioral modification.27 Once, in a lecture to a class of Chinese students, Ogawa caustically criticized the Chinese faith in moralistic preaching, stating: Can we not do any better than to morally instruct them? Perhaps, they will reform their errors and revert to being good. I may say, “Certainly.” Yet this is not entirely certain. Now prisoner education is something prisons are not fully able to carry out sufficiently enough. If today you say to a prisoner, “You should be an upright person and a gentleman” or even if you chant the way of Confucius and Mencius all day, still they will not understand earnestly supporting the official dignity. And if you say to a prisoner, “Don’t do wicked things; don’t break the law,” while you may be practiced at proclaiming the strictness of the legal system, still they will not know the urge to have an occupation.28

Conveyed along with Ogawa’s teachings of the techniques of modern rehabilitative incarceration were theories of crime and punishment which, in their

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Architects of Penal Reformation own right and in their references to conceptions of state and society, set forth views that radically challenged conventional Qing reformist thinking. Even as a mediated body of ideas, that is, a set of texts circulating in this period, the Ogawa perspective demoralized crime and interpreted it as part of wider social problems that ought to be remedied by a powerful constitutional nation-state concerned with preserving sovereignty and social order and promoting socialdemocratic values. This was to be achieved by rationalized institutions employing scientific methods; Ogawa presupposed an enlightened central state-led, highly systematized, and intrusive project of social transformation on a vast scale. Through this penal reform, the Qing Empire could, as Ogawa phrased it, become part of the “modern” as opposed to the “ancient” and join with “Japan and the other civilized nations” and not be one of the “unenlightened nations.”29 Ogawa appealed to the Qing reformers’ deepest aspirations and yet offered lessons that raised conundrums relating to basic beliefs about crime, social disorder, the role of the state, and the nature of the human character. At the same time, Ogawa’s blueprint left many glaring blank spaces. He never offered a detailed account of what the content of prison instruction should be. He himself recognized the limits of his contribution. Commenting on his design for the model prison in Beijing, he wrote, “It is not possible to assure that its external form and internal content will be as I had hoped; since I only created the plans for its form and was not involved with the internal construction . . . what will result from this is difficult to predict.”30 When Ogawa sailed back to Japan in 1910 to work further for social reform and poverty alleviation, he left behind a plan for the modern prison and the system of reformative education that had to be filled in, interpreted, and made functional in practice.31 SHEN JIABEN AND THE CHINESE INTERPRETATION OF GANHUA

There are no surviving photographs of Shen Jiaben and Ogawa Shigejiro together. The contrast between the senior Qing legal-judicial reform official and his invited Japanese expert on modern prisons must have been visually striking. More than twenty years younger than his host, Ogawa wore the “Westernized” official Meiji formal wear of black morning coat, white haikara (high collar) shirt, large-knot necktie, round spectacles, and zangiri crew-cut hairstyle, all of which represented an ideal of modernity. Shen had the long, thin white beard of an elder statesman, the shaved forehead and braided queue, and the silk embroidered robes worn by Qing imperial officials since the seventeenth century. He had dressed in official robes for forty years, as a magistrate,

Architects of Penal Reformation prefect, and Board of Punishments official; his father had worn similar robes before him, also, remarkably, in the Board of Punishments. Scion of a Huzhou, Zhejiangese gentry-scholar family, Shen lived with his family and servants during the years of legal reform in a classic gray-walled Beijing courtyard garden compound tucked away on Golden Well Alley outside of Xuanwu Gate. Genuinely a scholar and an official, there was no one more experienced in the practical matters of law and punishments, no one more erudite in the texts of the more than two-millennium-long endogenous Chinese legal tradition than Shen Jiaben. A disciple of the great legal scholar Xue Yunsheng, Shen was a meticulous evidential textual research (kaozheng) scholar, who was completing his major research studies of Chinese legal history at the same time that he was directing the Legal Revision Commission.32 Ironic as it may seem, the last great scholar and senior official of the late imperial legal system directed its dismantling. Shen Jiaben had his reasons. He participated in the reforms out of two higher loyalties that transcended his career of devotion to the imperial legal system and its ideology. He was, above all, loyal to the imperial dynasty in peril and faithful to the pursuit of ideal Confucian humanistic values, to the moral truth to be found in the ancient texts. Shen pursued those standards of “civilization” demanded by the foreign powers because this was the duty he had been given and he appreciated the urgency of the dynasty in jeopardy of collapse. Shen had personally experienced humiliations at the hands of foreign imperialists, forced to flee Beijing ahead of the invading Anglo-French Army in 1860 and later, as prefect of Baoding, detained by French troops in the wake of the Boxer War. As this detention came about due to an earlier conflict with French missionaries, it brought home the problem of the foreigners’ extraterritorial rights. On his release, Shen, ever loyal to the Qing throne, traveled immediately to Xi’an to join the internally displaced imperial court. On the way, he famously stopped in Zhengzhou to make a ritual visit to the memorial shrine of the ancient Zheng kingdom statesmen Zi Chan, who had codified a criminal code and had it inscribed on a bronze ding ritual vessel in order to strengthen his state. Although not known as a reformer earlier in his career, Shen appreciated the necessity of reform after 1900, and, when ordered to take a leading role, he loyally set out to pursue an urgent renovation of governance to save the dynasty.33 Shen and his fellow reformers were sharply attacked by Lao Naixuan and other officials who accused them of separating law from morality. These critics justifiably recognized that the reformers proposed to replace the imperial legal system with a foreign-modeled one with radical implications.34 Yet these discussions engaged in by Shen and his fellow reformers and their search for commensurate

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Architects of Penal Reformation terms to translate and explicate the foreign plans were conducted in the shared vocabulary and Confucian textual heritage common to all late Qing officials and scholars. The interpretation of ganhua readily found its language in the idealized Confucian discourse of moral education, self-cultivation, and self-renewal. Ling Fupeng’s 1906 report, the first report on the Nanhai (Guangzhou) “model prison,” and Zhang Zhidong’s and Shen Jiaben’s respective 1907 memorials to the throne on “model prisons” all employed the common classical phrase from the Book of Changes “to reform errors and revert to being good” (gaiguo qianshan). Shen even produced the creative combined term qianshan ganhua—“reverting to good through reformation.”35 In his preface to Dong Kang’s 1907 report summarizing Ogawa’s lectures, Shen started with the Mencian-inspired Neo-Confucian view that all people possessed an innately good and transformable nature. Hence, he explained, prison instruction would be like the classical idea of “reforming to one’s original nature” through a process of “inspiring repentance to undergo selfrenewal.”36 In contrast to Ogawa’s rejection of moralism, Shen assumed a process of moral reform and the centrality of instruction in ethics (jiaohui), rather than work training or knowledge education, to the ganhua that would remedy the ethical failings at the root of crime. In Shen’s words: “Most criminals are lacking in having been transformed by education [jiaohua]. Strict laws and rigorous punishments can punish sternly that which has already been done, but that makes it difficult to have any hope for the future. Thus, the prisons carry out methods of moral instruction, and that fulfills the original meaning of ‘clarifying punishments to assist education [mingxing bijiao].’ ”37 This use of the phrase “clarifying punishments to assist education” (mingxing bijiao), from the classic Book of History, offers crucial insight into Shen’s thinking about penal reform at this time. He thought about it in relation to the age-old tension in imperial governance between the legalist law (fa) and punishment (xing), on the one hand, and Confucian ritual (li) and education (jiao), on the other. In ideal theory, imperial Confucian states were to rule through ritual and educative suasion (jiaohua) and reserve legal codes and fearsome punishments only for those incapable of being successfully guided. Yet, from the formation of the combined legalist-Confucian imperial theory of governance in the Han dynasty, imperial governments had always relied on punishment far beyond what the Confucian ideals prescribed. Ritual and educative moral suasion had, over the course of successive dynasties, been long integrated into the language and practices of law and attuned to the modes of governance of the day. “Clarifying punishments to assist education” (mingxing bijiao) had, as used, for instance, by the Qianlong emperor in the late eighteenth century, meant that correct forms and rituals of punishment would communicate not an

Architects of Penal Reformation education to offenders but a clarification to his officials and subjects of the contours of the orthodox ethical code (for example, basing severity of punishment on age, sex, status of offender, and victim) and the symbolically performed preservation of the “cosmic balance”—elements fundamental to imperial sovereign authority and legitimacy. It had not presumed a teaching to transform the offender. Moreover, with the increasing complexity and scale of social problems faced by the undersized bureaucracy in the late imperial era, the hopedfor governance by suasion and the educative aspects of the legal-penal system, such as they were, had atrophied. Despite the continued use of the language of repentance, the Qing banishment system did not make any serious effort to educate and reform convicts. The conventional late imperial view, Philip Kuhn points out, was well articulated by the nineteenth-century scholar Wei Yuan: “Punishments to deter evil conduct are for the commoners. . . . Ceremonies to protect virtue are the way for the sages and worthy men to govern themselves.” The imperial state acted as if, in Kuhn’s words, “public values were not adequately internalized.” This was disturbing to Neo-Confucian elites and officials who were extending an increasingly wide and inclusive vision of ordering society through moral suasion and proper ritual. The tension between the late imperial reality and the moral-suasion Neo-Confucian ideal is evident in the moral prescriptions of local magistrates, the legal discourse presuming that commoners (liangmin) who committed offenses were capable of “repenting and renewing” (huiguo zixin) themselves, and in various localized elite experiments with morally educating jailed prisoners just as they experimented similarly with the destitute, marginalized, and non-Han Chinese.38 Shen Jiaben sliced through this historical-theoretical Gordian knot with his interpretation of Ogawa Shigejiro’s plans by doing something that the Qing state had never done and that ventured radically beyond what had been previously thought possible. Punishment was not to be an aid to moral guidance of the populace; it was to be recast as a central means of governance by moral suasion through the institutionalized moral education and reform of criminal offenders. In effect, he creatively brought the late imperial Neo-Confucian elite social-ethical educative project into the heart of the imported core mechanism of the state penal administration—ganhua. The existing penal system would be replaced not by an alien one, but by one that realized the ancient classical ideal of moral educative governance. Like contemporaries who made similar arguments about new foreign ideas and institutions, Shen made his most compelling and so legitimating case to his peers for this interpretation by identifying a classical textual provenance for it. As an evidential scholar, he pursued moral truths in the classic canon; and yet

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Architects of Penal Reformation his choices of commensurate classical passages were a form of meaning-making through cultural translation. The storehouse of classic texts, of course, included language and cases that could support rehabilitative education and punitive violence of flogging; branding; the cutting off of hands, feet, genitals; and a variety of horrific forms of execution. Shen identified texts that linked his reform efforts to the most valued humanistic Confucian ideals and that seemed plausible in the realm of legal and penal discourse. The purpose of the modern prison, he held, drawing from the Eastern Han Annal of Customs, was exactly like “the ancients’ idea of confinement to think about transgressions.” He supported this view with a quote from the classic Rites of Zhou, which had been used periodically over centuries of legal discourse as a justification for necessary uses of incarceration and had again featured in the reform proposals of Zhang Zhidong and Liu Kunyi in 1901 and Zhao Erxun in 1902: “to gather and instruct the infirm people in earthen pens” (yi yuantu jujiao bamin).39 This classical reference invoked the grand idealized historical narrative through which he and many of his fellow reformers chose to understand the penal reforms and all the New Policies. In his major Han-learning-style evidential historical research volume, Research on the Penal Laws of Past Dynasties (1907), Shen cited the “earthen pens” passage as evidence of a classical system of correction of criminals through education that contrasted with the Qin-Han penal methods predominant throughout the subsequent two millennia. So even as he recognized that in modern times penal reformation had first been “proposed in Europe,” Shen explained: “It is said that the meaning of the term prison in the Three Dynasties era established that prisons [yu] were not intended to harm people; but were for ‘closing one in to reflect on one’s faults’ and to ‘reform from evil into good.’ These two phrases take reformation [ganhua] as the main point, which is very similar to the new modern theories. . . . It can be seen in the principle of the name quite naturally that this idea which modern people boast to have created was long ago stated by the ancients.”40 Shen neatly contrasted the enlightened classical Zhou practice of “reformation” (ganhua) against the Qin-Han and subsequent dynasties’ regime of “suffering and humiliation” carried out by “violent and severe jailers.” Shen’s historical philological research not only identified ganhua as an original, authentically pure, and universally correct classical idea emanating from the principle of humaneness, it framed it within a narrative that styled the New Policies reforms a radical Confucian awakening overturning two thousand years of adulteration and autocracy. This was related to like narratives in support of the move to constitutionalism, which Shen Jiaben actively supported.41 By the last years of the Qing dynasty, it had become a convention in prison reform documents to reference

Architects of Penal Reformation the “earthen pens” phrase. Through the interpretations of Shen Jiaben, the jianyu, the Japanese term for the modern prison, had been redefined by way of the ancient Zhou “earthen pen,” as an idealized Confucian institution.42 The late imperial penal regime was overthrown in favor of a new system modeled on the standards of the foreign imperialists; Shen Jiaben appreciated the necessity of carrying out reforms that would satisfy the foreigners. He shared with Ogawa Shigejiro the highly compelling and grandly ambitious ideal that through the transformation of their minds and behavior, criminal offenders could be reformed and so benefit the realm. And yet Shen and his colleagues interpreted this vision through particular late imperial elite Chinese vocabularies, concepts, and narratives that distinctly altered Ogawa’s blueprint. Shen’s highly moralistic version of penal reformation imagined ideal, mutable goodbut-ignorant commoners living within societies and inculcated with teachings that were entirely different from those envisioned by Ogawa. For Shen, the emphasis was to be on the reform of the moral character. At the same time, Shen’s Confucian ideals of moral suasion legitimated plans for new codes and institutions that proposed a dramatic extension of the direct role of state authorities in ordering and molding its subjects through the attempted transformation of their internality; and it implied a strikingly altered relationship between the state and the individuals who constituted its people. Shen Jiaben, moreover, exuded, in contrast to Ogawa’s fervent utopian totalism, a patient optimism about the long-term effectiveness of the education and reform of convicts and its broader social transformative consequence. In this he reflected the late imperial Neo-Confucian faith in moral suasion modeled on the classic text The Great Learning (daxue), and its interlinked vertical schema of an ordering of “all under heaven,” which originated with the moral cultivation of the individual, then his family, and so forth.43 Like Ogawa, Shen recognized the practical difficulty involved with reforming criminals; yet he drew on a tradition that fortified his belief that it could be accomplished through moral education over time. As if responding to Ogawa’s skepticism about moral instruction, Shen wrote: It has been said that someone who has been deeply corrupted by evil habits will not be easily purified. It is also said that in prison he may greatly benefit from reformation [ganhua]. I am afraid to say that, while this sounds appealing, in the actual implementation, it is difficult to get results. Just consider those most ignorant of ignorant commoners who will not be changed. But is that a reason not to carry out reformation? Even if it is impossible to reform everyone, if of every ten that undergo reformation, six or seven, or even four or five or two or three are reformed, then certainly there will be fewer people

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Architects of Penal Reformation who harm customs and damage peace and order. Gradually, over a long time, customs will daily improve, and it will be possible to preserve peace and order for a long time.44

The new prisons were to be institutions of ethical renewal for the greater good—powerful state mechanisms for the realization of the late imperial NeoConfucian dream of utopian transformative ordering through moral suasion. Implementation was daunting. Shen Jiaben was busily engaged in supervising the entire legal reform process and emerged as a leading senior political figure in the Qing constitutional assembly. Then, in a matter of months at the end of 1911 and early 1912, the Qing dynasty and the imperial system to which Shen had devoted his loyalty were overthrown. Shen would not serve the Republic and passed away soon after in 1913.45 Others would have to carry forth the vision. XU SHIYING, WANG YUANZENG, AND THE INSTITUTIONALIZATION OF REFORMATION FOR THE NATION

One of Shen Jiaben’s protégés, the Anhui native Xu Shiying, embarked in 1910 on a momentous overseas journey. Selected along with his fellow Qing Ministry of Justice official Xu Qian to head the first formal Qing delegation to the pentennial gathering of international penal experts, this being the Eighth International Prison Congress in Washington, D.C., the thirty-seven-year-old Xu Shiying was one of the most promising and experienced of the new generation of Qing legal-judicial reformers. Appointed, following exam success, to the Board of Punishments in 1898, he had been with the Qing government in exile in 1900 and accompanied his mentor, Shen Jiaben, back to Beijing. He subsequently headed the new Outer Beijing city police supervision of the widening and paving of streets and installation of streetlights; he gained renown and the admiration of Shen for his deft and principled adjudication of a thorny 1908 case in which the legendary courtesan and Boxer War heroine Sai Jinhua was charged with beating her maidservant to death; and he distinguished himself in the new Ministry of Justice, which replaced the Board of Punishments in 1906, and as chief justice of the experimental High Court of Fengtian Province. Xu Shiying was one of the leading reformist experts on foreign law and the new legal system, and yet, by his own admission, he was a rather conventional Qing bureaucrat in habit and thought. Despite the new names of bureaus, nothing had changed about the way Xu undertook his official duties or the manner in which he, like his colleagues, would regularly repair from his office to relax at the Beijing opera theater. Like so many opera heroes and like his mentor, Xu,

Architects of Penal Reformation by his own account, departed on his 1910 journey first and foremost an official loyal to his imperial house.46 The four senior member Qing delegation was joined in the United States by two junior reformist officials—the Japanese-educated, future Beijing No. 1 Prison warden Wang Yuanzeng, and the notable future jurist Wang Shurong. Wang Yuanzeng was procurator of the Fengtian Local Procurate, serving in the same experimental modernizing judicial scheme in which Xu was chief justice.47 They all labored in the administration of the handful of urban courts, procurates, police forces, convict work training houses, and model prisons that constituted the incipient new Qing justice system of great ambition and, as yet, of little evident achievement. Much of the effort, in sharp contrast to longstanding late imperial practice, concentrated on state authorities policing, institutionalizing, and attempting work-skills training of petty criminals, beggars, vagrants, common prostitutes, opium addicts, and the unemployed poor. In addition to convict work training houses, and a variety of workhouses and reformatories, Japanese-style model prisons had been completed in Wuchang, Guangzhou, and Shenyang and were under construction in a number of other cities, including at the training grounds of the Blue Bordered Banner in southwestern Beijing. Already, the grim realities attendant upon the sustained incarceration of large numbers of people had become evident enough to offer little cause for optimism about the future prospects of these institutions. The Qing delegates went out in search of methods that would improve and sustain the new institutional enterprise.48 En route to the United States, Xu Shiying and part of his delegation toured Russia, Germany, Austria, Italy, France, Belgium, Holland, and Great Britain. Throughout the journey, experiences of contrasts with his homeland sharpened his thinking. Hosted by officials and scholars in Europe, Xu was taken on tours of dungeons and torture chambers turned museums, which visually contrasted old “barbaric” punishments to those of the “civilized” modernity represented during his visits to modern judicial and penal institutions. Even as he was welcomed as a new member of the global penal reform fraternity, Xu appreciated how “barbaric” practices had yet to be consigned to the past at home and how much needed to be done to catch up with his hosts. In the United States, the Qing delegates, unlike most Chinese in America at the time, received first-class treatment as they were taken to tour the famous institutions of nineteenth-century American prison reform—the Eastern Penitentiary in Philadelphia and New York State’s Auburn Prison and Elmira Reformatory. At Philadelphia and Auburn, they were intrigued by encounters with Chinese prisoners—keen reminders that foreigners could imprison Chinese but Chinese could not similarly punish

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Architects of Penal Reformation foreigners. The Elmira prison chaplain impressed Wang Yuanzeng, who would describe him with the borrowed Japanese term for instructor. That evening at Elmira, the Qing delegates had the novel but apparently convivial experience of dining, speech making, and drinking whiskey with the Japanese delegates, including Ogawa Shigejiro, and the American hosts. On the eve of the conference, they were welcomed with all delegates to the White House by President William Howard Taft, who, not unlike senior critics in Beijing, warned the gathered experts not to make prisons too comfortable and attractive for criminals. Then, sitting among his fellow 151 prison congress delegates from October 2 to 8, Xu joined in the work of the international penal reform fellowship. Yet, insofar as the delegates came from thirty-five nations, all representing a nation-state within an “international community,” and conducted themselves according to a deliberative format reflecting liberal-constitutional practices, there was no overlooking the fact that the Qing Empire, publicly labeled in English at the congress as “China,” failed to conform to these normative categories and fully belong to this club of nations. For Xu, the incongruence inspired not rage against imperialism, but a thorough internalization of the legitimating assumptions of modernization as central to the success of the modern nation-state.49 Xu Shiying not only strongly supported the prison congress’s progressive agenda in favor of, among other things, parole, probation, crime prevention measures, separate treatment of juvenile delinquents, productive convict labor, and individualization of treatment, he submitted his own proposal for indeterminate sentencing. It was clear, moreover, that what he termed ganhua and was discussed in English as “reformation” was the central business of modern prisons.50 Soon Xu’s commitment to progressive penal reform became intertwined with his growing nationalistic political consciousness. Xu would later specifically date what he termed his “political reform” to the month he spent in London, where he was introduced by his interpreter, Luo Wenzhuang, to Luo’s brother, Luo Wengan, and to his fellow Cantonese friend Wang Chonghui. These young scholars of the Anglo-American legal and political traditions initiated Xu into the social habit of drinking and talking politics. Luo had already lived in England for six years and earned his doctorate in law at Oxford. Wang, the missionary-educated son of a Hong Kong Christian minister, had studied at the University of California at Berkeley, earned an LL.M. at Yale Law School, and been called to the bar at the Middle Temple in London in 1907. He was also a member of the anti-Qing Revolutionary Alliance and a confidant of Sun Yat-sen. With these liberal thinking companions, Xu discussed revolution for the first time and, as he later recalled, “came to a clear understanding of the

Architects of Penal Reformation domestic political situation and the profound evil of that kind of political environment.”51 Xu returned home in early 1911 a convert to the purpose of making China a modern constitutional nation-state—a position animated, as it was for most progressive reformers and revolutionaries of the day, by social Darwinist nightmares of national-racial annihilation. But he had to be cautious and bide his time, living a double life of covertly organizing the liberal pro-revolution United Progress Association (gongjinhui) in the Tianjin foreign concessions while continuing to serve as a ministry official in Beijing. To burnish his Republican credentials, Xu later drew attention to his role during these months in arranging special treatment and assisting with the commutation of the execution order for the revolutionary Wang Jingwei, following Wang’s failed plot to assassinate the Qing prince regent, Zai Feng.52 Yet, in fact, the official report he wrote on the Washington congress revealed the extent to which Xu’s thinking and official discourse had changed in the final months of the Qing Empire. Xu used the opportunity to make an impassioned plea to the throne for the immediate adoption of the entire gamut of progressive penal reform policies advocated at the Washington congress in the name of national salvation. Penal reform, the report stated, would end the scourge of extraterritoriality, as it had in the Japanese case, and bring “universal harmony with the various nations.” Most importantly, it would save the nation that Xu now clearly defined: “China [zhongguo] has four thousand years of civilization, twenty or so provinces of land, and four hundred million people, and yet still receives this unjust treatment.” It had to “awaken” to the social Darwinist realization that “the active are strong, while the passive are weak; those who do not act will perish.” The report concluded with the emotional clarion call: “The existence of the nation lies in this, lies in this!”53 On the eve of the 1911 Revolution, Xu boldly asserted the centrality of progressive penal reform to the viability of the modern Chinese nation. Less than a year later, in July 1912, Xu Shiying was named minister of justice of the Republic of China. He replaced his Hong Kong friend Wang Chonghui, who shifted over to lead the national Legal Reform Commission. Their comrade in political discussions and drinking, Luo Wengan, came north from Guangdong the following year to take up the position of chief general procurator, and would later also serve as minister of justice. Wang Yuanzeng was named warden of the Beijing No. 1 Prison. A new generation of leaders took charge in Beijing, one that combined experience in the late Qing New Policies reforms and overseas education. The ambitious multistage plan for the construction of a modern prison system drafted during Xu Shiying’s 1912–13 ministership set the agenda for the next fifteen years according to the penal reform ideas Xu had become

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Architects of Penal Reformation committed to on his world tour and did so in the name of national necessity. The rhetoric of national preservation through state modernization secured the final fusion of Ogawa Shigejiro’s Japanese progressive blueprint of structures, techniques, and methods with Shen Jiaben’s idealized Confucian revivalist rendition of reformation. In early Republican penal reform discourse, Japanese progressive terms and Confucian glosses and classical references were liberally mixed together within a national project increasingly seen as part of citizenry education and linked to the recovery of national sovereignty through the revocation of extraterritoriality. The inherent incongruities and tensions between the contending visions were ignored. The new preferred classical phrase common in penal reform documents was “punishments to end all punishment” (xingqi wuxing); at once it bestowed the imprimatur of the ancients while gesturing toward an ideal future. Reformation of prisoners, conceived as requiring a combination of highly rationalized institutional techniques of discipline, surveillance, work, and education for moral transformation, had, in theory, been firmly established as the core penal practice of the Republic of China and identified as vital to the national mission.54 REFORMATION AND THE MODERN PRISONS OF THE EARLY REPUBLIC

Contemporary observers did not generally think highly of the prisons of the first decades of the Chinese Republic. Chen Duxiu, the renowned New Culture intellectual and co-founding leader of the Chinese Communist Party, with his famed assertion that the prison was among “the two sources of world civilization” (the other being the laboratory), echoed the social revolutionary view that these were apparatuses of oppression, which young revolutionaries would have to enter to carry on their liberating political struggles. It was not a particularly fair characterization insofar as the new-style prisons rarely held student radicals, but it was memorable. Writing some years later, the writer and social critic Lu Xun famously skewered the “so-called civilized-style prisons” of the early Republic that “were built to show off to foreigners” just like students sent abroad “to study the etiquette of civilized peoples so as to have good social relations with foreigners.”55 If close enough to the mark to sting, the barb also missed much. After all, these decades saw judicial and penal officials and diplomats pursue an impressively energetic quest to regain national dignity and full sovereignty through a combination of domestic reforms and international negotiations. The formation of an International Commission on Extraterritoriality in China, in large part due to the diplomatic efforts of Xu Shiying’s friend Wang

Architects of Penal Reformation Chonghui at the 1921 Washington Conference, culminated in a nine-month commission inspection tour in China that was a potent impetus to expanding and improving the new prison system during an era of turbulent political chaos and weak national governments.56 Still, critics could easily point out that the ambitious plans of Xu Shiying and his colleagues had been underfunded and had not been fully realized after more than a decade, that reforms had been partial, fragmented, and had little effect in many, especially rural, parts of the country.57 The same, of course, could be said of all major new institutions that were primarily concentrated in and around major cities at this point. However, if considered in the context of the evolving urban metropole institutional infrastructures, the new-style prisons appear to have rapidly become well-established, functioning institutions of considerable import. In spite of political turmoil and division, difficulties with construction, funding, and management, the Beijing Ministry of Justice oversaw an active program of prison building and reform throughout the 1910s and 1920s. By 1926 there were seventy-two new-style prisons in the leading urban centers. According to one official estimate, in 1924 one-third of all convicts in China were serving their sentences in a new-style prison. Unprecedented in scale, design, and function, the major prisons of, for instance, Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai, Nanjing, and Suzhou were expensive, imposing facilities each built to house between five hundred and nine hundred inmates within their high encircling walls. Each had multiple workshops, exercise yards, an infirmary, a kitchen, offices and dormitories for guards, supplies and weapons storerooms, and always an instruction hall. Physical space was everywhere divided and controlled by thick walls, heavy locked doors, iron bars, electric lights, and alarms. As much as prisons may have removed acts of punishment out of the public eye, these massive walled structures had situated the state’s penal authority with a newly fearsome monumental presence in the major Chinese cities.58 Leading the process of making these grand structures living, working institutions was a highly committed first generation of primarily Japanese-trained Ministry of Justice officials, wardens, and senior officers. Wang Yuanzeng was enormously influential, first as warden of the Beijing No. 1 Prison and later as director of the Prison Bureau. The 1913 Prison Code he penned, by revising and simplifying Ogawa Shigejiro’s 1910 draft, would form the basis of all such codes into the late 1940s. Most importantly, at the Beijing No. 1 Prison, he trained a generation of prison officers, who would dominate modern prison leadership in northern China throughout the Republican period. Based on his reportage investigation in 1930, Xu Yongshun wrote that Wang’s former students “all had a sense of pride in their training by Mr. Wang Yuanzeng” and “were from much

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Architects of Penal Reformation better backgrounds than soldiers.” In addition to Wang, there was also the Tokyo-trained Wang Wenbao, who served as director of the Prison Bureau from 1914 to 1926; Beijing No. 2 Prison warden in the 1910s to 1920s, Liang Jinhan; and Tian Jinghua, the first director of the Prison Bureau (1912–14), and then warden of the Beijing No. 3 Prison.59 These prison officials and officers, through a process of pragmatic trial and error, developed the routine functioning mechanisms of housing, managing and attempting to reform prisoners. In his history of crime, punishment, and prisons in modern China, Frank Dikötter rightly emphasizes that these prisons, like most around the world, never made a pristine Foucaultian “punishment shift” abandonment of physical punishment; they always depended on manacles, leg-irons, truncheons, and firearms. At the same time, the entire design and organization of these institutions was arranged to control and discipline inmates through techniques of separation, surveillance, and regulated routine. In theory, guards were posted throughout the prison. Inmates, dressed in gray uniforms tagged with identification numbers, were to live according to a strictly regimented schedule marked by the guards’ whistles and shouted orders. They were expected to obediently follow regulations and, for the most part, remain silent. Thus disciplined, inmates were to undergo the program of reformation— a daily regimen of work and basic knowledge and moral education.60 The work programs immediately weighed heavily on the minds of senior officers, as they struggled, ultimately unsuccessfully, to balance lofty educational aims with far more practical concerns. Warden Wang Yuanzeng followed Ogawa Shigejiro’s idealistic progressive theories about the value of labor, introducing radically new Western-modeled labor-rights provisions for regulated work hours, holidays, pay scales, pensions, and worker compensation. Reformist penal officials sought to dissociate their workshops from punitive hard labor, casting them as exemplary training programs for modern industrial workers.61 Yet, in practice, even in the prototype Beijing prisons, prison officers were less interested in the lofty theories than in using workshops to occupy and control prisoners.62 When confronted with limited funding for costly institutions, all wardens took an interest in the potential income generating (or cost offsetting) financial benefits of their workshops. Although Ogawa had supported and regulations permitted the sale of prison workshop products, Wang Yuanzeng worried that if prison officers “schemed for economic income,” that would “run counter to the main point of work and ruin the real nature and aim of carrying out punishment”—that is, the corrective rehabilitation of the convict.63 But faced with rising expenses for construction, for officer, guard and support staff salaries, as well as for adequate clothing, food, and medicine for hundreds of

Architects of Penal Reformation prisoners, Wang, like his fellow wardens, overcame his scruples and supported the use of inmate labor and workshop product sales in the hope of, as one 1916 Beijing No. 1 Prison report termed it, “a day when [the prison’s] income will balance its expenditures.”64 Prison work programs came to be shaped by the infrastructural projects and administrative needs of the supervising government agencies and by local market conditions and modes of production. In the 1910s, inmates from the two new-style prisons in Beijing worked on the construction of the new Ministry of Justice building at Zhonghua Gate and the Supreme Court building and plaza; they printed thousands of government documents a day and made uniforms for the Beijing police, street sweepers, the army, and the Capital Women’s Normal School. Inmate labor in many new prisons manufactured both the everyday items they used and often the very locks, leg-irons, handcuffs, and walls that confined them.65 With the exception of lithography, lead-plate printing, and typesetting of certain printing workshops, most prisons adopted lowcapitalization, artisanal-style handicraft techniques common to the locality and produced goods aimed at the low end of local markets. Often, the low-quality prison products were intended for subsequent sales redistribution in rural areas. Beijing prisoners were known for making bamboo products, wooden furniture, bricks, and shoes; in Baoding, it was carpets, hats, and the coarse blue cotton “patriotic cloth”; Anhui No. 1 Prison workers made firecrackers, while Zhejiang No. 1 Prison convicts spun silk. The prisons opened sales outlets adjacent to their compounds and in urban commercial districts and contracted out their workshops to private companies. The Beijing No. 1 Prison made boxes for the Yanghui Noodle Company; the Zhili No. 1 Prison in Tianjin supplied straw mats to salt merchants; the Jiangsu No. 3 Prison did contract work for Suzhou’s Awaken China National Products Company.66 The result was that work conditions brought about nothing like the idealized training of modern industrial workers that had been imagined by the penal reformers. Nor was prison workshop production, despite significant efforts and innovation, ever able to realize the dream of attaining financial self-sufficiency for the cash-strapped prisons. Wang Yuanzeng had to admit in 1917 that the government would “not get much profit from it, but must suffer various types of losses.” In effect, employing a largely unskilled, often unmotivated workforce with a rapid turnover rate, and burdened, among other matters, with security concerns, prisons were not efficient economic units. Yet, even though prison production could never generate enough income to offset operating costs let alone hope to match the much more lucrative official revenue streams from court and judicial office fees, fines, and sales of legal papers, it remained an

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Architects of Penal Reformation obsession of ministry officials and wardens into the 1920s. A Jiangsu No. 3 Prison report in 1920 even went so far as to proclaim that “the [sales] circulation of products is the primary key point of work.” The preoccupation of wardens and officers with production targets, marketing, profits and losses, and managing or at least safely occupying mostly short-term convicts diminished the attention given to the original reformative work-skills training and character-building aims of prison labor.67 By the 1920s, policy on prison work, in contrast to the founding plans for the new-style prisons, shifted to emphasizing work training in a sustainable trade in order to supply the material conditions for living a moral life. This was a reversion to the paternalistic late imperial statecraft perspective evident in the late Qing convict work training houses. In sum, prison work training had been recast as complementary and secondary to the central concern with moral reform.68 Similar to the work programs, the policies and regulations for new-style prison basic knowledge education (jiaoyu) set a progressive agenda for training a new kind of modern person—the literate, patriotic citizen of a modern nation. Starting from the position that some criminal behavior resulted from a lack of basic education, the prisons were supposed to adopt a version of the Japaneseand German-influenced national lower-primary-school curriculum mainly to instruct juveniles and illiterates. They were to teach elementary reading, writing, penmanship, arithmetic, abacus, singing, and physical education, though the emphasis from the start was on basic literacy and civics.69 At the Beijing No. 1 Prison in the 1910s, Warden Wang Yuanzeng paid particular attention to promoting the teaching of patriotism and patriotic duties through military calisthenics and discussion of “our nation’s national humiliations and sites of commemoration” in history and geography lessons. And, following the Meiji Japanese elementary-education model, a mixture of patriotism, citizen training, and a version of Confucian ethics was to be taught in the Self-Cultivation or Ethics (xiushen) classes. These three themes also featured in literacy training. So not just in the ethics lessons, but also throughout the basic knowledge curriculum, there was in the attention to civics and ethics considerable overlap between the basic knowledge and moral-instruction (jiaohui) programs. In most new-style prisons, a single instructor directed both programs. Although basic education and moral instruction “have different names,” Wang Yuanzeng stated about the actual practice in his prison, “in reality they are closely related, and should mutually support one another.” With this blurring of the lines came an implied presumption of the primacy of ethical education.70 In essence, in the early Republican new-style prisons, the originally planned reformation program triumvirate of work training, basic education, and moral

Architects of Penal Reformation instruction quickly gave way to the view that moral instruction was the core mechanism of the reformation process. According to official guidelines, procedures, and the standard forms for assessing procedures, the prisons were supposed to implement the Meiji Japanese-style regime of individual sessions, general collective lectures, and small classes for prisoners grouped and classified according to the numbers and types of crimes they had committed, their occupations, education, and temperament. Moreover, in keeping with the international penal theory ideal of “individualization,” instructors were supposed to diagnose each prisoner’s conduct on admittance, continually track their behavior, and keep a record of this for each inmate in a “Moral Instruction Register.” The instruction for each inmate would then be determined on the basis of this record and an examination of the nature of the crimes committed.71 Every part of this formula, however, reflected the fusion of Ogawa’s progressive penal techniques with the language of Confucian moral education and selfcultivation in the name of nationalist purpose. Moral instruction would be a “nourishing of morality” and “cultivation of the spirit” that would transform moral character at its source—the originally good mind. Individualized treatment became “counseling and guiding,” “inspiring their awakening,” and “cultivating their repentance.” Reformation was presumed to be primarily concerned with the ethical nature of the prisoner. Moral instruction was, Wang Yuanzeng explained, “the transformation through education [jiaohua] of morality that specially emphasizes the cultivation of the spirit.” The convict was expected to undergo a profound transformation of the internal moral mind and so “reform faults and be renewed” (gaiguo zixin). And this was linked to the great cause of the nation. In the words of Zhu Ziyuan, an officer-trainee in the Beijing No. 1 Prison in 1915, “the responsibility to the nation of penal incarceration lies in upholding the duty of reforming the prisoners’ moral character, which is the final aim of the penal sentence.”72 By the early 1920s, this had become the standard, official position upheld at the highest levels. Anticipating by four decades a similar famed statement by Mao Zedong, Supreme Court Chief Justice Shen Jiayi told “scholarly circles” in Hangzhou in 1922 that “the prisons of today are like academies for transforming criminals through education.”73 The shared consensus presumed that because crime was primarily a consequence of ethical failings, prison moral education was the key to reformation. Although there were those who, influenced by international theories, proposed that offenders be regarded as products of physiological or psychological weakness or as victims of their socioeconomic environment, senior officials and prison officers alike invariably gravitated back toward the emphasis on ethics, drawing on quintessential Neo-Confucian

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Architects of Penal Reformation language to define the aim of reformation as “to correct [them to return to] their original nature.”74 In pointed contrast to the global trends of the day, the Chinese new-style prisons of the early Republic persistently conceptualized their rehabilitative mission as a process of moral transformation through ethics instruction. In doing so, they took the Neo-Confucian jiaohua civilizing mission of moral suasion extended, as the historian Qian Mu argued long ago,75 by social elites over the late imperial era to the guidance of the populace in local society and situated it within a powerful new urban-centered state institution committed to the incarceration and correction of criminal offenders. REFORMATION TRIUMPHANT

In March 1925, a certain Zhang Yongfang, writing in the journal The Legal Critic, denounced militarist leader Duan Qirui’s recent prisoner amnesty in celebration of his accession to the presidency of the Republic in Beijing as a “corrupt administrative practice of the monarchical era that does not benefit the reformation [ganhua] of criminals.” For Zhang and many of his colleagues in Republican China’s budding “judicial circles,” such amnesties undermined both urban social order and the rehabilitative principle of the modern penal system. Zhang Yongfang, however, did not seem to be aware that the Ministry of Justice provisions for the 1925 amnesty, quite out of keeping with the imperial tradition, required officials to consider whether a prisoner had been reformed or not before granting a release.76 As much as the amnesty may have invoked imperial practices, its specific arrangement revealed how fundamental the principle of reformation had become to the judicial-penal administration. This was a striking development of the post-imperial era. Certainly there were ample reasons to be skeptical about the prospects for the new-style prisons and their program of reformation. Prison construction had been so troublesome and costly that even the landmark Beijing No. 1 Prison required a special extra loan from the Ministry of Justice and a donation from Fujianese businessman Cai Faping to complete its facility. Then problems of inadequate funding, crowding, and mismanagement continually plagued the new institutions. The Beijing prisons had no choice but to scale back their originally ambitious plans when government funding proved insufficient, market prices for construction materials and Western medicines rose, and the 1916 Jiaotong Bank crisis brought an ill-timed depreciation of paper currency. The new prisons never fully upheld their own regulated standards and always seemed far from becoming the ideal institutions originally planned.77

Architects of Penal Reformation At the same time, a great many people in China in the 1910s and 1920s still experienced punishments that had nothing to do with the rehabilitative principle. As would be the pattern throughout much of the century, many summary detentions, arbitrary fines, instances of torture, and executions were carried out by local or regional police or military units outside the purview of the centrally supervised judicial system. Much extralegal punishment and summary execution by military firing squads was legitimated in the name of “bandit suppression.” In 1920 alone, 2,824 people were officially reported executed for offenses against the Bandit Suppression Law. Despite the efforts of Ministry of Justice reformers to bring about the appeal of the law allowing “on the spot” executions by military units, the leading militarists made sure it was reaffirmed by presidential mandate in 1923. Moreover, several Japanese-modeled laws introduced by the Yuan Shikai government (1912–16) empowered police to detain people without trial for all kinds of minor public nuisance offenses, vagrancy, and for taking part in political demonstrations and unsanctioned gatherings.78 Many picked up by police or military gendarmes in urban areas, and eventually in most significant towns, found themselves in police lockups, detention centers (kanshousuo), or military prisons never designated as corrective institutions. As the reformist legal official Luo Wengan discovered personally from his politically motivated incarceration in a Beijing detention center in 1922 (and should have known well from many Ministry of Justice reports), detention centers were overcrowded, poorly managed holding pens where idle inmates were held for too long in horrific, disease-ridden conditions. Similar problems afflicted the control centers (guanshousuo) and other variously named facilities for detaining defendants in civil cases, those who had failed to pay civil settlements, and debtors. And many detained without trial or after sentencing in rural counties ended up in old county yamen jails little changed since the nineteenth century. In this ancillary network of jails and detention centers, physical punishments, torture, and mistreatment of prisoners were not uncommon. In certain hinterland counties, local officials still resorted to imperial-era-style public humiliation and beatings.79 Yet, by the 1920s, the sense of horror common to public discussions of cases of violent punishments and the miseries of pointless detention revealed a striking shift in general social elite attitudes; there was now a vague expectation that China ought to have “humanitarian” punishments like modern nations had. New Culture writers like Lu Xun, Hu Shi, Shen Congwen, and Lao She vilified the imperial “hell-like” jails and physical punishments as symbols of the evil practices of the failed old Chinese culture of weakness and humiliation. At the level of social-cultural discourse, there was no turning back to the old

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Architects of Penal Reformation system. This was equally true within the government bureaucracy and judicial circles: There was no serious opposition or genuine alternative to the penal rehabilitative ideal. In truth, even as violent punishments and non-rehabilitative detention persisted (and would always persist in some form), the rehabilitative ideal steadily gained wide acceptance. As illustrated by the 1925 General Amnesty case, reformation was both a sine qua non requiring inclusion in an exceptional government order and the principle passionately defended by the intellectual reformist critics of the policy. Even earlier, the October 1914 proposal by the political thinker Liang Qichao, in the final days of his brief tenure as minister of justice, to replace “detention for labor” sentences with “light beatings” was, contrary to the view of certain alarmed penal reformers, not a serious effort to roll back the reforms. It was the opposite. Liang’s argument for the limited beatings to be administered out of public sight within the new prisons originated with a criticism of the failings of the prison that largely reaffirmed the reformative ideal. What, after all, could badly managed prisons filled with haphazard congregations of emaciated, dying inmates hope to produce other than corpses or more hardened criminals? Abandoned less than two years later, the “light beatings” policy had been intended as a stopgap measure until the prisons could function properly.80 Reformers of the early Republic repeatedly described the penal reforms as a major historical transformation—“like the break of day after a long night” wrote one—from the “old imperial jail” of “suffering in binds and fetters” to the “modern Republican prison” of “cultivation for reformation.” They neatly folded the penal reform story into the narrative of the nation-state and its selfrealization in the birth of the Republic in a manner that displayed their internalized faith in what they considered to be a Western-originated modernity. The legal reformist official Wang Chonghui concluded that “the gulf between the main current of thought in the past and the humanitarian aims of the present is nearly as great as that between the ancient East and modern West.”81 Chinese penal reform was told as part of the international penal reform story that asserted a clean break between modern corrective techniques and the brutalities of the past. Not only was there no going back to the old system, there was a general consensus among government officials and their legal scholar supporters and critics alike about the centrality of reformation to the penal regime. It was not just a codified ideal, but also a meaningful core idea that was given a generative centrality around which administrative processes were organized. In the 1920s, the term “reformationism” (ganhuazhuyi), implying a distinctly modern, internationally recognized systemic doctrine, came into common use to refer to the

Architects of Penal Reformation central purpose of the new prison system. Presidential mandates, Ministry of Justice orders, and investigations were promulgated in its name, and provincial wardens reported back on its progress. The documents, for instance, produced by the central government and the Jiangsu prisons as part of a 1923 Ministry of Justice investigation of instruction in new-style prisons reveal a remarkable uniformity of opinion about the centrality of reformation, its techniques, and its definition as a process of moral transformation.82 It had become powerfully conventional as a driving purpose for governmental action. The initial formation and establishment of the principle of penal reformation at the level of theory and policy began the reshaping of twentieth-century Chinese penal practice around prisons that would persistently be viewed as organs of mass transformative education. For all their failings, these prisons became among the most significant institutions to undertake the sort of statedirected reformative practice that would increasingly define a core means of twentieth-century Chinese governance of those requiring correction and conversion. This initial stage of development had resulted from complex historical processes specific to social and political conditions, concerns, cultural resources, and interactions of the end of the Qing dynasty and in the early Republic. There was no simple extension of a modern global discourse or its Meiji Japanese version to China. Rather, its process of historical formation in China involved decisions made and initiatives led by individuals as strikingly different from each other as Shen Jiaben, Ogawa Shigejiro, Xu Shiying, and Wang Yuanzeng. These founders, with their divergent perspectives and aims formed in relation to specific cultural backgrounds and rapidly changing domestic and international political contexts, sought to make sense and so assert value, interpreting and altering meanings with available proximate language, concepts, and narratives. They and many of their colleagues engaged in the making of the codes, plans, and policies, the guidelines to the daily institutional practice of reformation. Of course, even as detailed as the plans were, many questions remained. What would be the specific content of prison instruction? What sort of good citizens were these prisons supposed to create, and what did this mean in an era of turbulent political, social, and cultural change? What was not in question was that reformation (ganhua) was a highly compelling idea, seemingly at once internationally modern, scientized, and technical and distinctly Chinese with a satisfyingly familiar, age-old preoccupation with moral education. In contrast to international trends, the new Chinese prisons did not primarily focus on social or psychological factors that had led to crime; they were not in the business of preparing convicts to regain their rights and liberties. Instead, they viewed crime and the criminal as, in essence, a

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Architects of Penal Reformation problem of individual moral character that, in the end, could only be remedied by moral guidance. Ganhua itself was conceived by many of its first generation architects as a guided Confucian ethical renewal that would create good citizens for the modern Chinese nation. Yet it was not just a newly institutionalized deployment of the Neo-Confucian elite public-moralizing jiaohua agenda. The notion of penal reformation proposed much that was novel even beyond the introduction of nonphysically violent controlling techniques using space, separation, amassing and tracking of information, and manipulation with a scale of rewards and punishments. The grand ambition of pursuing both ageold and modern mass social transformative dreams—turning the marginal and criminal not just into “good people” for a harmonious society, but training and indoctrinating them to be model citizens for a modern nation—was at the forefront of a major turning point in the new century. The new prisons were a constituent part of a developing regime of governance and law, modern institutionalized training in new schools and military units, and mass propagation of the rituals and norms of modern citizenry that were creating a new functioning relationship between the state and the individual. This was a change from the era when, as Michael Tsin has written, “subjects of the dynasties were not assumed to be the constituent parts of a discrete aggregate body.” The practice of making citizens, or, in Liang Qichao’s terms, “new people,” in the name of the revival of the nation made the perfection of each individual a vital matter to a successful society and modernizing nation-state.83 In theory, there was a new imperative of governance for the state to reach inside and reorder the thinking of its citizens. In this context, “reformationism” appeared increasingly to represent a new modern system of moral suasion that worked in a deeply effective, intrusive manner on the individual heart and mind. The jiaohua moral suasion mission of the imperial state and Confucian elites—Qian Mu’s “moral suasion Confucianism” (jiaohua zhi ru), which emerged in the Ming dynasty and characterized the late imperial era—remained an important influence on ganhua, as it continued to have many updated versions and advocates in the post-imperial period. Yet, even in their revised Republican forms and association with the Japanese social disciplining sense of the word, jiaohua was never fully interchangeable with ganhua. The Neo-Confucian’s practices of “self-reflection” for “self-renewal” were concerned with his own interiority, but the act of jiaohua put the emphasis on the “jiao,” the teaching, guiding, or instructing of another. It was, in William Rowe’s words, “done by someone to someone else.” It was much associated with a superior figure instructing and ordering the conduct and customs of local communities.84 Although the new term ganhua retained

Architects of Penal Reformation something of jiaohua, the decisions to use it and not jiaohua or some other more obviously classical term suggest that it was understood to represent a new, distinct kind of transformative process. In contrast to jiaohua, it referred not to the instructor, but to the feelings of the person transforming and their transformation. Such usages nearly always implied that ganhua involved the sort of personal moral cultivation and transformation that the penal reformers had associated with it. This difference had much to do with the term’s emphasis on gan—that is, on the object of reform’s act of self-transformation through a perceived “natural” response in human feelings (ganqing). The term draws attention to feeling or emotion as affective on the mutable mind undergoing transformation from bad to good. The idea of the human internality that accompanied ganhua seems closely related to the late Qing elite sensibility that associated the authenticity of emotion with moral quality. Appealing to human emotion would be the way to change a person’s moral character, and so their thinking and actions. An offender was not just to be perceived as an individual, assessed and diagnosed, trained, indoctrinated, and morally transformed, but the entire process was to originate with a manipulated emotional catharsis. Whatever precipitated this transformation had to inhabit the mind, and this, then, was a process of thorough, irreversible conversion. Jiaohua and ganhua both had influential Meiji Japanese versions; jiaohua, however, not only had numerous ancient usages, but had been in common use in late imperial times. This was not the case with ganhua, which, for all intents and purposes, was as much a neologism as were terms such as minzu (nation/ race), minzhu (democracy), or shehui (society). But the term had a familiarity for many because of the many cases in which the language of “feeling” and “transformation” were linked. The towering sixteenth-century Ming NeoConfucian philosopher of the “heart/mind school” Wang Yangming used the two characters together to describe a figure being “moved and transformed” by being brought to awareness by great virtue.85 The language and ideas of this derived from and was most commonly found in Buddhist texts and later syncretic morality books. Accumulated karma or the sincerity of filial piety might be the source of “being moved,” but the theme was always conversions of the heart/ mind and its great consequences. This was as in the Buddhist text On Assisting Education: “Thus in moving [gan] people’s minds so all under heaven will be transformed [hua].” In late imperial times, similar constructions of “moving and transforming” or “moving minds” appeared in morality books and the ethical instructions of such nineteenth-century Confucian moralists as Peng Yulin and Liu Zhangyou. Eventually, Christian missionaries would echo this language in describing an individual being moved emotionally and so converted.86

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Architects of Penal Reformation This sense of ganhua as emotionally inspired moral conversion quickly developed a broader appeal in the years after it had been introduced and adopted as the central penal principle of the Republic. Various elites interested in mass education and a new kind of mass social transformation that was ethical at its root and modern in its form took enthusiastically to the word. As early as April 1913, in an article on public social education in Zhejiang, Jing Hengyi repeatedly used ganhua to point out the socially reformative potential of art, films, and public lectures. A similar social educative function with innovative means marked its use in early 1920s Guangzhou.87 The public-service-minded industrialist Mu Ouchu chose the word when discussing national education reform but placed the emphasis on a very Confucian-sounding process of moral reform: “Presently school education overemphasizes instruction [jiao] and neglects cultivation [yu], so schools become places that sell knowledge and do not provide the opportunity to reform [ganhua] the character.”88 This was also the theme in a 1924 article on university moral education by the Nanjing-based Yang Quan, who wrote, “If they do not cultivate the mind, how can they attain the results of reformation [ganhua]?” Ganhua was, for many, associated with a process of moral cultivation that transformed a person from within. Yet Yang Quan was rare insofar as he was one of the few to use “reformation” in a discussion of elite education. In most cases, it was chosen to refer to educational transformation of the lower strata of society—those increasingly labeled “the masses.” It was an important new term for the elite and state social transformative projects that had emerged in the period after 1900 out of the fused streams of late imperial jiaohua popular moral education and foreign-modeled projects of mass education.89 Ganhua gained an even broader political usage, and its most conspicuous one, in the influential speeches and writings of Sun Yat-sen in 1923–24. It was what he admired about what the Soviet Union could do to its own citizens and foreign soldiers and that the Nationalist Party (KMT) should use in the training of its own military and party members. Emphasizing the emotional process of being moved and the internal transformation, Sun understood the term as a process of conversion and referred to it that way in the manner that Buddhists and Christians converted. Yet, for Sun, the process was linked with training (xunlian) of the party and propagation (xuanchuan) by the party. Military and cadre training was to carry out “propagation reformation”; then trained party members could “go and reform [ganhua] others.” In one enthusiastic rhetorical moment, he pronounced, “reformation [ganhua] is propaganda.” And this conversion would be of “the masses” to unify the Chinese nation. His vision was at once one that saw this transformative process as specific to modern mass politics, and yet he could, in certain passages, sound much like a Confucian public

Architects of Penal Reformation moralist and the founding leaders of the new-style prisons. The process of conversion depended, for instance, he pointed out, on “sincerity of mind.” Like Shen Jiaben and Xu Shiying, he believed in the gradual process of individual transformation that would eventually transform all. If within a year, he argued, “one person converts [ganhua] ten people, introduces ten people into the party” then eventually “the minds of all the people in the nation will be completely reformed [ganhua] by the party.” Sun Yat-sen used the term to refer to a general conversion of the internality and a process of winning over hearts and minds of all citizens for the benefit of the nation-state through training and propaganda.90 This expansion of the use of the term would be curtailed after 1949 by the CCP preference for the word gaizao, and ganhua would only be revived after 1979 to specifically refer to rehabilitative incarceration of criminals and juvenile delinquents. However, the opening up of much conceptual space in the name of ganhua in the early Republic initiated developments with major, longterm consequences. The architects of reformation had assisted in formulating not just a compelling ideal for corrective punishment, but one that would have great appeal for broader agendas of social and political transformation.

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GUIDES TO REFORM: PRISON INSTRUCTORS IN JIANGSU AND BEIJING, 1918–1927

In the dim light of a small room stifling in the stench and wet heat of summer, Instructor Shao Zhenji faced a troubled inmate alone. It was July 18, 1922, deep within greater Shanghai’s largest and newest (since 1919) Chinese-administered prison—the imposing nine-hundred-inmate-capacity Jiangsu No. 2 Prison, which rose above the fields of Caohejing village to the southwest of the city. Although he had less than three months experience, Shao spoke with authority: What you have said today would seem to show that you have somewhat understood how to restrain yourself. Yet you are still being grudgingly perfunctory about this with me. You have not in the least changed to repenting and coming to awareness. You are saying that you understand the crime to have been based on nothing. Why are you unwilling to tell me the cause and the facts of the crime? You speak of having a kind heart. How can the causes be evil? To assist evil is the same as evil. Does that also count as compassionate? You say that you did not at all have any thoughts of profiting and that the others in the case got all the money. Are you able to maintain your purity intact? Your smooth talking does not excuse the fact that those people were deceived. You think about it. During these hot summer months, when you are sweating like pouring rain; why not go and take a rest? . . . Generally very clever people like you stubbornly cling to your faults. My good intentions cannot really overcome that. So you will go headlong into the heat of summer. Don’t you dislike this trouble and hardship? If you really didn’t understand, then I would say you are stupid. Perhaps, though you may understand, you are unwilling to admit error for the sake of saving your face. That would be not humbly accepting my teaching. If you don’t admit error one more time, that would be deliberately being evil and not being willing to reform.1

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Guides to Reform Instructor Shao’s notes record patterns and rhythms of colloquial speech such that one can almost hear his alternately cajoling and threatening tones. He had engaged the convict in a discussion, but it was no dialogue. This was an occasion for a lecture. It did not matter that the prisoner had already been tried and sentenced; Instructor Shao was prodding for an admission of guilt. He did not just want to hear the facts of the crime, but a penitent acknowledgment of the moral failing at the root of it. He was ultimately concerned with the mind and the thoughts of the offender. From this, Shao would guide him toward reform. This instruction session seemingly accomplished little, as the inmate died of illness two months later without showing any sign of repentance. Still, Instructor Shao recorded the gist of his own remarks, in accord with regulations. Although there is much formulaic repetition in the surviving reports of prison instructors, those of Shao Zhenji and a number of his colleagues are filled with rich detail and exude a zeal for the work of reforming convicts. Shao compiled a twovolume collection of his teachings, Introduction to Moral Instruction, which was published in 1925 as a training guide for prison instructors and eventually appeared in several editions marketed as a popular moral prescriptive text. The book was lauded by well-known public moralists and approved as a standard text for prison education, first by the Beiyang government Ministry of Justice and later by the Nationalist government Ministry of Judicial Administration.2 Shao Zhenji’s collected instructions and similar records open a rare vantage point on the strivings of the first agents of the reformation process, the prison instructors, who, through daily practice, forged a living reality out of designs, regulations, and directives. They mostly appear to have attempted to realize the prescribed system laid out by the founders and senior officials. Most accepted the view that crime was at root a moral problem and that their principal duty was to provide offenders with lessons in ethics. Instructors incorporated many of the texts, themes, and teaching methods proposed by the Beijing Ministry of Justice and prison wardens. Yet parts of the prison system design, such as the labor and basic skills education aspects, were soon pared down and redefined. Instructors repeatedly made pragmatic decisions to simplify or curtail instruction programs. Much of what emerged from the spirited and often unresolved Beijing government policy debates about prison education curricula was later reversed or amended and always vague and open to interpretation. Much also was not specified in any detail in regulations and policies and was left to the instructors’ discretion. Hence, through interpreting and implementing guidelines and policies and innovating in ways sensible and practicable within the prison walls, mid-ranked instructors formulated functioning lessons and methods. In the notes of Shao Zhenji and his fellow instructors, we encounter

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Guides to Reform a group of men mostly in their thirties and forties who were struggling with dramatic political, social, and cultural changes and drawing upon their educational backgrounds, familiar cultural resources, and sense of the needs of the day to produce lessons of value. Straining to be attentive to the records, we can glimpse them working to define their role and hone their message and methods in ways that would be effective with their convict students. Shao Zhenji spoke to inmates in a manner that showed his familiarity with them. We hear him trying out ways to appeal, cajole, pressure, convince, and convert. Key creative contributors to the formation of the institutional practices of reformation, the instructors were making a lot up as they went.3 THE JIANGSU AND BEIJING INSTRUCTORS

Much of what we know about Instructor Shao Zhenji comes from a brief biographical sketch by his older brother. According to this account, the defining early educational experience of this native of Liuyang, Hunan, came when Shao was a student in the reformist official-gentry-run Current Affairs Academy in Changsha in 1898. There, in the brief period before the school was shuttered as part of the crackdown on the Hundred Days Reform, Shao Zhenji became a follower of the reformist reinterpretation of Confucianism and the new, foreigninfluenced political ideas he encountered in lectures by the influential Liuyangnative reformers Tan Sitong and Tang Caichang, their fellow Hunanese Xiong Xiling, and the brilliant young Cantonese scholar Liang Qichao. Like many of his student contemporaries, Shao was steeped in reformist Confucian statecraft and aspired to serve his country and people as a progressive official. Yet, with the abolition of the civil service examination system in 1905 that closed off the age-old path into officialdom, Shao had initially hoped to follow the procession of students making their way to Japan to study modern law and governance. Unable to afford to study abroad, Shao instead took up, in his brother’s words, “lowly teaching jobs to earn a living” and pursued further teacher training at Changsha’s Hunan Central Route Normal Academy—the forerunner of the Hunan First Provincial Normal School, which Mao Zedong, Cai Hesen, and other future revolutionaries would enter a few years later. Shao had been a student at two of the centers of late Qing Hunanese political and cultural reformism, and yet, following the revolution, he had returned to Liuyang to “carry out service” in the local government. He would eventually serve as a primary school principal, the head of a rural education committee, and in a staff position in the Hunan provincial government.4

Guides to Reform Exactly why Shao Zhenji left Hunan for Shanghai and how he managed to be hired in May 1922 as instructor at the Jiangsu No. 2 Prison is not known, though it is likely that his older brother, already in the judicial bureaucracy, and Shao’s co-provincial ties (as many Hunanese were officers in Jiangsu prisons) had something to do with it. Unquestionably, however, attaining this relatively modest position in a major government institution was a source of pride to Shao and his family. The job came with an entry-level officer salary and civil service rank that promised some financial security, social respect, and prospects for advancement. Instructor salaries, which ranged from forty yuan per month at the Jiangsu No. 1 Prison in 1919 to seventy yuan per month at the Beijing No. 1 Prison in 1926, were (taking into account variations over place and time) considerably lower than those of wardens but many times higher than guard pay.5 Instructors, moreover, enjoyed the dignities of this uniformed, armed branch of the judicial administration. The prison service provided an institutional affiliation and disciplined organization that promised its members an active role in the higher purpose of reforming society and strengthening the nation. Instructors were to be specialists with highly valued skills and personal qualities. Ogawa Shigejiro’s idealized “doctors of the mind,” a template reflected in many of the complex duties expected of the instructors, were to be master technicians of social and psychological engineering. At the same time, in a contravention of Ogawa’s warning against recruiting intellectuals presumed to lack the discipline for these positions, a Ministry of Justice regulation in 1919 expressly stipulated that instructors be “graduates of normal schools or middle schools or have the same level of education,” have good literary style, and be “excellent at lecturing.”6 Warden Wang Yuanzeng stressed that instructors be “those with comparatively lofty morals.”7 They were to be teacher moralists. It was a position that allowed a figure like Shao Zhenji to become the sort of official paternal Confucian teacher of the common folk—lofty in purpose and close to the people—that he might have imagined in his school days. This frustrated aspirant for a reformist official post, a disenfranchised educated man of limited means but considerable ambition, became a committed agent of neither revolution nor local politics but of the penal apparatus of the modernizing state. And his educational experiences at the end of the Qing Empire, as well as his awareness of having risen from a lowly and precarious social position in a time of turmoil, stayed with him. As his brother concluded, Shao “never forgot his own poverty in the past.”8 Shao Zhenji was an exceptional prison instructor. After little over two years in the post, he was promoted to first section chief in August 1924, becoming second in command at the prison; and while he continued to instruct prisoners into early 1925, his senior administrative position and the success of his book made

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Guides to Reform him unusually prominent. Still, Shao and his fellow Jiangsu and Beijing prison instructors shared many commonalities. Ranging in age from their mid-twenties to mid-fifties, most instructors were upwardly aspiring men from neither poor nor elite families, who had, in the face of considerable disruptions and obstructions, acquired respectable but not elite educations. Only the Jiangsu No. 3 and Jiangxi No. 2 Prisons retained regular women instructors for female convicts in this period.9 Most instructors had begun a classic late imperial Confucian education, with some earning the lowest imperial degree, before the end of the examination system compelled them to find their way in the bewildering market of new schools. Many had studied in the new professional training schools—the teacher-training normal schools, legal administration schools, and business schools. Only a few had graduated from the more academically respected middle schools. Like many of the entry-level recruits into early twentieth-century China’s agencies of state- and party-building projects, prison instructors came from among the middlebrow, practically educated strata, which often initially pursued low-level government clerical posts or jobs as schoolteachers. They had contact with and awareness of social elites and higher officials and an interest in politics at many levels, and yet they had lived and worked among the common people. With a Senior Licentiate degree earned in the reformed Qing degree system in 1910 and subsequent study at the Zhejiang Superior Normal Academy, Instructor Song Lin at the Beijing No. 1 Prison (1923–27) had acquired the mix of credentials deemed suitable for mid-level government service or school teaching.10 His crosstown counterpart at the Beijing No. 2 Prison outside Desheng Gate (1914–27), the local Wanping County native Chen Hong, had, while never attaining examination success, made his way through a series of junior managerial positions within new branches of the expanding late Qing New Policies bureaucracy dealing with social order, relief work, and revenue extraction. Having served as a provisional judicial official in Jiangsu, a Commissioner of Winter-Accounts Rice Provisions on Credit for Jiangning County, as Transport Inspection Commissioner of the General Office of Salt Transportation to the North in Jianchang, Fengtian and Investigating Commissioner of Opium License Collection in the Financial Administration Bureau, Chen joined the new prison regime in a managerial capacity as deputy chief of the Work Inspections Section of the Jiangnan Model Prison in Nanjing in the brief period between its opening and subsequent near destruction during the fighting of the 1911 Revolution. Returning home after the revolution, Chen was hired at the Beijing No. 2 Prison as third section chief (financial manager) and then, still just twenty-eight years old, was appointed instructor a few months later.11 The manager of revenues and accounts had become an official state educator.

Guides to Reform In the mid-1920s, Chen Hong was joined by a second full-time instructor, an Anhui native in his fifties and a Qing Senior Licentiate named Guo Junwei. Guo had been a commissioner of rations in support of a bandit suppression campaign in Caozhou, Shandong, and a hygiene instructor at the Hubei Policing School. A stint as a secretary of General Services and chief of the Military Supplies Department in the Xianwu District near Xi’an in 1914 led to another logistical support position for the “Christian warlord” Feng Yuxiang’s Sixteenth Mixed Brigade. Having served in the military secretariat directly under the influential public moralist and General Feng’s close civilian adviser Xue Dubi, Guo moved to Beijing when Xue became vice minister of justice in 1923 and ended up in the prison service. Coming from the Feng Yuxiang faction, Guo Junwei proved a vigorous advocate of his Christian-themed religious teachings, compiling several instructional texts himself. Yet, even though Guo was among the group that brought Christian influence to its apex in the Beijing prisons, his Feng Yuxiang–style mixture of Christian themes, popular Confucian moralism, and patriotic civics differed only slightly from the lessons taught by his colleague Chen Hong.12 In Jiangsu, prison instructors tended to be drawn from the ranks of educators. A thirty-year-old primary normal school graduate from Xinghua County town in central Jiangsu when appointed Jiangsu No. 1 Prison (Nanjing) instructor in April 1915, Wu Yuejin had taught in primary schools in Zhenjiang and Xinghua and been a primary school principal and head of the Xinghua County Education Association. Serving at the prison until 1920, Wu wore the traditional scholar’s gown when he taught the convicts. Wu’s successor, Li Weicai, was, rather unusually, a graduate of a Japanese university. At Suzhou’s Jiangsu No. 3 Prison in 1920, the fifty-three-year-old Instructor Chen Youtian had been a teacher of civil law at the Jiangsu Republican Legal Administration School and of history and “national literature” at the Chengtian School in Shanghai.13 Shanghai prison instructors often possessed educational and employment credentials that reflected the city’s modern commercial-industrial character. In 1920 the twentyfour-year-old instructor of Shanghai’s Jiangsu No. 2 Branch Prison, the Zhejiang native Wang Dejian, had studied at the Beijing Banking University and the Nanyang Higher Merchant Special Banking School and been employed as a registrar in a telegraph bureau and as a statistics clerk in a railway office. Even prior to Shao Zhenji’s arrival, the Jiangsu No. 2 Prison stands out for having secured instructors of unusually high levels of education and status. Lu Chaoran, a thirty-four-year-old (in 1920) from Chongming, Jiangsu, had a Japanese legal administration university degree and had been a justice of the Baoshan-Shanghai Local Court.14

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Guides to Reform The mid-1920s brought a wave of openly religious activist prison instructors— Buddhists in Jiangsu and YMCA and Salvation Army Christians in Beijing— and a trend toward recruiting new instructors from within the prison service ranks. However, these figures were not of markedly different social and educational backgrounds from their predecessors, nor did they bring any significant departure from the established sense of professional duties and identity.15 Most in both generations had not set out in their youth to be teachers in prisons. Jails, it was widely held, were no place for an educated gentleman. From early aspirations to become reformist officials or scholar-teachers, they had been buffeted and shifted across the Qing-Republican transition into training and experience as new schoolteachers and low-status mid-ranking bureaucrats in peripheral regions. Most arrived in their instructor positions having known considerable dislocation and instability in education, career, personal lives, and in the world around them. For all that might have seemed distasteful about the prison service, it was in the prisons that these men gained the jointly dignified status of state official (guan) and teacher with the noble assignment of morally instructing the people. It was an opportunity to pursue unfulfilled ambitions and long culturally honored aspirations to reform society and revitalize the state through the moral transformation of misguided people in a major new state institution invested with a modernizing, internationally sanctioned aura.16 Instructors easily used and gained a sense of value in the Neo-Confucian vocabulary of moral self-cultivation and moral education with which the architects of the new system had formulated the idea of reformation. Theirs was to be the work of modern sages, and they brought to it many deeply ingrained ideas about how and what to teach and how to inspire the transformation of the human character. SPIRITUAL POWER AND JIAOHUA PUBLIC MORALISM IN PRISON INSTRUCTION

In early 1923 a human trafficking offender escaped from the Jiangsu No. 2 Prison and fled to Zhenjiang, where he hid in plain sight as a shoemaker. One day, he set out on a trip to Ningbo, and while changing trains at Shanghai’s North Station, he had the astounding bad luck to be spotted and seized by the very detective from the Women and Children’s Relief Association who had first arrested him. Back at the prison, on April 14, 1923, he met alone with Instructor Shao Zhenji. “The net of heaven is vast and its meshes great and no one escapes,” Shao quoted the Lao Zi, continuing: “You were skillful in escaping from prison and from the detectives and police, but you could not escape the

Guides to Reform investigations of the ghosts and spirits . . .; just at that moment the minions of the ghosts and spirits called upon you to jump into the net.”17 Invoking the spirits like a late imperial county magistrate or gentry moralist may have come easily to Shao Zhenji, but it was an approach that was only tolerated after considerable contestation within Beijing government policy circles over the previous decade. The founding designers of the new prison system had said little about the specific content of prison instruction. In the 1910s, the issue sparked controversy as it related to the quest within the bureaucracy for suitable unified state values for a modern Chinese Republic. These were the years of Yuan Shikai’s attempt to revive state Confucianism, Kang Youwei and Chen Huanzhang’s 1913 proposal to make Confucianism a state religion, and the upsurge in Buddhist, syncretic-redemptive society and other religious political and civic activism; matters of religion and spiritual belief attracted much interest and opposition.18 The imperial ideology, which presumed a unity between the dominant ethical-metaphysical doctrine and governance, had been overthrown, but officials and elites educated in the old regime often still assumed the necessity of such a linkage. Recently adopted foreign concepts of the nation-state, religion, and categories for understanding the relationship between state and society required new definitions and clarifications by state authorities, including determining the main tenets of state ideology and the relationship between the state and what were now styled autonomous religions. There were already some strong views informing the debate. Ogawa Shigejiro had dismissed all religious and moralistic Confucian prison instruction as backward and ineffectual, suggesting that convicts ought only to be taught to be model citizen-workers. Xu Shiying supported the focus on modern citizenry training, but thought it should be combined with lessons in Confucianism, which, he held, had the advantage of not being a religion and so would be culturally unifying for the nation.19 The jurist Wang Shurong shared Xu’s proConfucian secularist position, but for a different reason that followed the themes of a diatribe by Warden Fujiyama against Buddhist preachers in Japan, which Wang had heard during a visit to Tokyo’s Sugamo Prison. As Wang had it, “religious superstition” was “essentially shallow” and thus ineffective and inconsistent with the “great special characteristic” of China—the teaching of Confucian ethics. Writing with great interest about how to reach prisoners and get them “to cleanse their minds [gemian xixin]” with songs and talks given in common speech filled with “exhortation and reprimand,” and teaching “easily understood wise sayings of the ancients,” along with lessons in discipline and basic skills, Wang thought religious people ought not to interfere with a matter as serious as the moral teachings of the state.20

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Guides to Reform Following the interpretations of Shen Jiaben, Confucian language abounded in the new prisons, and basic Confucian moral principles—“benevolence” (ren), “righteousness” (yi), “propriety” (li), “wisdom” (zhi), and “faith” (xin)—were often used to name prison wards.21 Still, Sun Xize and Fang Jinqi, in a proposal to the National Judicial Conference in Beijing in late 1913, which otherwise echoed much of Wang Shurong’s secularist view, raised the concern that elite Confucian teachings would not appeal to uneducated common convicts: “Since Confucianism is lofty and far-reaching, it is not something the average commoner is able clearly to understand. Although the theories of Christianity easily move people, actually most people in China do not believe in them. Although Buddhism is believed in by the commoners, still scholars greatly scorn it as absurd.”22 The challenge, as it would remain for successor states, was how to make elite messages effective in influencing the general populace. Prison instruction and teaching texts, Sun and Fang concluded, “should be suited to the convicts’ mentality and only not be anything that is opposed by the people.” The way to successfully carry out Confucian moral education, they held, was to expand it to include the teaching of “the theory of blessings for good and calamities for evil,” which, they noted, was much like the Buddhist karmic theory of “cause and effect” (yinguo). In the end, they wrote, “the unruly and evil people who do not respect morality and the law, do respect the ghosts and spirits.”23 This practical solution, which would appeal to purist Confucian elites, deny a central role to any organized religion, and still advance familiar elementary ethics backed by popular beliefs already present in society, was nothing new. After all, the combination of basic Confucian ethics with beliefs in metaphysical “retribution/recompense” (baoying) and “cause and effect” (yinguo) karma for good or evil deeds was the core of the jiaohua (transforming through education) teachings of late imperial popular Confucian moralists and the morality books (shanshu) they so often used and distributed. Not just gentry educators in local academies and benevolence halls, but county magistrates, itinerant preachers, and family patriarchs had long been cultivating the fear of supernatural punishments exacted in life for evil actions in their efforts to make good, civilized Confucian commoners out of unruly villagers (or children and non-Han frontier people) with untamed local spiritual beliefs. And these ideas were broadly familiar to many from introductory reading primers, operas, storytelling, and common colloquial sayings.24 Sun and Fang’s proposal, which on the surface denied a role for religious preachers in favor of a curriculum of Confucian ethics, opened the door to a kind of metaphysical support for ethical teachings that came from a long history of interactions between elite moralists and local society. In effect, they were proposing to situate these late imperial ethical teach-

Guides to Reform ings with their references to the cosmic sanctions of karma, baoying, and “ghosts and spirits” at the core of the transformative educational project of these modern central state institutions. Unsatisfied, however, with the restrictions on formal religious education, advocates of an overtly Buddhist approach pushed their view with a proposal at the 1915 National Prison Conference that sharply criticized the reliance on “the same tiresome platitudes of old scholars” of Confucian moralism and called for prison instruction to be based on popular Buddhist ethics. Using a similar rationale to the 1913 proposal, these Buddhists stated: “To those of somewhat lesser intelligence, one should preach cause and effect, which already is present in the minds of the citizens.”25 Moreover, they noted, Buddhism would vitally affect “the spirit” in reformation. There was, as Paul Katz has shown, a long history to the overlapping and mixing of the religious-spiritual and legal-judicial realms. Yet there were also precedents for the hostility some elites directed at the new muscular Buddhist social and political activist revival, led in these years by an influential generation of clerical leaders and supported by urban-based lay devotees. President Yuan Shikai and some in his government seemed keen to prevent these Buddhists making inroads into state affairs. Buddhists had to be cautious. In the end, the 1915 National Prison Conference resolution on the issue did not accept the Buddhist proposal, but it still officially approved the centrality of teaching “cause and effect” and “retribution/recompense”—further expanding the inclusion of spiritual content in prison instruction.26 If striking in its clarification that metaphysical inducements should undergird the process of reformation, it was also just vague enough of a compromise to allow all to pursue their own interpretations. As much as the contestation over prison instruction content is intriguingly revealing of some of the fault lines in Beijing government political culture in the early Republic, it also exposes important shared underlying presuppositions common to all contenders in these debates about the process of moving and transforming minds, the rationale for adopting ethical teachings hallowed in ancient Chinese texts and commonly accepted by the mass populace, and the significance of this process to reforming offenders and molding them into good new citizens that would support the renewal of Chinese society and the nation. The contention and consensus informed the emerging relationship between state policy and institutional practice—a vital dynamic to the spread and entrenchment of reformation. At the same time, the compromise forged in official policy opened a space for wardens and instructors to develop their own forms of instruction within certain fairly loose constraints. So, in 1916, a figure like the Beijing No. 1 Prison officer-trainee Zhu Ziyuan could, following his mentor Warden Wang Yuanzeng, state concisely in an

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Guides to Reform official report that the ministry policy on prison instruction, which “took the ethics of human relationships as the essential point and religion as a supplementary aid,” was being implemented in the prison. And yet he well knew that, in fact, religious instruction was much more common in the Beijing prisons than was officially acknowledged. Indeed, between late 1914 and 1917, Buddhist and Christian preachers received permission, one after the other, to lecture in the new-style Beijing prisons.27 Moreover, Zhu Ziyuan and Wang Yuanzeng were actually Buddhist lay devotees carefully incorporating as much Buddhist teaching as they could without alarming any high-level, anti-Buddhist officials. Although he defensively denied that Beijing No. 1 Prison instructors spent “too much time on religious instruction” at the expense of teaching Confucian ethics, Zhu Ziyuan insisted that for “reformationism” (ganhuazhuyi), “there is nothing like religion for entering people deeply and being rapidly effective.” The religion he had in mind was the popular Pure Land Buddhist “theories of prior cause and later effect and the illusion of heaven and hell,” which were “an invisible law that supplemented the inferior tangible law.”28 Associating quotes from the Confucian classics with the idea of karma, Zhu concluded that this Buddhist morality was “stamped in the brains of our Chinese people” and could serve prison administrators as “a short cut to the reform of character.”29 This belief in the effectiveness of Buddhist religious teachings was based not just on the notion that they represented authentic native values deeply internalized by the people, but also on the idea that faith in the spiritual was the ultimate force for ordering the mind and internal feelings. Although cautious in his public writings, Wang Yuanzeng occasionally revealed his similarly fervent conviction that religious faith could best sway and convert the ethical mind. For instance, he wrote: “The basis of morality lies in limitless faith. Limitless faith is born of knowing that the gods exist, and regulate and produce [such morality]. Hence, it is by having limitless faith that one begins to develop flawless morals, and that provides that it will have the strength to be long preserved. . . . We can say this reveals the great mystery of human feelings. No person is without this kind of mind; so they can be guided and led to preserve their faith, and so will themselves be able to attain the basis of caring for and cultivating their morality. That is the reason for the suitability of religious people as instructors in the prisons.”30 Several sources note that Wang quietly went about having his inmates chant mantras and sutras as early as 1914 and taught the Buddhist meditational, self-cultivation practices of qingjing (separating oneself from the errors of evil acts) and jimie (separating oneself from everything and being in total stillness).31 Such risky, personally significant efforts reveal both the commitment of such officers to the rehabilitative program and how they began to shape it.

Guides to Reform Yet even as there were seemingly few such Buddhist activists through the early 1920s, most instructors taught some version of the cosmic “cause and effect / retribution and recompense [yinguo-baoying]” ethical-metaphysical system.32 In the style of late imperial morality books, Shao Zhenji often spoke to the Jiangsu No. 2 Prison inmates of how yinguo-baoying was verified in “real stories” of “ghosts and spirits” intervening to make criminals give themselves up or otherwise meet their comeuppance. Mystical forces were at work when an adolescent girl, angry at being scolded, turned her morphine-dealer mother in to the police; when an inmate’s wife came to the prison to demand a divorce, this was, Shao told him, “retribution in the present life” for his crime of abducting another man’s wife, adding, “retribution never misses the mark.” Urging inmates to seek “the esteem of ghosts and spirits,” Shao talked of the prisoners’ own life stories or described recent cases (often noting places, dates, and other credible details) in which the interventions of ghosts and spirits or other metaphysical forces had brought “merit” or, more often, retribution. With a line uttered by many an instructor, Shao forthrightly defined the relationship between legal and cosmic authority as, “in the open there is the state’s law, in obscurity there are the ghosts and spirits.”33 Throughout the new prison system, late imperial morality books and similar recently compiled moral prescriptive texts became the core textual basis for inmate instruction. A 1920 Jiangsu No. 3 Prison report explained that morality books were used for instruction because they “speak of the blessings for good and the calamities for evil in order to arouse each prisoner’s mind to awaken to consciousness and repent.”34 The lists of “teaching materials” instructors reported to the Ministry of Justice up to 1927 included the oldest and best known morality books, such as The Treatise of the Most Exalted One on Moral Retribution (Taishang ganying pian) and The Text of the Secret Blessings (Yinzhi wen); the ethical self-cultivation tracts of the sixteenth century Ming dynasty scholar Yuan Huang; the “ledgers of merit and demerit” and morality books from the eighteenth-century Qing scholar Chen Hongmou’s Five Varieties of Posthumous Instructions (Wuzhong yigui); and family instructions, especially versions of Master Zhu’s Family Instructions (Zhu zi jiaxun). Other common texts included the early Qing dynasty scholar Zhou Mengyan’s collection of two morality books and two Pure Land Buddhist texts entitled Complete Works of Anshi (Anshi quanshu); precious scrolls; volumes of exhortations and admonitions, such as the nineteenth-century Fuzhou scholar Liang Gongchen’s A Record of Exhortations and Admonitions (Quanjie lu); various compilations of the writings and sayings of the towering mid-nineteenth-century official Zeng Guofan; and a remarkable variety of collections of wise sayings (geyan) compiled since about 1900. In most commonly distributing and quoting from The Treatise of the Most Exalted One on Moral Retribution, The Wise Sayings

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Guides to Reform of Master Zhu, and A Record of Exhortations and Admonitions, Instructor Shao Zhenji was typical. All instructors, including the Buddhists and Christians, always used at least a few key morality books. Responding to a 1923 ministry investigation into prison instruction, a county jail warden from Jiangsu named Deng Xianjiang sent in a proposal calling for all prison instruction to be based on five texts: The Treatise of the Most Exalted One on Moral Retribution, The Text of the Secret Blessings, Master Zhu’s Family Instructions, The Wise Sayings of Zeng Wenzheng (Zeng Guofan), and A Record of Reformation (Ganhua lu). Aside from promoting the last recently compiled Buddhist text, Deng’s proposal merely confirmed the existing morality-book-based curriculum. Incorporation of new moral education volumes alongside morality books was not limited to Buddhist and Christian books. Prison instructors also liberally drew upon compilations of Chinese and foreign wise sayings; translations of popular foreign wisdom, such as Aesop’s Fables and Smiles’ Self-Help; and new-school-curriculum ethics and civics textbooks in the Japanese style, such as New Moral Cultivation (Xin xiushen). The two most commonly reported new compilations were the Record of Shame and SelfCorrection (Chige lu) and Speaking of Repentance and Self-Renewal (Huiguo zixin shuo) by the public moralist and onetime vice minister of justice Xue Dubi. Prison print workshops produced large runs of the Record of Shame and Self-Correction along with Shao Zhenji’s prison instruction compilation and a similar volume, The Basics of Moral Instruction, by Jiangsu No. 3 Prison instructor Chen Youtian. The manner in which the prison instructors’ own works drew from and emulated the existing popular ethical guides and were eventually, in notable cases, commercially distributed alongside them suggests how all these various texts were widely understood to be part of the same popular moral-prescriptive literature genre.35 In effect, prison instructors were consumers and often contributors to a popular ethics print culture that was largely generated in the newly developed industrialcommercial publishing center of Shanghai. They did not gravitate to morality books and yinguo-baoying ethics out of a revivalist instinct, but rather made the most obvious choice for an institution dedicated to morally educating wayward commoners. Already the most widely available books in the late Qing period, morality books came to be distributed on an unprecedented scale with the growth of mechanized printing in the early twentieth century. These texts, Ge Zhaoguang has argued, “seeped into social custom and life and . . . became the content of popular Chinese ethics.” The projects of late Qing jiaohua public moralism, through which elites had endeavored to assert moral-cultural order in localities, had been all around the instructors in their youth. Such teachings had advanced orthodox Confucian morals, in part, by attempting to supplant local religious practices with the generalized spiritual power of “cause and effect / retribution

Guides to Reform and recompense” and “ghosts and spirits.” Formed as an accommodation of and as a negotiation with local societal beliefs, these teachings continued to develop and have great purchase as public morals education evolved in a post-imperial era in which the ideals of social elites and what seemed the most admirable values thought to inhere organically in the common people became increasingly important.36 Prison instructors saw themselves not just as heirs to the jiaohua tradition, but as vigorous advocates within a continuing and flourishing broader movement for an ethical renewal of the new China. The realm of early twentieth-century jiaohua public moralists featured a diverse and diffuse range of figures involved in the promotion, textual compilation, publication, institutional organization, preaching, or teaching of ethics to benefit the people. Among those involved were educators, Beijing-based and local officials, military leaders, wealthy industrialist philanthropists, commercial and religious editors and publishers, leading figures in redemptive societies, morality associations, Buddhist lay associations, charitable and civic organizations, and itinerant preachers.37 Prison instructors saw their work as a natural extension of this movement. The incorporation of the jiaohua teachings into the prison instruction curriculum was simply because this was, for the instructors, the way to educate and transform the “ignorant” masses. As a result, prison instructors not only told “real stories” of “ghosts and spirits” enforcing cosmic consequences for evil, they also instructed inmates in the popular Confucian social ethics of benevolence, righteousness, filial piety, sincerity, harmony, diligence, and frugality, along with a smattering of Buddhist and Daoist concepts and moral admonitions—exactly in the manner of morality books.38 Indeed, in the morality book style, Shao Zhenji and Beijing No. 2 Prison instructor Chen Hong began their curriculum with and linked all moral teachings to filial piety. Instructors daily exhorted prisoners to behave, work hard, and reform to redeem the unfilial act of their crime and so “repay parental kindness.” From filial piety, they proceeded to discuss the five relationships, family harmony, duties to venerate ancestors, and to be kind to ones’ children and unborn descendants and, “by granting grace by reason of analogy,” to others. This extended to lauding the traditions of lineage schools, charity land for the relief of widows and widowers, lineage-sponsored poor relief, and charity to the poor and orphaned. Again and again, instructors drew on jiaohua pacification themes, urging convicts to “be content with one’s lot and accept one’s place” (anfen shouji) and uphold “harmony with the clan and peace among neighbors.”39 Yet, sometimes in these same sessions, themes of the new age were linked to these moral lessons. Instructor Shao Zhenji, for instance, quoted The Wise Sayings of Master Zhu in support of teaching modern hygiene and used Confucian and Buddhist admonitions and traditional health concepts to speak against venereal disease and prostitution. In

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Guides to Reform one lecture, Shao asserted that the distribution of morality books increased knowledge in a manner that exemplified the modern idea of “public welfare.”40 At the same time, prison lessons were also filled with many underlying assumptions and conceptual patterns of the jiaohua moralist tradition. Among these were the view that problems in the world and for individuals began with moral failings in Confucian terms; that the locus of the ethical self, the human mind, could be transformed through education and cultivation, and that the reform and, ideally, moral perfection of the individual was directly related to the condition of the social, political, and metaphysical order. This pattern, successively linking up the cultivation of the individual with the ordering of the family, the people more broadly, and on to the state and peace and order in the cosmos, is recognizable as that set forth in the fourth-century bce text The Great Learning—the celebrated classic memorized by all boys pursuing education in late imperial times. Just as this pattern had provided the organizing structure for many morality books, so it was with Instructor Shao Zhenji’s curriculum. An equally significant related presumption was that of a universal, cosmically upheld morality and justice. The morality book perspective, as Ge Zhaoguang has argued, presented a myth of constant, all-pervasive cosmic surveillance and inexorable consequences for human actions.41 Reconfigured within the prison was this premodern ideal of upholding a universal truth and justice in an otherwise unjust world. And, to a degree, all new themes and concepts were related to and fit within these presumptions and patterns. Michel Foucault’s influential and yet much challenged depiction of the rationalized, secularized modern European prisons of disciplinary technologies of separation and surveillance as the embodiment of the modern regime of power never considered that elements of social ordering in the past might be reconfigured within the constitution of new techniques of control.42 In their early manifestations in China, the self-consciously modern prisons employed the threat of infallible, supernatural retribution in the material world for immoral conduct, just as late imperial-era magistrates and moralizing lecturers had once done. The captive audiences of the new prisons were early on recognized as one of the most promising targets of the jiaohua public moralist agenda; and as part of this moralist fellowship, prison instructors so ingrained many of these teachings within the prisons that even under Christian and Buddhist activists and later under the Nationalists, elements of them remained and influenced new lessons. Nonetheless, it is hardly surprising that the invocation of supernatural sanctions to support the earthly administration of justice in the new-style prisons struck some at the time and since as an awkward hybrid aimed, rather impotently, at retaining something of the lost late imperial unity of state legal authority and universal morality. The vantage point of the prison

Guides to Reform instructor, however, reveals not only how the Chinese version of the modern prison was reconfigured in policy and practice to propagate distinctly endogenous teachings, but how this incorporation of the late imperial scripts of moral education and conversion contributed to giving meaning and purpose, and so sustaining the rehabilitative practice of the new prisons in this formative period and endowing it with considerable potential potency. To be sure, long after teachings of the supervision of “ghosts and spirits” had been abandoned, the reformation of the prisoner would still be judged less with reference to any law than to a universal morality known and supervised by supposedly all-knowing supreme authorities and interpreted by an instructor. MAKING GOOD CITIZENS

In the summer of 1921, Warden Wang Yuanzeng’s national flagship, Beijing No. 1 Prison, launched an education reform that focused on literacy and citizenship training. As with all reforms, the necessity for a new course of action was justified by pointing to all the failures and inadequacies of the system in place. In its first years, the Beijing No. 1 Prison, like all the new-style prisons, had been committed to implementing basic education that, as Ogawa Shigejiro had hoped, would train convicts to become loyal, literate, skilled worker-citizens. As in most prisons, however, instructors had emphasized moral instruction, and officials had most concerned themselves with keeping inmates safely occupied. Even when regulations were revised to require the new-style prisons only to provide compulsory basic education, in line with national primary and secondary school curricula, for juvenile inmates, none of the prisons were able to do so thoroughly and consistently. Even in the relatively well-resourced Beijing and Jiangsu prisons, basic education programs that from the start had been incomplete and occasional had, by 1920, mostly been folded into moral instruction or neglected entirely. Indeed, through 1923, there was no basic education course of any kind at the Beijing No. 2 Prison.43 Yet interest in two original aspects of basic education—literacy and citizenry training—remained strong and had been integrated to some extent in most instruction programs. This was largely because the new-style prisons were consistently regarded as key institutions serving two related central agendas of the early Republican state—the maintenance of urban social order according to evolving conceptions of an orderly modern society, and the training of a modern citizenry that would revive the nation. Indeed, government authorities, intellectual theorists, and public moralists were already promoting similar combinations of themes in their proposed projects to transform the people and

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Guides to Reform save the nation. The prisons were influenced by these trends beyond their walls. Notably, the Beijing No. 1 Prison experimental education reform was initiated as a first step toward a broader penal-judicial reform that was sparked by Wang Chonghui’s successful post–World War I rejuvenation of China’s diplomatic efforts pursued at the 1921–22 Washington Conference to negotiate the abrogation of extraterritoriality, which hinged on proving to the European powers, the United States, and Japan that China could modernize its legal system. At the same time, Ministry of Justice policy makers pushing prison education reform had been influenced by the progressive American-trained education circle figures who promoted an agenda for the practical education of the masses, which came to be known as the Commoner Education Movement (pingmin jiaoyu yundong). The idea at the Beijing No. 1 Prison in 1921 was to bring the prison regime into accord with the latest international penal reform trends, which meant, in part, pursuing the rehabilitation of the convict through “social learning.” The prison appointed eight educated prisoners as teachers’ aides for “national literature” classes, in which inmates would be taught to read with the Common People’s Primer—a text said to appeal to prisoners. They were also to bolster the rest of the original basic education curriculum of math, general knowledge, civics, and physical education. In addition, the prison started an inmate-run (officer-supervised) periodical, Beijing No. 1 Prison Periodical, and in April 1922 opened a prison library. The initiative appeared to mark a shift to the type of mass citizenry education based on practical preparation to succeed in and contribute to society, which would appeal to international penal reform experts and progressive intellectuals at home. From the start, however, prison officers pursued the reform in culturally familiar ways, which often resulted in the new methods being altered and adjusted to fit the existing moralizing approach. In a remarkably idealistic imitation of the ultimate symbol of imperial Chinese academic-bureaucratic culture, Warden Wang Yuanzeng set periodic examinations for prisoners with ranked results as if they were students seeking civil service positions. Yet at the first examination, which consisted of elementary fill-in-the-blank questions about a passage from a simple, previously studied text, only twenty of the more than one hundred inmate examinees passed, and only nine were pronounced “up to the standard.” If the mostly illiterate prisoners could not be turned into examination candidates, however, at least they would receive some proper guidance. Moral education themes were evident not just in the ethics (xiushen) lessons, but also in the language and anecdotes common in other classes. Even though the new library included books on agriculture, industry, law, accounting, math, general scientific

Guides to Reform knowledge, and military studies, more than half of its 4,363 volumes, most of which were donated by philanthropists and religious groups, were religious, mainly Buddhist, or moral prescriptive and self-cultivation texts. Similarly, with its stated purpose “to assist reformation education,” the Beijing No. 1 Prison Periodical featured selections on “the fine words and deeds” of good people, wise sayings, summaries of instruction lectures, and stories to “stir emotions” and inspire “selfexamination” and “to explain the meaning of reformation.” Some didactic tales were of model inmates who worked hard, sent their earnings to their families, and were reformed; others related stories of those who had failed to reform and were punished and suffered. There were inmate-authored accounts reflecting positively on their prison educations, and inmate “repentance records” recounting their moral failings and commitment to reform. The inmates may have written these pieces, but the periodical was not an exercise in social-progressive participatory citizenship within the walls; it was designed by the instructor as instructional material for an educational program that still aimed at moral reform.44 In spite of its mixed results, the Beijing experiment was pronounced a success by the Ministry of Justice, which in June 1924 ordered a Prisoner Education Plan provisionally implemented nationwide for all new-style prisons. The major impetus for this was the approaching inspection tour of the International Commission on Extra-Territoriality in China, the fact-finding committee led by British, French, American, and Japanese legal experts and diplomats (and including other European and Chinese representatives), authorized, thanks to Wang Chonghui’s efforts, at the Washington Conference in 1922. The International Commission was to assess whether China’s judicial and penal reforms warranted the abrogation of extraterritoriality. The plan sparked a flurry of reform activity, with the patterns of the Beijing experiment playing out in new-style prisons in a number of major cities. The excessively ambitious scheme for a three-year, three-grade, twelve-classroomhours-a-week, lower-primary-school-level curriculum for all prisoners required the prisons to draft educated inmates, prison officers, and local teachers to staff all the new classes. Largely eschewing the elitist features of the Beijing experiment, the national plan, on the face of it, hewed even more closely to the methods of the American-influenced social-progressive Commoner Education Movement being actively promoted at the time by such liberal-progressive intellectuals as Tao Xingzhi, Zhang Boling, Hu Shi, and the YMCA activist Yan Yangchu (James Yen). Emphasizing basic literacy training with Tao Xingzhi and Zhu Jingnong’s widely disseminated core textbook of the movement, The Common People’s Primer, the reform curriculum also included simple math for account keeping, “common knowledge” (changshi) of science and hygiene, ethics, and patriotism.

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Guides to Reform The plan echoed the movement’s vision of turning the masses into thrifty, disciplined, loyal petty-urbanite, modern citizens with basic commercial and industrial skills. In ethics classes following the Commercial Press “Republican teaching materials series” textbooks New Moral Cultivation and New Method Moral Cultivation and those on civics, reading, common knowledge, and physical education, the inmate was to be taught the duties, responsibilities, and comportment of a “good citizen” (hao gongmin). This meant not only, for instance, lessons on how to deal properly with foreigners and how to carry the national flag, but also in the Confucian moral self-cultivation practice of “self-reflection.” The teachings of citizenry, ethics, and the moral instruction program overlapped throughout the plan, reflecting the common fusion in the early Republic of the Europeanoriginated and Japanese-coined terminology of citizenship with the late imperial language of moral self-cultivation. So even as the reform promised ambitious change designed to impress the foreign experts, it also contained much that reinforced the prison service’s proclivity for moral education. The plan itself stated that basic education was to remain supplementary to moral reform. It would “increase their knowledge to make them pursue the repentance of former wrongs and revert to being good people” and lead them to “exhort and discuss morality to make them repent and come to consciousness.” No one could have been faulted for thinking the reform was finally less dramatic than it had at first seemed. It is no surprise that it passed virtually without comment when, in 1926, the Beijing No. 1 Prison offhandedly reported that basic education had again been subsumed within moral instruction.45 The ambitious Ministry of Justice reform quickly foundered. Only months after it began, the original experiment at the Beijing No. 1 Prison waned in the fall of 1924, following a reduction in funding and the paroling of the most skilled and educated inmate editors, typesetters, and literacy instructors. Classes dropped off, the periodical closed, and by 1925 inmate usage of the prison library had fallen to almost nothing.46 Beyond Beijing, few were as bold as the long-standing Shanxi No. 1 Prison warden Xu Bohua, who openly objected to the “new theories” in the plan’s prescribed textbook, Citizens Required Reading. Most prisons reported full compliance with the plan, even as their own records showed they carried out much reduced adaptations. The Jiangsu new-style prisons had neither the resources nor the conditions to realize the plan’s requirements. Only the Jiangsu No. 2 Prison outside Shanghai found enough inmates with some education (eighty) to establish the prescribed higher-level, continuation track courses. The other prisons attempted only the most elementary classes for illiterates and amended the curriculum to teach vocational-training subjects like “practical use” or traditional “writing from memory,” which might

Guides to Reform better suit the rudimentary capabilities of the inmates.47 Every prison cut corners to try to approximate (at least on paper) the demands of the policy. Beijing prisons tried to staff all the new classes by compelling their officers and guards to teach for additional subsidy pay. Faced with the same conundrum, the Jiangsu No. 2 Prison ingeniously categorized only 48 percent of its inmates as eligible for the education program after the rest had been disqualified as too ill, frail, aged, or not a regularly sentenced convict. Many reports showed there to be insufficient instructors, textbooks, teaching materials, and classroom space. Even at the Jiangsu No. 2 Prison, the new education program was scaled back only weeks after being launched on August 1, 1924, and was subsequently suspended for several months in the early fall due to heightened security requirements during the brief Jiangsu-Zhejiang War; it was never fully revived. Although the push for literacy was notable, everywhere the plan was simplified, implementation was partial, and, before long, abandoned. Just a few years later, criminologists concluded that the attempts to carry out the 1924 Prisoner Education Plan had been perfunctory and of little impact.48 Although this reform failed by its own standards, it had a strikingly vigorous generative influence during a time of weak Beijing governments, political chaos, and fragmentation. The circulating reports flowing along the bureaucratic networks that linked prison administrators in major provincial cities with the Ministry of Justice show not only that prison officers responded with some action to the Beijing policy, but that the bureaucratic apparatus, even when unsuccessful in practice, repetitively articulated formulas and committed itself to a grandly ambitious agenda of prisoner re-education. The formalization of the reform-plan agenda within the judicial bureaucracy left it the principal template that both the last-ditch 1927 Beiyang government reforms of the Beijing prisons and the Nationalists’ prison education policy of the 1930s would return to and develop upon.49 This was not just a matter of mindless bureaucratic repetition. For the Beiyang government, with its limited resources and authority, the newstyle prisons—these large, resource-intensive institutions endowed with national and regional significance and holding captive audiences—represented among the few sites where central state policies could affect institutional practice and advance an aspirational vision of mass transformation. The state’s underlying agendas for such transformation were aimed at ordering the cities and creating a loyal, productive citizenry. This is why the most successful parts of the reform plan—those promoting literacy, training in social habits, and citizenship—were those elements that had already been valued prior to the reform and remained significant within the heavily moralistic and religious instruction programs after the reform faded. For all that could be disagreed about within policy circles and

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Guides to Reform between the ministry and prison officers, there was a consensus in support of the fusion of these themes with the ethical teachings. This, in part, reflected the powerful grip of the ideals of nationalism and its narrative, in this case, about the need to renovate the people to become good citizens, which would overcome the national humiliation visited on China by foreign imperialists. But an equally important impetus came from the related widespread concern among officials and elites about crime and disorder, particularly in cities. Judicial and penal officials and academic experts believed China was experiencing a crisis crime surge in its cities in the late 1910s and 1920s. Complacently confident in their new “scientific” statistical methods, they pointed to statistics showing that crime was rapidly increasing in major cities and was primarily the handiwork of poor, property-less, unemployed, uneducated men in their twenties and thirties—the undisciplined, “bare-stick” (guanggun) male committing petty theft in the city.50 With the statistical evidence seeming to confirm the foreign criminological theories about urbanization and social change, which were translated and discussed in legal journals by the early 1920s, there was a fascination with the idea that modern judicial and penal institutions, informed by the social sciences of criminology and penology, could diagnose the crime problem, treat, and eradicate it. Few acknowledged the imperfections and inconsistencies in statistical record keeping, the distortions resulting from the urban concentration of the policing and judicial apparatus, the biases and particular social-order agendas behind police enforcement, the confusion arising from the criminalization of previously tolerated practices and between new laws and imperial-era laws and common social morality. Although the sensational stories common in newspapers added to the sense of an urban crime wave, memoir accounts of daily life in, for instance, Beijing, which consistently registered among the highest statistical crime rates of the 1910s and 1920s, suggest the city was neither dangerous nor crime ridden.51 But for judicial and penal officials, as with other officials, intellectuals, and elites, the issue of rising crime played upon their preoccupations with and anxieties about mainly poor young men and some women free of family bonds in the city. These were not seen as a “dangerous class” to be feared as a direct threat to elites and officials, but rather as evidence of the failure of the social-moral order, a symptom of social disorder, in Confucian terms, and of the inadequacy of the nation-state’s efforts to modernize institutions and society and mold citizens as part of the national confrontation with foreign imperialism. Something had to be done about these backward, ignorant troublemakers who weakened the national social community. Discussions of the crime problem influenced by ideas from Confucian statecraft, as well as by Japanese and Western theories of

Guides to Reform crime and social order, pointed to moral causes as well as a failure of social discipline, the consequences of socioeconomic dislocation, and a lack of adequate education for common people. A 1923 Ministry of Justice report, for instance, arrived at the crude conclusion that “half of the various offenders come from among those who lack an occupation and half from among those that lack education.” This diagnosis presumed a treatment through the kind of work-skills and educational training the prisons were supposed to provide. And this presumption, common to all from ministry officials down to prison officers, included the view that education meant cultivating ethics and teaching proper social habits and comportment of a good, modern citizen. Yet again, while regulations and policies of the ministry offered guidance, most was left to prison officers and instructors to determine or innovate according to their own inclinations and interests.52 SHAO ZHENJI AND THE LESSONS OF MODEL-CITIZEN TRAINING

By the early 1920s, there was a proliferation of newly compiled and translated guides for training the modern Chinese citizen. Many intellectuals, moralists, and political figures had put forth their versions of, as John Fitzgerald has put it, the “determination to remake the Chinamen and remake the state together.”53 For Shao Zhenji and his fellow prison instructors, however, the most useful and influential guides were those compiled by the public moralist and official Xue Dubi. This was particularly so after the southern Shanxi native, whose political career flourished through his close association with the militarist leader Feng Yuxiang, moved to Beijing in January 1923 to serve as vice minister of justice.54 Xue Dubi’s Speaking of Repentance and Self-Renewal became one of the most commonly reported texts used by prison instructors well into the 1930s. In the 1924 prison education reform, the Ministry of Justice circulated Xue’s instructional compilations, Warnings on Greed and Honesty and Warnings on Arrogance and Idleness, for officer and guard training and inmate education, and assigned his songbook, Songs to Exhort the People, as the only textbook for singing classes. As with many new ethical and civics guides influenced by the morality book tradition, Xue Dubi’s compilations assembled quotations, wise sayings and proverbs, songs, and pithy didactic tales. Much of it was culled from the Confucian classics, morality books, the works of Zeng Guofan, and other great Confucians like Wang Yangming, and yet it also mixed in translated quotes from the Christian Gospels, Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanac, and more-recent foreign sources. China’s officials and people desperately needed all this Chinese and

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Guides to Reform foreign wisdom, Xue held, because the nation faced an unfolding social Darwinist calamity at the hands of foreign imperialists, and the ultimate source of the problem lay in the moral failings of the people. Hence, the solution would have to begin with a moral renovation to “change people’s minds, and clean away filthy customs.” Xue Dubi’s jiaohua moralism fused with nationalism concerned itself with correcting the moral lapses and bad habits he believed to be afflicting contemporary society. His songbook featured the “Get Rid of Opium Addiction Song,” “Abstain from Whoring Song,” “Pay Attention to Hygiene Song,” “Exhort Getting Up Early Song,” and “Abstain from Fighting and Cursing Song.” More than a decade before the Nationalists’ New Life Movement, Xue Dubi set forth in simple songs, stories, and slogans a set of lessons for mass indoctrination not just in family and social ethics, but in sanitized, orderly, law-abiding social conduct supportive of state and elite agendas. Hardly particular to Xue, it was a common conviction of many officials, elites, and educators that this melding of jiaohua moralism with the modern statistnationalist project to mold good citizens with a reformulated, purified “common morality” expressed in proper social habits was necessary to overcome China’s modern predicament.55 Most new-style prison instructors followed this trend. At the Jiangsu No. 2 Prison, Instructor Shao Zhenji’s social-order teachings struck most intensely against the vice, corruption, and immorality of Shanghai, where the inmates had been arrested. Like an updated morality book list of “evil customs,” Shao spoke against a litany of immoral activities—gambling, smoking, alcohol, opium and morphine, visiting prostitutes—that he identified as sources not just of impoverishment and crime, but of a broader social and national moral dissolution. Relating this to concerns about the physical condition of citizens and the social-cultural order, he combined morality-book aphorisms with rudimentary references to Chinese medicine concepts and the modern discourse of “public health” for citizens with strong modern bodies. Drug use was “bloodless killing”; gambling led to “loss of vigor”; and sex with prostitutes weakened the mind and health through excessive expenditure of “essence” (qi), exhaustion, and the crisis of venereal disease in Shanghai. Shao warned inmates against the easy money but unstable and corrupting influences of working in teahouses, bars, bathhouses, theaters, and in dock gangs. Talks on hygiene were his opportunity to rail against the unhealthy and socially disruptive effects of “the current Shanghai style of staying up late” and to assail, as he saw it, the foreign-influenced ideas and practices of unregulated relations between the sexes, so popular among Shanghai youths. The new ideas of freedom of romantic love (aiqing) and sexual choice and pleasure, in Shao’s view, were antithetical to the sincere sentiments of the “true affection” (zhenqing) of marriage, which was connected to the purposes of

Guides to Reform the family. Sex within marriage was natural and good, he emphasized, because of its sacred purpose of producing descendants. On the basis of the law and his interpretation of the Confucian tradition and the standards of the “world’s civilized system,” he stressed the importance of marital monogamy. The problem for the well-being of citizens and the social order lay with those women and young men living freely outside the bonds of the family. The modern girls, or as Shao put it, “the eminent women students . . . cannot avoid being stained by the evil customs, that is, by what they themselves call sacred and pure love.” “Freedom of love” just led youths to reject the commands of their parents. Concubines were worse. The original purpose of the practice to supply an heir and support the family had given way to relations solely for sexual pleasure, which caused quarreling and ruined families. Most concubines, Shao told inmates, were women of “lost characters” with extravagant desires, who engaged in petty quarrels and jealousies, “relations with chauffeurs, familiarity with actors and intimacy with pretty boys,” and in the end, “abscond with everything.” Mistresses, he warned, were inherently dangerous since they led men into financial trouble, crimes of theft or robbery, and could seek to kill and replace wives. In any case, women who engaged in extramarital or nonmarital sex were “despised goods” and “unbaked bricks that will never again be considered people.”56 Women independent of the family in the city, Shao taught, were a danger to men and society and should be avoided or corrected. Drawing on long-standing patriarchal notions, common to jiaohua moralists, of the innately complex and ever potentially corrupting yin moral essence of women, Shao held that women were always the more-immoral partner in illicit sex and often were “the source of inciting men to degeneracy” and so crime. They had a propensity for jealousy and pettiness, but, above all, acted out of female vanity. This vanity, which led young women to make an unseemly spectacle of themselves as salesgirls (“slaves to foreigners”) in Shanghai department stores, could, if unchecked, let loose a woman’s mysterious yin evil. Women human traffickers, Shao assured the male inmates, employed “even more secret methods and their thoughts are even more treacherous” than their male counterparts. At the same time, Shao taught that good women in the family should be protected. He criticized the rural practice of female infanticide, those who forced women into prostitution, and the “rural bumpkins” who “regard their wives as slaves” and “hit and curse them.” However, women inmates, who made up a small percentage of the prison population, generally were not subjected to these lectures. Shao, like most other instructors, who, with the exception of a couple of adjunct instructors, were all men, always taught women separately from men and prepared many gender-specific lessons. Some used revised late imperial and modern women’s

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Guides to Reform education texts, such as the Mother Instructs Daughters about Family Affairs Textbook and The Women’s Magazine. Quite typically, Instructor Shao urged women prisoners to overcome female vanity and to learn to uphold the gendered subordinate conduct of diligence, frugality, the ability to bear suffering and to be content with their position and responsible in their duty to care for and manage their families.57 His discussion of women’s “equality” as citizens, which he began with an enticing emphasis on women’s equal part in supporting society and the nation, culminated in explaining that these citizens’ duties were to be carried out “in the home” and in ordering the family. Addressing the same theme to male convicts, Shao gave a different talk in which the “equality of women” was explicated with classical phrases and analogies to conclude that women were equally human in having feelings, for instance, as a man would if their spouse was unfaithful.58 The separate and seemingly contradictory lessons had the same aim: to instill an ideal of the disciplined patriarchal family structure within the modern nation, and the conduct to match it. In lecturing to convicts on the social habits and values that would help them return to an ordered life, Instructor Shao selectively chose from his various influences to address what he perceived as the two broad realms of contemporary social problems—rural backwardness and modern urban disorder. The rural problem was, for him, the lesser of the two. It could be remedied if the inmates and people followed his teachings of the basic morality book-type Confucian ethics and harmonious, hierarchical relationships and conduct of an ideal agrarian family and lineage-based social community. Indeed, all citizens could learn from these values. It was clear, however, that his preaching of communitarian social harmony based in social inequalities was fundamentally opposed to Shanghai urban modernity. With regard to this more-daunting problem, Shao preached not only against the immoral lures of urban entertainments and lifestyles; he criticized the excesses of profit seeking in commerce, arguing that limited resources ought to be shared to preserve social harmony.59 In addition, he promoted his version of the individual duties relating to the imported, adapted modern progressive concepts of “civic morality” (gongde), “public hygiene” (gonggong weisheng), and “public welfare” (gongyi). These were teachings for a modern urban civic community and modern nation that seemed to occupy a space, as Shao viewed it, at some remove from the family-based rural social community of his earlier lectures. His public hygiene lessons instructed inmates not to defecate, urinate, or spit “just anywhere” in public space and to correct such “common bad habits of our people.” All ought to take an interest in the cleanliness of rivers, canals, drinking water, and in vaccination and preventing epidemics.60 Among many dictates of civic morality, Shao exhorted inmates not to obstruct traffic with heavy, unwieldy objects, not to

Guides to Reform secretly read other people’s mail, not to slander others, not to waste time and procrastinate; but rather to be punctual and to answer questions directly without talking nonsense. He conceptualized such instructions in relation to, and often referred directly to, his sense of the sharp contrast in Shanghai’s social order between the clean, well-ordered, and modern International Settlement and the disorderly Chinese-administered Zhabei and Nanshi Districts, with, as he put it, graffiti of “guttural verse or a few poorly formed characters” everywhere on temples and alley walls. All citizens, he argued, should support such modern, civilizing “public institutions” as museums, libraries, and parks.61 There should be traffic lights, roads, and bridges and a range of progressive welfare and educational programs—schools for the poor, universal education and literacy, work-study schools, night schools, continuation schools, and work training shops. The cultivation of good habits and morals, Shao taught, was just to be the first step toward the great enterprise of forging an orderly, socially progressive, modern society.62 At points, Instructor Shao’s lessons could seem disjointed and selfcontradictory, particularly with respect to his envisioned distinction between a social realm of harmonious, lineage-based rural villages and that of a striving, modern, urban civic morality. It seemed to suggest that the social-ethical roles of citizens were to be determined by their proximity to the urban zones, where mobilization was most necessary for China’s confrontation with the imperialists. But this, for Shao Zhenji, as with so many public moralists of the day, was part of an imagined social continuum given coherence not just by the discourses of nationalism, but also by those of the ethical transformations of jiaohua moralism. The Great Learning–patterned framework of social thought that provided the underlying structure for understanding proper conduct and the relationship between the individual, communities, and the state was broadly extended to include new teachings about social comportment, civics, and patriotism. Shao Zhenji himself, for instance, in an official 1922 report, defended the use of morality books in prison instruction against critics opposing such old, “superstitious” texts by pointing out that the books resembled the modern school ethics textbooks, “with moral themes divided variously among those having to do with the self, the family and the nation.”63 The same perspective extended to lessons of civics and patriotism, which, through translations and summaries, had already been fit into the same conceptual frame and interpreted with moralist language. This not only affected how nationalism and republicanism were understood by many, but allowed for an easy conflation of notions of cultivating the good person with those of training patriotic citizens.64 In addition to the works of Xue Dubi, the textual sources that instructors turned to most for their lessons on citizenship in the Beijing and Jiangsu prisons

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Guides to Reform were from the post-1900 genre of mainly Japanese-modeled primary and secondary school civics, history, and ethics textbooks, popular patriotic histories, translated European and mainly American civics texts, and ethics and civics compilations with translated foreign and domestic content. Although ethics appeared in familiar ways in all of these texts, volumes such as Essential Reading for Citizens and Shen Wenjun’s popular nationalistic history textbook A Short History of National Shame most plainly made the case for the link between the personal ethical cultivation of citizens and national salvation. A narrative of China’s national renewal in response to the humiliations at the hands of imperialists from the Opium Wars to the Russian and Japanese incursions in Manchuria of 1905–06, A Short History of National Shame succinctly articulated the common early Republican nationalist view formulated around the revised Confucian moral principle of “sense of shame” (chi) that was to be extended to all citizens and the nation. The primary duty of the citizen and the Republic to “restore sovereignty” and “wipe away decades of national humiliation” was to proceed, like a mass process of self-cultivation, through steps of recognition, repentance, cultivation, and renewal—a process of reformation.65 This theme, with its social Darwinian sense of crisis and lessons of proper comportment, patriotic rituals of flag carrying and national anthem singing, and the ethics of “patriotic citizens” were reprised in the compilations by Xue Dubi and the lectures of prison instructors. Following Xue Dubi’s songbook, prisoners were taught to sing the themes out in unison.66 Shao Zhenji, like most prison instructors, made much of “national shame.” Aiming at stirring personal feelings of humiliation and indignation in his audience, he pointed to nearby examples in Shanghai, such as the “Westerners’ park” on the Bund, infamous for barring entrance to Chinese. Linking this symbol of national humiliation to the everyday public hygiene and civic morality failures of Chinese citizens, he claimed that the exclusion had only come about when Chinese visitors had “plucked the flowers and trees or chased the animals and birds or threw things at the fish or became savagely angry.” The consequence for such failures of virtue, he warned, would not be amusing: the Chinese would become “slaves from lost nations,” like the people of Egypt, Poland, India, Burma, Annam, Korea, and the Ryukyu Islands, and even be in danger of the “extinction of the race,” like the “black slaves” and the “red man” in America. The “white people” could provide the model of “hygienic modernity,” but they were deceitful, dangerous, and “not naturally well-intentioned toward yellow people.” In the manner of the “national shame” histories, Shao’s lessons on citizenry, patriotism, and history spoke not just of avoiding genocide, but of a national revival launched as a collective expiation of the “national shame.” With

Guides to Reform the predicament of the nation cast as an ethical crisis for all its citizens and so interpreted in the patterns of late imperial ethical cultivation, the national body of citizens had first to be educated so as to come to awareness of its shame. This meant, in part, teaching the history of suffering at the hands of imperialists from the First Opium War to the Japanese Twenty-One Demands of 1915. Shao taught the subject less to illuminate than to excite passions so inmates would emotionally feel the humiliations of the nation personally. He thundered in one session, “One day we will wash away and purify this shame and we will glare out fiercely over the whole earth, amply obtaining unsurpassed glory.”67 On this march to glory it would not be sufficient for citizens to be passively good. Echoing Xue Dubi and others, Shao associated China’s weakness with its isolation from the world and its oppressive “autocratic state,” which had denied people a role in state affairs. Hence, he called on the inmates to be aware citizens, who actively carry out their civic duties and “love the nation like a family.” Repeatedly, he made it clear that the remaking of the citizenry and, indeed, of the national character, which was required for the national mobilization to save the nation, had to originate from individual internalization and cultivation of morality. To be a citizen meant having and maintaining good conduct and a moral mind.68 The convicts, moreover, were not just to take part in this transformational role of the citizenry, but, Shao held, ought to strive to take the lead. “Criminals in a nation,” Shao told the prisoners, “are like worms in an organ or a body being stopped up and swollen with constipation.” So to pursue “the reform of the national destiny,” he stated, “we should begin from the selfrenewal of prisoners.”69 He continued: “If [you] prisoners are capable of selfrenewal, purifying yourselves and becoming good, and acting like good citizens of a great nation, then not only will your conduct be respected by the masses, but also that patriotism will inspire society, which, as quick as an echo, will mutually urge each other onward to unify the mind of the nation, to collectively seek superior governance, and so bring transformation within a moment.”70 The rehabilitative process, he promised, could transform social pariahs into agents of a grand national renewal. Such lessons in social conduct and civics further endowed reformation with great purpose. TECHNIQUES OF INTROVERSION

A typical early 1927 report from the Jiangsu No. 2 Prison made it sound like the instruction program had been a great success: The instructor’s talks had inspired the prisoners, and his methods were “soothing them and clarifying everything.”71 This overly sanguine bureaucratic boilerplate does not inspire

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Guides to Reform confidence; every instructor could not have been talented and inspirational, and there is evidence that many were far from it. The young criminologist Yan Jingyue was appalled, for instance, to witness an instructor at the Beijing No. 1 Prison in 1927 standing at the podium tediously reading from his instructional text before a disaffected-looking group of inmates for nearly thirty minutes without a break. Based on his observations, Yan held that prisoners received far less instruction than the regulations, plans, and schedules had asserted, and that teaching was not carried out with the detail and concern claimed by prison authorities. Yan also reported that instructors not only filled out prisoner evaluation forms in a pro forma way and produced inaccurate statistics on reform, but that “each week instructors happily speak a few sentences of admonitory words that are lacking in deep concern.” Instructors had admitted to him that they wrote up their lectures mainly to send to the Ministry of Justice.72 If this depiction was accurate, it would seem the project of reformation was in jeopardy. After all, like all institutional projects of mass introversion that continually struggle with the practical challenges and limitations involved with conveying the message and winning over their audience, it depended heavily on the abilities and commitment of instructors. Yet, Yan Jingyue’s own firsthand writings also provide evidence that certain instructors and visiting lecturers served with remarkable commitment, skill, and charisma; other sources, including official reports, offer similarly credible testimonies. For instance, a 1927 official report praised the oratory skills of a high-ranking military officer in the Feng Yuxiang organization who lectured in prisons: “Formerly, when Mr. Zhang Zhijiang lectured at the Beijing No. 1 Prison, an audience of over four hundred people would listen to him for up to three hours. Due to his fervent sincerity and determination, all of the many listeners were moved to awareness and did not look tired.”73 The talent and energy of particular instructors surely were vital, though organizing a practicable regimen was just as important. The Beijing government’s prison rules and regulations specified in detail the basic plans and considerable paperwork, inspections, teaching of large assembly sessions, smaller classes by prisoner “classification,” and “individual instructions” expected of instructors. But what was actually done clearly varied with each instructor and with the parameters of the job in each prison. To begin with, there was a calculus to be made about personnel, time, and inmate numbers. In 1926 the Beijing No. 1 Prison reported employing one main instructor, three teachers, and one teacher’s assistant. Some prisons brought in supplemental teachers or religious preachers from the outside or had the warden and section chiefs (senior prison officers) offer lectures. In some cases, there was only one instructor for a

Guides to Reform prison holding some five hundred inmates. While the main instructors tended to stay in their positions over a number of years, the supplemental positions came and went with available resources, as did the personnel.74 Even in the best-staffed prison, it would have been difficult to carry out the mandated assignments (not to mention the grandiose aspirations) in full. Prison reports typically defended the industriousness of instructors as if expecting criticism, even as they provided evidence of notable variations in the actual instructional schedules, hours of teaching, and practices. For instance, instead of holding the mandated two-hour large assembly instruction on Sundays, the Jiangsu No. 3 Prison in Suzhou held two one-hour sessions during the week.75 The greatest reported variations were with the one-to-one “individual instructions,” which by regulation were to take place “at any place, at any time” according to conditions and opportunities. In 1927 when the Jiangsu No. 1 Prison instructor reported spending only two hours on such sessions in a week, Instructor Yao Chengqing at the Jiangsu No. 2 Prison was devoting fifteen hours a week on individual instructions, including 106 sessions for prisoners being released, 82 for the newly admitted, 3 for those being punished, 2 for those receiving rewards, 2 for sick prisoners, and 1 regarding a letter received. Yao’s numbers were closer to the typical reports from the Beijing and Jiangsu prisons, which tended to record between ten and twenty hours of individual instruction a week, the aim being to reach all inmates once in a month.76 The picture that emerges from the record suggests that while the overburdened and underresourced instructors and wardens could never hope to carry out the mandated curriculum in full and, in fact, dramatically pared down and simplified the enterprise, these very efforts testify to their pragmatic attempts to make a functioning reality of the reformation program. Wang Yuanzeng’s Beijing No. 1 Prison originally garnered the greatest attention at home and abroad for such modern innovations as, for instance, its rendition of the Pennsylvania-style instruction hall, with its wooden stalls designed to permit inmates to look only at the lecture podium and not each other;77 but most innovations to prison instruction were mundane simplifications in response to challenges within the walls. In 1922 the Jiangsu No. 2 Prison reported moving all assembly sessions into the wards (and so gathering much smaller numbers of prisoners) because the inconveniently located instruction hall posed a security risk.78 By January 1927 Jiangsu No. 3 and Jiangsu No. 4 no longer reported holding “classification instruction,” acknowledging what was clearly an open secret in most prisons—that nobody was really instructing prisoners in groups classified (as regulations demanded) by the crime categories, numbers of convictions, or diagnosed characteristics. The Jiangsu prisons increasingly used the term “workshop instruction” and “ward instruction,” indicating that these sessions were associated simply with locations

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Guides to Reform in the prison and not distinctive methodological approaches to separating inmates. Indeed, instruction was increasingly carried out not just in the originally designated classrooms and assembly halls, but in any convenient area where a set of low wooden stools or benches could be set out in front of a space for a teacher and a portable blackboard.79 Similar pragmatic steps were taken with regard to pedagogy. Instructors were generally careful to lecture in language simple enough for the mainly illiterate inmates to understand. Falling back on time-honored popular ethics and introductory reading-teaching methods, instructors told little stories and centered their lessons around presenting and having inmates memorize short, easily comprehended sloganlike moral sayings and a few basic Chinese characters for moral principles.80 In 1920 Jiangsu No. 2 Prison instructor Lu Chaoran reported, “I paste up on the blackboard the topics written on paper; then first explain the meaning of the topic to make them clearly understand it; then again present the meaning of the topic in a lecture in the hope that it will be clearly understood.”81 Such methods were reinforced, often, when instructors put up bigcharacter posters with key words, moral sayings, and slogans throughout the prison—a practice eventually adopted by all Chinese prisons and which would come to be common in many institutions and throughout society over the course of the century.82 If their choices often seemed influenced by the methods of the late imperial moralist lecturer or local schoolteacher, prison instructors and wardens seemed open to trying any new approach that might help arouse the interest of the inmates. Inviting in special inspirational speakers—Buddhist and Christian clergy, leading Prison Bureau officials, and celebrated moralist lecturers—was one way. For a time in the late 1920s, the YMCA lecturers even screened educational and newsreel films at Beijing No. 1 Prison assemblies.83 Then there was the idea of inculcating lessons through the enjoyment and camaraderie of collective singing. Promoted first, in its modern form, after 1900 by scholar reformers like Kang Youwei, Liang Qichao, Huang Zunxian, and Zhang Taiyan, and then developed in new schools and military units following Meiji Japanese practice, group choral singing was supported for inclusion in the new prisons by early reformers like Wang Shurong. The idea that both lyrics and music itself could have a transformative effect on prisoners was an important theme of the Beijing No. 1 Prison educational reform and subsequent national reform. Although experiments with organizing inmate music bands and having inmates write songs did not meet with much success, group-singing programs had great appeal. The regular choral singing classes (featuring Xue Dubi’s songbook) reported at the Jiangsu and Beijing prisons in the second half of the 1920s

Guides to Reform testify to the fact that singing was the single most successful innovation of the 1924 Prisoner Education Plan. It inspired imitators such as Taixing County (Jiangsu) acting magistrate Lu Chaobi, who in 1925 had his thirteen-year-old daughter teach songs from his own prison songbook to inmates in the Taixing County Jail. Lu proposed the songbook for use throughout the Jiangsu prison system. Choral singing would continue to have an important part in convict indoctrination throughout the subsequent Nationalist period.84 For many penal officials and instructors, the simple, easily remembered lyrics distilling messages of good conduct, morality, citizenship, and patriotism set to catchy tunes made such songs the ideal way for “transforming imperceptibly.” Xue Dubi’s Songs to Exhort the People, with its didactic lyrics sung to collected local Shaanxi and Shanxi folk tunes (long before the CCP would do the same), was the most successful example of this. According to Wang Yuanzeng, the two songs of personal reflection and reform that Xue Dubi specially added to his songbook for the 1924 reform plan and which were usually the first to be taught to prisoners and most commonly sung, “Morning Bright” and “Reflection on a Quiet Night,” were so effective in reforming convicts that they could, on their own, make up for poorly taught instruction.85 Committed prison instructors drew upon, adapted, and innovated with longstanding and recently imported methods and were continually making practical, nearly always simplifying, adjustments in an attempt to make prisoner education work. In the quest for an elementary, common language and the low-cost means through which elite messages could best be expressed on a mass scale in a way that would appeal to the largely illiterate, lower social strata inmates, they were key figures, along with those active in projects of mass moral, civics, and literacy education, military training, and political propaganda, in the formulation of a set of Chinese techniques and styles of mass indoctrination. The simple teaching methods, the poster slogans, and collective singing of propaganda songs of the 1920s prisons would, over time, come to have expanded uses and become integral to the landscape of the Nationalist and Communist propaganda societies. Each of these methods of introversion evolved distinctive styles, and most were designed to inspire a profound emotional stimulus meant to initiate the transformation of the mind. The great allure of music within the prisons and for figures like Xue Dubi, for instance, was that it had the power, if practiced regularly, to affect the internality. Xue Dubi’s songbook, according to the Prison Bureau, would help prisoners acquire “a cheerful spirit and a kindly, patient disposition.” Xue Dubi himself promoted singing his songs (which he considered specially adapted for the illiterate Chinese common masses) as a kind of regular selfcultivation exercise of mind and body that would, if done right, “influence

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Guides to Reform people’s temperament and encourage people’s will . . . regulate people’s anxiety and expand their spirit.”86 Similarly, in a visual manner, big-character slogan posters posted in the prisons were, according to a 1927 report, “to help bring about an emotional reaction in those who read them.”87 Regardless of the origins of the method, it was its ability to touch the heart and mind that counted. PURIFYING THE MIND: GUIDING REFORMATION

As part of its early 1920s prisoner education reform, the Beijing No. 1 Prison innovated some striking new practices of reformation. Instructors set literate inmates to producing “thought writings” about their reform process; they arranged special assemblies of convicts in which prisoners that were determined to have been reformed stood up before their peers to “describe the thoughts and feelings in their minds” and speak of their “former sufferings” and their “reformation after entering prison.”88 These “prisoner repentance” talks, in which the public performance of confession and repentance simultaneously represented the culminating moment of individual reform and contributed to the conversion of the surrounding audience of peers, are strikingly evocative of Pentecostal Christian revival meetings and Chinese Communist public self-criticism. Although there is no evidence that these innovations ever spread to other prisons in this period, there were some similar practices, such as the notes Beijing No. 2 Prison instructor Chen Hong required literate convicts to take and have inspected so as to understand their thinking. But more to the point, practices designed to have inmates reveal and critique their internal thoughts and feelings were central to individual instruction.89 Instructors, after all, were not just to be concerned with filling the minds of prisoners with correct thoughts; their principal challenge was to bring about a presumed fundamental deep conversion of the mind. All the instructors, in theory, had at their disposal a regimen of modern institutional techniques, established with the founding of the new-style prisons mainly on Japanese models, for observing, recording, ordering, and assessing information about each inmate’s physical body, social situation, conduct in prison, disposition and thoughts, and progress toward reform. The Personal Appearance Chart, filled out on admission of the new prisoner, was to include detailed physical information, a body chart, often a photograph, and always fingerprint records in accord with the latest dactylographic classification systems. The chart became the first document in the prisoner’s Identity Record or individual file, which was kept in administrative office filing cabinets cataloged under the inmate’s identification number. To the file was added a Personal History Chart, which, organized as a means of diagnosing causes of criminal conduct, recorded information about the prisoner’s family members (even to grandparents,

Guides to Reform paternal uncles and aunts, and all living within a registered household), family property, and economic status, religion, educational level, hobbies, use of opium or alcohol, and notes about the inmate’s “conduct,” “character,” and “feelings for his family and nearby neighbors” and about the general conduct of the whole family, including “whether the family is good or not” and the “nearby neighbors’ evaluation of the family.” Then there were regularly updated individual charts and records based on observations of the inmate in the prison: the Inspection Record was a regular summary of observation notes kept by officers and guards following daily roll calls, cell inspections, and general surveillance; the Correspondence Chart was a record of all names, dates, relationships, and the gist of the content of all letters received or sent by an inmate; the Summary Chart on Personal Relations recorded summaries of conversations during visits from family and friends. Finally, the Conduct Record, the key record of evaluation, was an overall report card with the following categories to be addressed: “whether or not obeys orders,” “number of times rewarded or punished,” “whether or not his belongings are kept orderly,” “attitude about hygiene,” “attitude about work,” “attitude toward instruction,” “actions and words toward officers,” “actions and words towards fellow prisoners,” “feelings for relatives and friends,” “reform and repentance status,” and “concerns about again committing crime.” The assessment was tersely marked “good,” “quite good,” “average,” “not good,” or “the least good.”90 Here, in effect, was a version of that regime of surveillance and control, as opposed to the punishment of violence and humiliation, that Michel Foucault famously associated with modern systems of power. In China, as in modern penal regimes around the world, not only were such technical systems never as immaculate and omnipotent in practice as they had appeared to Foucault, but also there had never been a single global form to them.91 For instance, following the Japanese, this Chinese system was as concerned with amassing knowledge about the family and social setting as of the individual. Nevertheless, this system of techniques proved useful instruments to modernizing, state-building authorities. Notably, the individual file supervision system, realized in its first systematically functioning form in China in these new prisons, grew to be a central feature of the massive systems of social control built up over the subsequent decades and culminating in the Maoist state. In contrast to the theories supporting them, however, much of the efficacy of these methods lay in imposing external restraints on inmates as opposed to inspiring internal transformations. Prison regulations modeled on international theories linked the closely observed recording of conduct with a systematic progressive scale of punishments and rewards—increases and decreases in the privileges of food, letters, and visits, and such applications of pain and restraint as palm slapping, forced kneeling or standing, locking in shackles, solitary

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Guides to Reform confinement—which were supposed to allow the prisoner a route by which to progress, step-by-step, to more privileges and responsibilities, and on to regaining freedom through rehabilitation. Yet, in fact, the prison staff typically applied piecemeal versions of these techniques and developed their own practical adaptations of “merit badges” or appointment to desirable prison jobs or punishments far more violent than those delineated in the Prison Code, primarily to modify prisoner behavior and ensure a disciplined, obedient inmate population.92 In the theories originally promoted in China by Ogawa Shigejiro, the collection and evaluation of individual information was also to extend into an “individualized” diagnosing of criminal conduct and the criminal character that would require an “individualized” treatment, which would be at the core of the rehabilitation process. Yet again, in practice in the Chinese prisons, little attention or time was invested in producing a detailed study of the individual for the charts and files. Instead, once basic information was recorded, an inmate was typically labeled according to a limited set of formulaic crime types and moral dispositions, which reduced the complex social realities and motivations behind individual actions to a set of easily applied and so institutionally useful stock patterns.93 Far from illuminating the internality of the inmate, the observation and file system functioned as a crude categorization that was generally used to rationalize the inmate’s subjection to the existing indoctrination curriculum. This can be seen in the comments of instructors. In early 1927 Jiangsu No. 2 Prison instructor Yao Chengqing reported that in preparation for individual sessions, “first, I clearly investigate and record in the registers, the prisoner’s age, native place, way of making a living, disposition, hobbies, family situation, educational level, and crime; then later, in accordance with the aim of instruction, I provide the medicine for the illness.” Yao’s “medicine,” however, was to “seize the opportunity to guide them beneficially, to arouse in them the thoughts of awakening to repentance and exhort to them the merits of reverting to being good.”94 In other words, it was the same moral education formula he taught all prisoners. Nonetheless, even if it was little aided by the modern information and control techniques, many instructors appear to have been genuine believers in the process of deep, internal transformation of the mind and character. For them, as in Shen Jiaben’s interpretation of reformation, it was a moral transformation, which in the manner of Confucian self-cultivation occurred in the “mind/heart” (xin). The language that instructors repeatedly invoked to describe this was precisely that of the texts of moral self-cultivation and jiaohua ethical education: “exhortation to reform [quanhua],” “transforming and guiding [huadao],” “reform and repentance [gaihui],” “to correct faults [gaiguo],” “to awaken to repentance [huiwu],” “to reform and repent thoroughly [tonggai qianfei],” “to show deep repentance and

Guides to Reform reform [tongzi gaihui],” “to repent errors and return to being good [huiguo qianshan],” “to repent errors and reform oneself [huiguo zixin],” and, most commonly, “to correct errors and renew oneself [gaiguo zixin].”95 The accompanying presumption, often directly discussed by instructors with the terms “good nature [liangxing],” “innate goodness [liangzhi],” “original character [yuanxing],” and “original state [yuanqing],” was the Mencian-inspired Neo-Confucian idea that ultimate cosmic goodness was innate in human beings.96 As Instructor Chen Hong put it to inmates at the Beijing No. 2 Prison in 1919, “People, born of heaven and earth, are from the beginning endowed by nature. One is essentially good. Originally one has no evil disposition.” The problem was, Chen continued, “in the midst of chaotic confusion and the perceptions of various situations in society, one’s corruption by evil customs deepens increasingly.”97 Instruction was carried out, as a 1920 Jiangsu No. 2 Prison report noted, “in the hope of opening a way to consciousness . . . because those who repent and renew themselves have not yet exhausted their potential to be good people.”98 Consistent with these beliefs in the moral transformability of the individual and the potential to return him to his original, innate state of goodness, instructors, in the self-cultivation tradition, believed in the regular practice of self-examination, which meant a scrutiny of one’s faults and the moral failings at their root. The form and value of such self-cultivation practices, and notably the view that ethical renewal required examination and confession of faults, were reinforced in the songs and texts used by instructors and preached to the prisoners. Instructor Chen Hong often urged prisoners “to make a self-examination in the still of the night” and so come to feel remorse, correct errors, and reform. As if reciting from a late imperial “ledger of merit and demerit,” another instructor called on the gathered inmates at his New Year’s Day 1923 assembly lecture “to examine last year’s merits and demerits and make a plan for this year, to get rid of all evil and to daily make progress in morality.”99 Such self-examination ideally would, as in the instructions of the late Ming popular Confucian moralist Yuan Huang, allow a person to purify the mind and constantly monitor thoughts and feelings so that evil would no longer arise in it or influence it. In precisely this kind of moral self-cultivation language, Instructor Shao Zhenji often spoke to inmates of “preserving the mind, speaking good words, and doing good deeds,” and “cleansing the mind and purifying the thoughts.”100 This profound vision of internal moral transformation harnessed to the Chinese state’s new prison system went much further than simply aiming to discipline and make inmates obedient; it was to induce conversions that would create active participants—good in thought and so in action.101 To set this process in motion demanded guidance, which was, in the words of a 1921 Jiangsu No. 2 Prison report, “sufficient to move their good nature.”102 The

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Guides to Reform best chance of accomplishing this, most experienced instructors agreed, was through individual instructions. Beijing No. 2 Prison warden Liang Jinhan held that in such sessions an instructor could “attain double the results with half the work.”103 Instructors could prepare for such sessions by reviewing a prisoner’s file, but the most committed instructors clearly put much time and effort into acquiring a personal familiarity with inmates. Like a teacher attempting to engage a wayward student, Shao Zhenji spoke to prisoners in a direct, sometimes severe, but often personable, engaging manner. And when there was need for individual instructions, as the regulations stated “according to the circumstances,” Shao knew the inmate well enough to speak directly to his or her specific situation. In this way, he came close to realizing the model for the prison instructor—the complex relationship of power and intimacy with the prisoner that Warden Wang Yuanzeng had originally articulated: “He should make them feel intimate, not afraid; be like a kind mother, not like a Board of Punishments official. Sometimes he has no alternative but to stand up to the offenders and show them their place. Also he should shed some tears of compassion to have them awaken to realization; in this way, he will begin to gain their trust.”104 In his individual sessions, Shao skillfully altered his tone from sternness and criticism to sincerity, supportive exhortation, and even caring assurance and sympathy. “Don’t be unhappy,” he told an inmate he was criticizing; “I am faithful in remonstrating with you and am kind at heart; and I am always so in order to help perfect you.”105 There was also an emotional effect to Shao Zhenji’s frequent sharply worded admonitions and interrogations. In a February 28, 1923, instruction of a prisoner punished for quarreling, Shao berated him: “Do you still want to quarrel and make disturbances for people? You are not in the least bit good. . . . You cannot avoid acting with such a lack of self-respect. You say someone was making fun of you. Then why did you act up when the others were being peaceful?”106 In another individual session on September 13, 1923, Shao caustically sputtered, “You say you are pig-headedly foolish. You truly can be considered pig-headedly foolish.”107 Shao subjected almost every kind of convict to his harangues, even the sick and despondent; he readily threatened the recalcitrant with removal from workshop assignments, consignment to handcuffs, leg-irons, and solitary confinement.108 Instructor Shao’s attempts to reach prisoners through berating, cajoling, and encouragement were not meant merely to realize their obedience, but rather sought to prod them through a particular process of examination, self-awareness, repentance, and renewal. The first step, regardless of the fact that nearly all inmates Shao counseled had been tried and convicted, was to have the prisoner acknowledge guilt in his original crime and that justice had been done. For instance, during a March 29, 1923, instruction of a newly admitted inmate

Guides to Reform convicted of forcible abduction, Shao immediately addressed the issue of his guilt with a discussion of the evidence: “You say you have been unjustly imprisoned. I say it is not even a little bit unjust. First, the young girl honestly and without falsehood gave a reliable statement. Second, the writing on the adoption paper was completely in accord. Third, the fingerprints matched.”109 Not only was there no question that the convict had “seized and sold” the young girl, Shao continued, but he had acted contrary to his own espoused Christian faith. On another occasion, an August 23, 1923, instruction of a female forcibleabduction convict who was refusing to eat because she claimed to be unjustly incarcerated, Instructor Shao began: “Who are you holding a grudge against? . . . Here in prison you never see those you have wronged. What does it have to do with you whether someone’s daughter has a good or bad reputation or will live or die? You say your family situation was impoverished. Then how did you have money to do those good things and save those people? If you were truly so good hearted, why have none of these fortunate beneficiaries of yours come to thank you? . . . It can be seen, in fact, that your notion of claiming injustice has come to the point that it has backfired and given you a comeuppance.”110 As with all such records, Shao’s notes left only blank spaces to denote that the inmate had spoken. Still, we can infer from his rejoinders that he did not rest until he had persuaded or browbeaten the prisoner to confess and so acknowledge the facts of the case and admit guilt and responsibility. But this was not sufficient. Instructor Shao, like most of his colleagues, assumed that at the root of every crime, no matter what social, economic, or personal relationship causes might be identified, there was, at a deeper level, a moral failing. In the manner of the tradition of moral self-cultivation, it was necessary to uncover the original ethical lapse. For instance, in his June 21, 1922, instruction of two former prison guards convicted of bribery, Shao aimed to make them understand that the problem requiring correction was their greed. Yet the moral weakness that Shao, like most of his fellow instructors, most commonly identified was lack of filial piety. Speaking on October 29, 1922, to a theft convict, a Hubei farmer who had migrated to Shanghai, Shao described a chain of causes for the young man’s thieving, originating with the “great error of not being filial to his mother.” Due to his lack of filial piety, Shao explained, he had quarreled with his mother and so had fled to Shanghai; and because he had taken up with a girlfriend and was unemployed, he had turned to theft to support her. To another prisoner who had committed assault, Shao was even more blunt: “Don’t be an unfilial criminal.”111 Accusations of unfilialness, more than any other accusation of ethical lapse, struck at a profoundly emotional chord and were intentionally used at moments already fraught with emotional sensitivity. This was consistent with the modern

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Guides to Reform penal-theory strategy—described by Ogawa Shigejiro and established in foundational prison documents—of “realizing opportunities for reform” to psychologically manipulate inmates at such moments of emotional vulnerability as on occasions of sickness, punishment, reward, or following an upsetting visit or letter from home.112 In fact, moments when prisoners encountered demands for divorce; suffering from illness; or deprivation of wives, children, or siblings; or the deaths of cellmates or family members proved the most opportune for instructors to attempt to influence them through displays of intimate consolation, sympathy, and sincerely sharing in justifiable emotion. In individual guidance and lectures, the appeal to emotions was central to bringing about reformation as the transformation of feelings.113 And the most profound feelings to share were not just those having to do with parents, but, for the mostly male inmates, the emotions relating to their mothers. “What thoughts and feelings do you have about this?” Instructor Shao asked a prisoner regarding a letter he had received from home with news of his mother. Shao noted in his transcription of this December 10, 1922, individual instruction that the prisoner then wept. Shao continued: “Needless to say, your officials are pained to tears, even if other observers are not filled with feelings of sadness.” The letter had informed the inmate that his mother “had been exhausted in bed for seven days”; but when she received his letter, “her heart was filled with joy” and she had arisen from her sickbed, “her illness suddenly cured.” His mother might be in Xuzhou, Shao concluded, but “her heart is in Shanghai.” Shao paused, sustaining the emotional moment, and then began to speak of steps to take toward reformation, and so the ultimate consolation to and reconciliation with his mother.114 Presumptions of the sort of intense mother-son “emotional attachment” and the son’s sense of guilt in repaying parental kindness, which Hsiung Ping-chen has discussed with regard to late imperial times, were for instructors often at the core of relating an inmate’s emotional awareness of filial failure to a determination to undergo a moral reform.115 Human feelings (renqing) in family relations, Eugenia Lean has written, “were thought to represent the relations of the larger political and cosmological order and thus served as the foundation of moral truth.”116 In this context, instructors proceeded not so much along Ogawa’s tactic of manipulating weakness, but rather according to a notion, familiar in the moral self-cultivation tradition, of inspiring a sincere recognition of the immanence of the moral principle (often filial piety): The emotional catharsis brought about a coming to awareness and so opened the way to genuine sincerity and toward regaining goodness and the purity of the mind. The most powerful moments for such recognitions both for instructors Shao Zhenji and Chen Hong, for instance, were following the death of an inmate’s

Guides to Reform mother. At the onset of such instructions, the inmate was usually upset and weeping. In one case, Instructor Chen began: “Crying? It is necessary. It would be inhuman for a human being to encounter a family death and not feel like weeping. . . . I have observed your weeping . . . and know that a little bit of your sincerity and innate goodness has not been destroyed.” In exactly the same kind of situation, Shao Zhenji told the inmate: “From this I can see that you still retain dignity in your nature.” With the expression of this morally pure emotion understood as an emanation of the individual’s inherent goodness, the moment had come to move on to recognizing moral failings and flawed conduct and so renewal and reform. But this had to begin with the expiation of shame and guilt; reform would redress the disgrace of the unfilialness that had led the offender to prison. Instructor Chen spelled it out: “By being good, your mother, even though she is dead, will still have honor in having had a child. . . . When you were not good, for your mother, having a child was just the same as not having a child. Although she had given birth, she had also been disgraced. Your desire to repay parental kindness will depend upon whether or not you are able to be good, not on your continual crying.”117 The intense emotional guilt associated with the culturally dominant value of filial piety, especially as related to mothers, was a powerful weapon to place in the hands of these state institutions of introversion and their agents. THE PRISON INSTRUCTOR’S CONTRIBUTION

Prison instructors like Shao Zhenji were a new kind of agent of the modern state, with a brief to teach and transform the aberrant into good citizens for the benefit of social order and the advancement of the national project. There were other such figures involved in ordering and educating citizens—policemen, government schoolteachers, military training officers, propagandists—at the time, though none with the same profile and mission as the prison instructor. Unlike jailers and wardens or those who carried out punishments in the past, they were educated, salaried officials expected to be paragons of virtue. And yet, in bureaucratic and social status they were of the middle strata, educated aspirants to official and elite status; they had nothing like the social position or distant aura of power of the imperial-era magistrate. Rather, they were closer to and more engaged with their charges from among the people than any previous state official of such dignity. They were teacher-moralists and penal officers in a security institution armed with new mechanisms of control. And they were charged with carrying out the grand, ambitious project of teaching and guiding their commoner inmates not just to learn good moral lessons and patriotism,

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Guides to Reform but to inspire them to a core, emotionally generated, internal transformation, the reformation imagined by the founders of the system, which would move minds and so mold characters and produce upstanding citizens that would save China from its predicament in the modern world. It was an impossible expectation for instructors to meet. Neither sages nor always-gifted lecturers and counselors, instructors never had sufficient resources and time. They reduced and simplified their programs in practice. Even the most effective methods, such as individual instructions, had to be scaled back with increases in inmate populations and were often concentrated on entering and departing prisoners. Ideals continually gave way to compromises forged out of daily realities. Yet, despite all the obstacles and challenges, the turbulence of the times, and weakness of the state, many remained committed to the project. Indeed, it is in the pragmatic, simplifying adjustments made to approximate regulations, guidelines, and policies that we can recognize how these modestly ranked instructors made a living reality of the prison reformation system, taking a major hand in formulating the content, procedures, and methods of prison indoctrination. They drew both on the latest ideas and materials adapted from foreign sources and from familiar domestic cultural resources. To the modern techniques of identification, supervision, and control, they grafted the texts, teachings, rhetoric of exhortation and admonition, and pedagogies of late imperial jiaohua moralism and related practices of moral self-cultivation. Hence, they enlisted for these new state institutional programs such endogenous social-ethical educational concepts as retribution for immoral conduct by spiritual forces, selfexamination involving admission or confession of fault and shame, the pursuit of the purified mind, and the regular internalizing of ethical discipline. Moreover, even as they taught lessons about modern urban society, citizenship, and the nation, they conceived much of the reform process through late imperial language and conceptual patterns. Most notably, they believed that crime stemmed, in origin, from the moral failings defined by Confucians and Buddhists; that the locus of moral choices was in the mind, which was good in its original state, corruptible, and yet reformable and even purifiable through correct practice; that the cultivation of individual goodness meant the upholding of particular ethical values (filial piety chief among them) defined in family and other social relationships and immanent in and upheld by proper earthly and spiritual universal authority; and that such individual cultivation integrally contributed to the ordering of communities and the success of the state. Even as they taught a variety of lessons, instructors above all sought to inspire a moment of internal awakening to self-examination, cultivation, and renewal. The impetus, they believed, had to be a powerfully emotional experience, preferably one related to

Guides to Reform an awareness of a failure of filial piety, especially with respect to a male convict’s mother. This, like the other key late imperial constructs, endowed these modern institutions of state discipline and human remolding with considerable potential potency. Even though the prisons of the 1920s were never particularly formidable institutions of introversion, the instructors who brought the reformation system to life in daily practices experienced by tens of thousands within their walls contributed much to creating the sustainable coherence and distinctive forms of the modern Chinese rehabilitative system.

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OBJECTS OF REFORMATION: COMMON PRISONERS, 1912–1937

Common convicts (in contrast to political prisoners) do not frequently tell their side of the story to history. Hence, Chen Zhixi’s “Looking Back on Seven Years in Prison,” a brief autobiography of a prisoner published in Prison Magazine in November 1929, would seem a rare opportunity to view the evolving modern Chinese prison system through an inmate’s eyes. Chen relates that he was the eldest son born to a poor farming family in a remote county in northern Shaanxi Province. Thanks to his parents and the patronage of a wealthy neighbor for whom he had worked, he was at the age of eight sent to study the classics in a village school. Although, in retrospect, he thought he had been spoiled as the eldest surviving son, and recalled being criticized by the village schoolteacher for having “a violent nature,” Chen proved himself academically talented and was able to continue on into a higher primary school, graduating at the age of nineteen. Already very well educated for the son of a northwestern farmer, Chen had the good fortune, through the introduction of a friend, he tells us, to receive a scholarship to attend a Christian missionary middle school in the town of Fenyang in neighboring Shanxi Province. This was certainly the recently established Mingyi Middle School run by American Congregationalists and known for providing scholarships to promising underprivileged youths. Chen’s future looked bright. Leaving his parents, younger siblings, and new bride, he went off to school, as he put it, “carrying with me my family’s hopes and my own hopes to improve the family’s situation.” As a student in Fenyang, Chen was taken with New Culture / May Fourth Movement iconoclasm and socialist ideas. One of his best friends was an early Communist. Politics, however, was not Chen’s only extracurricular interest. In the winter of

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Objects of Reformation 1922, tragedy struck. Chen killed a fellow classmate—in “a morning’s fury” after being “extremely provoked”—in a dispute over a woman. Convicted of murder, he was sentenced to life imprisonment in the Shanxi No. 1 Prison in the provincial capital of Taiyuan.1 In early 1928, more than five years into his imprisonment, Chen Zhixi met a young sociologist, “a stylish youth,” in Chen’s words, from Yenching University in Beiping (Beijing), who wanted to hear his story, his thoughts on crime and prison. This was the twenty-three-year-old Yan Jingyue, a northern Zhejiangese first educated in Shanghai, who, as a student and then as a young professor in the celebrated Yenching Sociology Department, pioneered the academic fields of criminology and penology in China. The first scholar to undertake empirical social scientific research on crime and punishment in China, Yan pursued a method of lengthy on-site observation and interviews of convicts in prisons, regularly spending whole days and nights in the major Beijing prisons. This became the hallmark of the Yenching criminologists/penologists he trained. Establishing himself quickly with a flurry of publications of Beijing-based studies in his department’s own journal, Sociology Circles, in the late 1920s, Yan went on in the 1930s to pursue large national research projects conducted with major government and some private, mainly American, funding. Educated at Yenching to be a liberal-minded social progressive in the American-manner of the day and most influenced in his scholarship by the social reform-oriented American sociologists John L. Gillin and Charles A. Ellwood and the Dutch Marxist social criminologist Willem A. Bonger, Yan believed crime in China not to be the handiwork of the immoral nor the less-intelligent, psychologically or physiologically weak, but rather primarily (85 percent, he claimed) a consequence of social-economic conditions. Crime, in his view, was a symptom of China’s economic, social, and cultural crisis. To provide a cure, he had to study and diagnose the patients—prisoners like Chen Zhixi. Stated more expansively, Yan held that he “wanted to get close to the people in order to serve them.” He was also close to the government. Yan’s original Beijing prison research was made possible and guided by the long-serving Ministry of Justice Prison Bureau director Wang Wenbao. And surely, without government funding and relationships, he never would have been able to gain access to Chen and the Shanxi No. 1 Prison firmly ruled for most of its history by the formidable, Japaneseeducated warden Xu Bohua.2 Asked by Yan Jingyue to write an account of his life and incarceration for the inaugural issue of Prison Magazine, Chen Zhixi agreed and took on the challenge of telling his story so that it would be published and read. He would have to write something that would satisfy Yan, whom Chen would extol as “pure, sincere

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Objects of Reformation and loyal,” “a youth in service of society.” He would have to show Yan something authentic about the experience of crime and the prison—a sense of the problem— that Yan could put to use in formulating his analysis and proposed solutions; he would have to help Yan get “close to the people.” At least, he seemed confident of Yan’s sincerity and sympathetic attitude. Both were educated “new youths,” and it probably helped that the young principal of the Mingyi Middle School, Zhang Yuankai, was a Yenching graduate.3 At the same time, Chen had to tell a story that, as Yan emphasized to him, would be for his own good and “the glory of the prison.” The new magazine, after all, was intended to support prison reform. But most vital in this regard was to write nothing that would offend any senior official and especially not the older, conservative warden, Xu Bohua. Already, Chen Zhixi, who had originally been sentenced to life in prison, had had his sentence reduced and was in line to be paroled. Judging by his obsequious expressions of gratitude to Warden Xu, Chen thought flattery a wise tactic with a top official. But, most importantly, he had to tell a story that described a process of reformation that would be deserving of parole. His account, he explained, was written as an example to encourage other prisoners to reform as he had.4 The account that Chen Zhixi completed while still a prisoner on September 22, 1929, is not, if there is such a thing, an unadulterated voice of the elusively silent “subaltern” common prisoner. Hardly representative of the “average prisoner,” on the basis of his education and opportunity to write such an account alone, Chen in any case had to write within boundaries, expressing his views with tact and conforming to the expectations of two very different authorities. And yet we should not consequently dismiss Chen’s autobiography as inauthentic for being produced under duress by an atypical literate inmate. Certainly it was not a puppet reproduction of the prison administration’s position. Rather, in writing an account pitched between the young, new intellectual social scientist and the experienced provincial warden, Chen Zhixi told his story within constraints. In doing so, he offers us complicating details, themes, and tones that represent a distinctive voice and perspective on the prison experience and the reformation program. Through this constrained narrative (where the lines of constraint are fairly clear), Chen offers one prisoner’s carefully constructed perspective on the prison experience and the prisoner mentality that, when viewed in context, offers significant insights. Alongside this, I have examined a range of sources that open other ways to consider what the experiences of the reformation programs were and what reformation meant to the prisoners subjected to it. Chen Zhixi tells us he was reformed and offers a convincing description of the pressures he faced along the way. Yet the authenticity of this conversion is

Objects of Reformation impossible to ascertain and so reflects the fundamental enigma of penal reformation then and since. What we can discern is the prisoner’s narrative within restraints—a voice heard always through its interaction with the authorities seeking to shape it. This alerts us, as we examine the interaction of prisoners with penal reformation in its formative decades, first to the extent to which this mechanism of state power had to be adapted in practice to accommodate prisoners as they were, not as theorists and high officials imagined them to be. In this sense, prisoners played as significant a role in the institutional formation of the regime of penal reformation as wardens and instructors. Second, this examination of prisoners reveals how such transformative disciplinary projects, in spite of their numerous, repeated failures to achieve their own grand ambitions and the horrors often accompanying such failures, nonetheless make it difficult for inmates to retain any voice or subjectivity that is entirely free of the program to reform them. In this is one of the clues to the power of the reformation concept and practice, and an insight into the consequences of surviving the experience. The prisoner maneuvering to have a voice and act in relation to the disciplinary system—and the attempt to reform him—reveals the workings and lines of that disciplinary system as it actually was, not as it was presented by authorities. THE COMMON PRISONERS OF BEIJING AND JIANGSU

Records show that, like Chen Zhixi, the most typical new-style prison inmates of the 1910s through the 1930s were poor young men mainly in their twenties and thirties. Women convicts, most often in their forties and fifties, generally accounted for less than 10 percent of a prison’s population, and there were small numbers of men in their seventies (and sometimes as young as eleven years old); but the prison was primarily a young man’s world. Large numbers of these men were registered as propertyless and unemployed, though not so commonly in the categories reserved for the most abjectly destitute. At Suzhou’s Jiangsu No. 3 Prison in 1935, 58 percent of the inmates were labeled “without property,” while most of the rest were in the category “have a little property,” which was defined as a thatched cottage or small amount of land. Although education levels were appreciably higher in Shanghai than in most places and rose in the 1930s, the largest proportion of prisoners, unlike Chen Zhixi, were listed as uneducated, and so illiterate, with women usually recording far lower literacy rates than men.5 This condition of the inmate population alone, as we have seen, compelled instructors to modify their educational programs accordingly.

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Objects of Reformation “Without an occupation” was among the most common prisoner designations under occupation status, but these tallies varied over location and time. In Beijing, the leading category for male inmates was often “free occupation,” which referred to a class of roving hired laborers and street peddlers. Women in Beijing, however, were more typically registered as “hired worker,” “worker,” and the most common category for women in most prisons, “without an occupation.” Questioning this data, Yan Jingyue argued that his investigations showed that the largest proportion of Beijing prisoners were of peasant origin. At the Jiangsu No. 4 Prison in Nantong, north of the Yangzi River, and to a lesser extent at the Jiangsu No. 3 Prison in Suzhou, large numbers of prisoners were indeed listed as peasant-farmers, while in the major Shanghai prisons, the most common listed occupation was “worker.” By 1936, workers accounted for 40 percent of common prisoners in Shanghai. Workers and the unemployed were also common in Nanjing’s Jiangsu No. 1 Prison in the 1930s.6 There was, nonetheless, remarkable diversity in the prison populations beyond these categories. On the Jiangsu prison rolls alone, there were servants, rickshaw pullers, laundrymen and -women, collectors of birds’ nests, prostitutes, opium-den attendants, professional actors and opera singers, beggars, and even a few Buddhist monks, Daoist masters, astrologist / medical practitioners, sorceresses, teachers, and students. Most major prisons had large majorities from among local populations and major sojourning migrant communities, and yet also a mix of inmates from a broad range of provinces and dialect areas, and a few foreigners unprotected by extraterritoriality, mainly Russians.7 This array of prisoners, in the view of one disparaging commentator, “gathered the five [fraudulent] trades and eight eccentrics and evil people.” This was the jaundiced view of certain wardens and officers. “The greater half of prisoners are treacherous types,” wrote Beijing No. 1 Prison officer-trainee Zhu Ziyuan, and some were “outrageous.” His commanding officer, Warden Wang Yuanzeng, held that most convicts had become so habituated to criminal conduct that their life experiences and personal characters were entirely unlike those of ordinary people. Yet statistics reveal that while the numbers of recidivist thieves and robbers increased in the prisons over time, there were great numbers of first-time convicts, many brought in on drugs (often due to a failure to pay fines), morals, or other charges that did not particularly indicate a pattern of criminal behavior. The greatest numbers of prisoners had been sentenced for petty theft. Alongside these were significant numbers sentenced for injury/ assault and kidnapping, and fewer for murder, fraud, misappropriation of funds, grave robbing, adultery, illicit consensual sex (fornication), abortion, false accusation, and impersonating a soldier. A handful of inmates in Beijing in the 1920s

Objects of Reformation were even listed under the old imperial-era offenses of “disobedience” against the family and “injuring a respected senior relative.”8 The prison system purported to diagnose and understand in order, as we have seen, to evaluate and so reform the mentality and motivations of the criminal. Yet the categories of “crime causes” in the statistics were blunt instruments that produced reductive characterizations useful for prison organizational processes but otherwise not particularly illuminating. The clearest message they could relate was one that echoed the prevailing international and Chinese criminology theories and the policing priorities of the day: The major portion of prisoners were petty thieves and robbers driven to crime by “economic oppression.” Nearly all of these, like most prisoners, had been arrested, tried, and sentenced in and around one of the major cities in which the new legaljudicial-penal apparatus of police forces, procurators, courts, and prisons was well established.9 Government and academic crime experts, like European and American criminologists, often associated crime and criminals with poor urban slums, such as Outer Chaoyang Gate and the mat-shed shanty towns on the outskirts of Beijing or the Shanghai working-class neighborhoods of Zhabei and Nanshi. The economic determinist perspective sometimes blended with the long-standing common wisdom (influenced by Confucian statecraft thinking) that crime increased during the winter, when rural people with little to do in the fields and the chronically poor were cold, lacked sufficient food, and had debts to settle prior to the Chinese New Year. This logic had been behind the late imperial practice continued into the Republic of “winter defense” charity kitchens and other outdoor relief efforts for rural migrants who flocked to cities when periodic natural or man-made scarcity struck.10 The presumption that people turned to crime out of desperate economic need was supported and elaborated upon by Yan Jingyue and several of his fellow criminologists, with their studies of prison inmates. Yan portrayed Beijing convicts as a mix of struggling rural migrants and an urban underclass of unemployed vagrants, orphans, beggars, lowly street prostitutes, and pickpockets, congregating in poor slums and crowded market areas like Outer Chaoyang Gate and Tianqiao.11 Yan’s students Zhou Shuzhao and Liu Yaozhen found that the great majority of Beijing women prisoners they studied in 1931 had been below the “poverty line” (which they calculated as an annual income between 140 and 189 yuan). Twenty-four of the one hundred women inmates in one study were widows, and many others had been left by absent peddler, servant, or soldier husbands to support themselves and their children through piecemeal handicraft work, needlework, and washing laundry. Unable to make ends meet, they had turned to prostitution, drug dealing, and, most commonly,

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Objects of Reformation human trafficking. A study of women convicts in Shanghai prisons undertaken less than a year later by the women criminology graduate students Xu Huifang and Liu Qingyu showed that most were migrants from rural northern Jiangsu who had struggled to survive in rough slums and make enough money as workers in textile, cigarette, or egg factories to get by and to send support to their families in the village back home.12 The evident fact that most prisoners came from materially impoverished situations, notable even amid widespread deprivation of the general populace, raised two immediate challenges for the wardens and instructors with the responsibility for the rehabilitation of the prisoners. First, the relatively petty crimes such as theft, typically attributed to economic causes, brought short prison sentences of a mere several months. A significant proportion of people were simply going through the prison revolving door with only minimal exposure to instruction.13 Second, the economic explanation for criminal conduct implied, in the manner of the criminological theory, that criminals were a kind of victim of social-economic forces without significant moral responsibility for their actions. Although prison instructors acknowledged the role of such economic pressures, they persistently pushed prisoners beyond such explanations so that, as we have seen, they would recognize a moral failing at the root of their conduct. Hence, there was a continual tension between a system of institutional measurements tilted toward emphasizing socioeconomic causes and instructors ever bent on assessing morality. The matter was of supreme importance because understanding the source of the criminal behavior was the essential first step in the reformation process. And yet both the institutional statistics and the instructors were hindered by their own reductive tendency to see a single or at least primary cause for criminal conduct. What many of the experienced instructors discovered was the layered multiplicity of the motivations, the range of specific contexts, and the complexity of human experiences that had led prisoners to be incarcerated. If there was a shared mentality to the convicts on entering prison, it was that they all had justifications for their actions, which is exactly what the instructors felt they had to break down first. Some who committed petty theft surely felt justified that their actions were undertaken for the sake of survival. Yet, for the enormous numbers of people in these decades who experienced immiseration due to drought, flood, famine, arbitrary violence and disruption of transportation and markets by warfare and banditry, the deflation of copper relative to silver, increased state extraction or predatory levies by local authorities and landholding elites, their survival strategies were multiple, varied, and changed with circumstances and in relation to other noneconomic considerations. There was

Objects of Reformation no fixed calculation of suffering or standard type of character that determined choices to pursue theft or banditry as opposed to charitable support or migration.14 Moreover, some thieves, like the notorious and later mythologized “flying burglar” of Beijing, Li San (“Li the Swallow”), chose their métier not out of desperation but out of interest and the promise of gains. Famed for having burgled even the Beijing police, Li San proudly acknowledged his burglaries and was entirely unrepentant during his three stints in prison in the 1920s.15 The motivations of prisoners convicted of violent crimes, always a much smaller portion of the prison population than those sentenced for property offenses, were equally irreducible. Chen Zhixi’s explanation of his tendency to violence and being provoked to fury and a physical confrontation retains within it the shards of a justification. Yet Chen’s relationship to violence was assuredly unlike that of the great numbers of armed (or at one time armed) men with experience of violence in an era marked by periodic civil conflict and, in many areas, endemic banditry.16 Similarly, women violent offenders had their own specific contexts. Most of the women imprisoned for murder or injury/assault had attacked their husbands, usually with a near-at-hand cooking cleaver, in a furious reaction to the husband’s infidelities or out of self-defense or defense of their prerogatives within the family. If only these women knew of the divorce laws, held the famed “filial murderess” Shi Jianqiao and several crime experts, they would never have ended up in prison.17 This phenomenon of women murderesses, however, was, in the view of the criminologists Zhou Shuzhao and Liu Yaozhen, due to intractable patterns of domestic mental and physical abuse of women. One Beijing prison inmate they interviewed in 1931 explained that she had killed her husband after he had repeatedly abused her, sold off all of the family’s property to pay for his opium smoking, drinking, gambling, and visits to prostitutes, and then one night, drunkenly cursed and beat her. She told them with great emotion, “Since I came to his home, I had not had even one heavenly blessing. He ate the white flour noodles; I ate rye flour noodles. He covered himself in a cotton-padded comforter; I got to cover up in rags. We never discussed a single thing. I was his servant girl maybe, not his spouse. And I only got a beating for my share.”18 This convict clearly felt she had had no choice and had not done anything wrong. There were other convicts who similarly believed they were doing no wrong even when they recognized themselves to be outlaws. These included, from a largely Shanghai-situated perspective, such sojourning or itinerant criminal specialists organized along native-place relationships as Guangdong gamblers, Shaoxing kidnappers, northern Jiangsu kidnappers and armed robbers, Fujian female swindler-traffickers dealing in foster children and fake permits, and the

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Objects of Reformation soundless, wall-and-roof-climbing southwestern burglars. Then there were those from the gang and triad culture, running the gamut from the foot soldiers of the notorious Green Gang and Red Circle criminal syndicates, with their “fictive kinship relationships” and ties to police and officials, to small-scale, local gangsters, with their own rituals, secret slang jargon, and codes of loyalty and righteousness. Even some of the tight-knit native-place sisterhood gangs among Shanghai women workers engaged in trafficking and other crimes.19 For all of these, their social-ethical code trumped state law. Sometimes, for convicts, the particular moment or circumstances justified the action for which they were arrested. As the notable Shanghai warden and criminologist Sun Xiong observed, especially in towns and rural villages, the permissiveness, social instability, and raw emotions common to the traditional popular cultures of seasonal festivals like Chinese New Year (when the saying went “the emperor prohibits nothing”), the Lantern Festival, the periodic popular local religious processions to greet gods (saihui), and even funerals led people to act abnormally and often into violent brawling. Even at more ordinary times, matters of “superstition” (that is, local religious beliefs) could, in seemingly minor matters, trigger serious fights and even armed feuds. Those sentenced for injury/assault or murder in such affrays might well have expected the state to respond to bloodshed, but they were unlikely to think they had any other choice than to defend themselves against a potential supernatural threat or a challenge to their community.20 Those sentenced for crimes relatively recently criminalized by law or by new active policing could feel a similar lack of culpability. Drug offenses are an obvious example, not just because codes and enforcement had only been initiated in the last years of the Qing Empire, but also because, in the early Republic, enforcement was wildly inconsistent and tainted by the corruption and collusion of some authorities. Yin Changfa has shown that in the Shanxi No. 1 Prison housing Chen Zhixi, by far the largest percentage of convicts, some 46 percent, imprisoned there between 1912 and 1927 had been convicted of drug offenses. The case was similar in Fengtian, as Frank Dikötter has shown, and in the Jiangsu No. 1 Prison in Nanjing in the 1920s, but not in the other Jiangsu prisons or the Beijing prisons.21 Another striking example was human trafficking, usually prosecuted under the charge “forcible abduction [lüeyou].” Although human trafficking and a specific set of offenses associated with it (for example, “forcible abduction,” “procurement/enticement,” and “illicit consensual sex”) were codified crimes in the Qing dynasty, Philip Huang tells us that the practice of buying and selling mainly young women was widespread by the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and

Objects of Reformation that the Board of Punishments in 1818 officially tolerated, as a compassionate act, the sale of girls by families in severe economic difficulty. By the early twentieth century, this flourishing and broadly socially tolerated commerce in women and children continued to be fueled by social imperatives of patriarchal Confucian familism and male sexual prerogative, even as restructured economic relations between major urban centers and rural hinterlands expanded and reoriented the market. So, while trafficking and related customary practices like “wife kidnapping” (to avoid a costly wedding) continued in rural areas, the largest markets for human beings were in major cities like Shanghai. In her study of Shanghai prostitution, Gail Hershatter has emphasized that parents (and even individuals themselves) primarily initiated such sales of young women into marriage and concubinage and that this activity was little disturbed by authorities, with only the most extreme cases ending up in criminal courts. Certain sources, however, show there to have been a spectrum of trafficking conduct running the gamut from cases initiated by parents to others involving degrees of deception, coercion, and violence; criminal syndicate gangsters, a class of trafficking brokers, many of whom were women, and part-timers all took part in selling women and children (including some boys) and sometimes sold them into factory work, prostitution, and domestic servitude. Although Philip Huang has rightly argued that the Nationalists brought a new legal regime and theory to bear against trafficking, incarceration rates show that the Beiyang judicial apparatus had already been waging a significant campaign against it in and around major cities. A series of local Beijing, multiregional, and national criminological studies of the time indicate that from the 1910s through the 1930s (with an increase in the 1920s) more women went to prison for trafficking offenses, above all “forcible abduction,” than for any other type of crime. Depending on how the statistics are counted, the only close competitor was “drug offenses.” So, at the end of 1925, thirty-two of the eighty-one women held at the Beijing No. 1 Prison had been sentenced in trafficking cases. These women, most of whom were widows over fifty years old, were nearly all occupational trafficking brokers. It was easy enough for crime experts to describe these women as turning to trafficking out of economic necessity, as they were surely without many other options; but they were also engaged in a widely socially tolerated social brokering commerce that they did not understand to be illegal until confronted by the new agents of the disciplining state. As the criminologists Zhou Shuzhao and Liu Yaozhen observed, these women were unaware of the legal restrictions and did not think they had done anything wrong.22 The early decades of the Republic were a time when considerable confusion and ambivalence reigned with respect to new laws and state ordering projects and their relationship to Chinese legal traditions and popular notions of justice

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Objects of Reformation and social morality. To begin with, even as the Beijing government’s Legal Revision Commission and Supreme Court sought to develop the new legal system, police, procurators, judges, and rural magistrates, retaining a wide latitude for interpreting offenses, continued to invoke a mix of old and new laws and legal principles.23 In many cases, crimes were prosecuted on the basis of new laws that were perceived in the community to be contrary to popular Confucian social morality. A former 1920s county magistrate lamented: Cases in which a husband seized and killed his wife upon finding her committing adultery, or where parents or kin had unfilial children put to death were not at all considered crimes under the old customs. On the contrary, they were encouraged by rewards. Down to the present in some backward counties, those customs still exist. Many of those that have to hear and to decide such cases feel these issues are difficult to deal with. For to act according to the current law that sharply stipulates and passes punishment seems overly harsh with respect to natural human feelings. However, if one judges the case leniently, then that would be contrary to the intent of the law.24

In the 1930s, these tensions between the drive to legal modernity and common social morality played out not just in courts, but also in print media as cases were publicly sensationalized in the newspapers. Among the best known of these cases, and expertly examined by Eugenia Lean, is that of the “filial murderess” Shi Jianqiao, who in 1935 in Tianjin carried out the filial “righteous revenge” killing of the former militarist Sun Chuanfang, whom she held responsible for her father’s murder ten years before. Her conviction and sentencing to ten years of imprisonment unleashed an overwhelming outcry in the press, petitions and influential people coming to her support for her moral action, until she was given a special pardon after serving only a few months of her sentence.25 Filial piety, which, as we have seen, was a crucial theme for prison instructors, was often also at the heart of the clashes between new laws and social morality. People carried out crimes, in cases, because of their feelings of filial duty to parents. And many expected that filial motivations would be recognized and serve to mitigate punishments as in imperial times. Yan Jingyue witnessed an inmate in Beijing incessantly shouting from his cell, “Are you going to discuss this reasonably?” Yan was told that this prisoner had killed the man who had murdered his father shortly after the murderer had been released from prison in a general amnesty. He could not accept that he had been sentenced to fourteen years of penal servitude for what he considered a moral act of “righteous

Objects of Reformation revenge” and would not stop loudly protesting that avenging his father was “filial and righteous.” Yan thought that, confronted with this moral-cognitive dissonance, the man had gone quite mad.26 The sociologist Lu Renji was likely right to conclude that “in the minds of the common people, crime is a moral issue, and is not related to the condition of society.”27 Of course, as we have seen, this view was shared by most judicial officials, wardens, and instructors. But even so, there was considerable divergence in assessments of the moral quality of actions and understandings of the meaning of justice, especially in this era of dynamic social-cultural change. Following his own experience behind bars in the late 1920s, the Nationalist (KMT) cadre and prison warden Hu Yimin described the multiple mentalities of his fellow inmates as follows: “There are those with thoughts from beyond the twentieth century; those with modern thoughts of legal authority; those with medieval thoughts of monarchical authority; and even those with ancient thoughts of supernatural authority.”28 Among all the diversity of views, however, a common thread for many prisoners was evidently that many believed the actions for which they had been incarcerated were consistent with their own social-ethical code. Many believed they had done nothing morally wrong; and it was precisely this mentality of the prisoner, as we have seen, that was the first target for prison instructors in the process of reformation. Beyond this, the sources offer a sense of the many who arrived in prison out of tortured personal, family, and social tragedies, the consequences of which would not be easily comprehended or disentangled by prison instructors or any kind of rationalization. There was a young man surnamed Gu from Zhenhai, Zhejiang, who had made it through Beiyang University, with degrees in Chinese and English, to a promising career as a manager in the sales department of the Xiangya Company in Shanghai only to be sentenced for embezzlement and die on May 28, 1923, at the age of twenty-four in the Jiangsu No. 2 Prison. One of his fellow inmates of about the same age had been a Shanghai street urchin who managed to get a job in a cotton mill but ended up joining the Green Gang, losing his job and turning to armed robbery. Sentenced to life for murdering a woman when still a teenager, he was by the late 1920s one of the most experienced inmates in the prison, though still only in his twenties. During her incarceration in the women’s ward of the Jiangsu No. 1 Prison in 1933, political prisoner Zhang Jinbao met a woman inmate caring for her infant child, who was serving time for an offense committed by her opium-addict husband. While the husband remained on the outside feeding his drug addiction, the wife contracted tuberculosis and died in the prison. The mug-shot photograph in the 1937 parole file of Zhejiang No. 1 Prison inmate Ding Quanfa

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Objects of Reformation is one among so many haunting images of human pathos. Ding stares out at us, a troubled-looking middle-aged man with the character for Buddha sewn onto his faded prison uniform. Ding had invited the “not yet 15-year-old” daughter of a neighboring family to a talkie movie in downtown Hangzhou and then “seduced” and “fornicated” with her at the Hangzhou Hotel near the main railway station. Charges for “seducing a minor” were only brought against him when Ding’s wife found out and had gone to curse out the girl and her mother. The file also notes that Ding was visited each week in prison by either his mother or his wife, though mostly by his wife.29 PRISONER CULTURE AND MENTALITIES

Initially often punished with long periods of solitary confinement and, even later, quite introverted, Chen Zhixi does not appear to have taken much interest in inmate life and culture at the Shanxi No. 1 Prison. Nonetheless, his narrative evokes a sense of the bleak monotony of prison life. Eventually, Chen, like most prisoners, wanted to work, if only to counter the tedium and social isolation, and he seems to have enjoyed his skilled job in the prison’s lithography workshop. Most of Chen’s reported discussions with his fellow prisoners had to do with concerns about their cases, prospects for parole, and rumors about possible early release. He himself repeatedly petitioned to have his case reexamined. Occasions of general amnesties, particularly Duan Qirui’s 1925 amnesty, he noted, made those “nanyou” (friends in adversity, that is, fellow prisoners) not being released “crazily upset,” swearing furiously and saying things like “That bastard Duan Qirui handled this unfairly” and “What justice is there in this mixed-up world?” It was not uncommon, indeed, for prisoners to claim injustice and question the moral authority of the system—which was, of course, insupportable for the prisons if they were to have any hope of morally educating convicts.30 Chen’s term nanyou (friends in adversity), moreover, the most common way for prisoners to refer to each other, pointed to one typical way in which prisoners saw themselves and their community. This was a relationship understood to be based on shared suffering, with the term carrying the added connotation that the suffering might be due to injustice or, at least, cruel fate. The many accounts of terrible and sparse food, illness, cells unheated in winter turning to airless, insect-infested ovens in summer give an initial impression that prison life was primarily one of suffering, survival, and surely inhospitable to any educative enterprise. However, such accounts need to be considered in the relevant context. Certainly there were times when dire conditions resulting from administrative breakdowns forced inmates into a desperate

Objects of Reformation struggle for survival. Far more commonly, however, attitudes toward prison conditions corresponded with the living-standard experiences and expectations of the observer. Visiting penologists and criminologists to the Jiangsu No. 2 Prison in the early 1930s, for instance, commented that, while the external appearance of the structures and landscaping was impressive, the interior stank with foul smells and had conditions that compared poorly with Shanghai’s foreign-administered prisons. Prisons tended to be damp, poorly aerated, unsanitary places. Political prisoner accounts, such as the memoirs written by the women Communists held at the Jiangsu No. 1 Prison between 1933 and 1936, emphasize grim conditions. The crowded women’s ward is described as dark, stinking, brutally hot and swarming with flies, mosquitoes, and maggots in summer, and icily, drafty cold in winter. The women bathed twice in a month all in the same dirty tub of water.31 And yet the many prisoners from among the rural and urban poor had surely known equally miserable or worse environments. Luo Wengan, when again minister of justice in the early 1930s, may have sounded callous when he held that convicts deliberately committed crimes in order to be imprisoned during the winter; but Yan Jingyue quoted inmates who informed him that in winter they preferred the relative comfort and warmth of the Beijing No. 1 Prison to freezing on the streets. On one occasion, Yan witnessed two recidivist thieves arriving at the Beijing No. 1 Prison with a manner “just as if they were returning home.” The point was compellingly made in the 1937 short story “Women’s Prison,” credited to Shi Taxia, about a nineteen-year-old rural woman transferred from a rural detention center to an urban modern prison. Unquestionably written by someone with personal experience of prison life, the story relates how the young country woman marvels at the sturdy “foreign-style” prison buildings with running water and faucets and cannot understand her fellow prisoners’ complaints about the prison conditions and the warden’s embezzling; the prison was the most comfortable place she had ever lived.32 Whatever assessment prisoners might have of their living conditions, the prison lifestyle tended to focus the mind on basic tasks of daily living and, above all, on food. Prison food rations were notoriously minimal, infrequent, and of little nutritional value. Two meals a day was the norm, with Beijing and other northern prisons usually serving the conical steamed-cornbread wowotou, thin soup, or watery gruels, and southern prisons providing soups and rice gruels. Vegetables were few and not fresh, while grain quality was poor and sullied by chaff, sand, insects, and rodent droppings. Quality could only diminish in cases of prison administration mismanagement or corruption.33 In such an environment of scarcity, prisoners tended not just to be obsessed with food and hunger,

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Objects of Reformation but demonstrated a strikingly astute awareness of exact rations regulations and what was necessary to sustain themselves. For instance, records of prisoner interrogations at the Jiangsu No. 1 Prison during a September 1928 investigation into prison conditions and corruption reveal how average prisoners were so sharply aware and focused on every detail of their food rations—the relative amounts of millet and white rice provided, differences in the small measures allotted per inmate, the degree to which rice was encumbered with dirt and grit, its dryness, and how well it had been cooked.34 Exactly this sort of obsession with food rations is a central theme to one of the nonfiction pieces, “The Day of the Visit,” included in the 1936 One Day in China reportage volume. Set seemingly in the Jiangsu No. 1 Prison in Nanjing, the inmate narrator wrote, “With the prisoner service worker shouting out ‘mealtime,’ everybody in the whole ward noisily and chaotically scrambles to their feet, meal bowls, rice bowls, and chopsticks all banging together, clackety-clack. First there is one bowl of rice gruel—really one could only call it rice soup—a murky coffeecolor; if you give it a stir with chopsticks, you might perhaps find a bit of some kind of rice grains and lumps; this was made from steeping the cooked rice from yesterday in boiled water.” The inmates grumble: “Motherfucker, what’s this gruel called?” They sarcastically complain about the millet (instead of rice), the lack of any oil or even “weak flavored black and white salt.” The “Guangdong guy” discusses the details of the rations much like the 1928 interrogated prisoners: “Motherfucker, the prisoner ration stated amount is four and a half pieces (of pork) a month per person; we never eat as many as two and half pieces; is that a motherfucking special favor?”35 A concern related to food-ration quantity and quality, and certainly to the state of prison conditions and administration in general, was with the everpresent threat of the discomforts and perils of illness. One of the greatest administrative challenges of the new system of incarceration, particularly as it continually struggled with limited funding and corruption, was simply with maintaining the basic health and survival of such large prison populations. In one sense, the fact that these prisons were made functional at all was quite an achievement of the prewar Republican governments. For instance, the Jiangsu No. 1 Prison prided itself on a successful campaign of quarantining, use of disinfectants and medicines, and other health measures to avoid the deadly 1918 diphtheria epidemic in Nanjing. Still, prisoners knew much suffering and illness, and the risk of dying in prison from disease was ever present. Confined in dark, damp, airless cells with low sanitation standards and provided insufficient nourishment, they were highly susceptible to a range of diseases, which the poorly trained medical officers and their inexpensive herbal medications

Objects of Reformation and aspirin pills could do little to remedy. With human waste typically collected in buckets and emptied only once or twice a day, and unhygienic preparation and consumption of food by prisoners crowded closely together with frequent comings and goings, the potential for the spread of infectious disease and epidemic was high. The most common prison ailment, beriberi, was primarily a consequence of insufficient nourishment, especially vitamin B2 deficiency. Typically experienced as an incapacitating swelling of the legs and feet, beriberi was particularly rampant and deadly (usually through heart failure), for instance, at Shao Zhenji’s Jiangsu No. 2 Prison in the early 1920s. In the first decade of the Beijing prisons, gastric illnesses, tuberculosis, scrofulous swellings, and cholera epidemics were the most common and most deadly diseases. Tuberculosis, which the Ministry of Judicial Administration at the end of the 1920s estimated to afflict some 6 percent of all prison inmates, was generally a slow, inexorable killer. A prison medical officer conceded to Yan Jingyue that “there is nothing for those who contract tuberculosis in prison to do but die.” Still, death rates from illness were much reduced by the mid-1920s, with the major Beijing prisons reporting between ten and twenty deaths from illness each a year, though periods of corruption and mismanagement and government instability, such as the 1926–28 revolutionary period, could result in suddenly horrific increases in prisoner deaths. Mismanagement and staggering overcrowding at the Zhili No. 1 Prison in Tianjin led to epidemics taking the lives of 343 prisoners in 1921–22. More common was the slow suffering from chronic diseases. Venereal diseases were clearly underreported and ineffectively treated. We can only guess at the symptoms experienced in the cases registered as “apoplexy” (tounaobing), a common designation at the Beijing No. 1 Prison.36 Guidelines called upon prison instructors to take advantage of the emotional state of inmates during illness, but for those suffering from any of these common diseases, such teachings may have been the last thing on their mind. Within a social environment of precariousness and restricted movement and interaction, the society and culture of the prisoner appears to have been heavily consumed with communication and exchange. Chen Zhixi noted discussions about the possibility of early release, but considerable interaction had to do with the covert inmate economy of exchange (particularly of food and clothing) and the various ways of countering isolation and boredom. Yan Jingyue observed that Beijing prisoners surreptitiously exchanged goods and passed around bits of news about goings-on in the prisons, policies, particular cases, and events occurring on the outside. Prison punishment records for Jiangsu and Beijing reveal cases of smuggling contraband and books and the “misappropriation,” “concealing,” and “theft” of various kinds of food, flatbreads, yarn, and cloth—exactly the sort of

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Objects of Reformation modest items clandestinely exchanged among prisoners. Inmates were also caught “talking,” smoking or hoarding cigarettes, and, especially at the Jiangsu No. 2 Prison in the 1930s, playing cards and other gambling games.37 The sexual lives of prisoners, an issue of considerable concern at the time to American and European prison officials troubled by homosexuality, is nearly absent from the Chinese prison records and prison memoirs. A rare exception is a December 12, 1933, case at the Jiangsu No. 3 Prison when three male inmates were punished for “obscene behavior.” The issue of prisoners’ “abnormal” sexual habits was, however, deemed a sufficiently major problem by Luo Wengan when he was again minister of justice in the early 1930s that he proposed an experimental plan allowing convicts regular conjugal visits at the Jiangsu No. 1 Prison. Although supported by some criminologists, the proposal was much ridiculed and produced no further investigation or information about inmate sex lives. Yet, in a 1948 article published in a popular Shanghai magazine and purportedly based on interviews with Shanghai prisoners, the author held that most of male inmate talk was about women and sex, and that an astonishing 80 percent of male convicts engaged in homosexual sex, willingly or coerced.38 As in many institutionalized single-sex communities, there is evidence of communal bonding and conflict. Violence among prisoners does not appear to have been particularly common, but it did occur. From the first years of the Beijing No. 1 Prison to the 1930s in the major Jiangsu prisons, records show regular but not statistically high levels of “quarreling,” “mutual cursing,” “violent actions,” and “fighting” among prisoners.39 The 1923 case in which Shi Qingshan, a forty-one-year-old former soldier from Tianjin serving a fifteen-year sentence at the Zhili No. 1 Prison in Tianjin for desertion, sodomy, and theft, beat his cellmate, the thirty-seven-year-old murder convict and lifer Wang Gulou to death with a wooden club is an exceedingly rare reported case of sexual assault violence.40 Sexual violence was nearly unheard of or such a taboo subject that, like homosexual sex, it is virtually absent from the official record. By contrast, official and unofficial sources report one of the most common forms of violence in prison society to have been the systematic bullying of fellow prisoners by inmate “cage-head” (longtou) or “shop-head” (putou) cell bosses and their gangs of enforcers. There was a long history of inmate cage-heads deputized by jailers to maintain order and extract payoffs in late imperial jails, and penal reformers continued to view this as a significant problem, especially in county jails, well into the 1930s. Where cage-heads ruled, and the problem was periodically discovered in the new-style prisons, these rough former bandits or gangsters, typically serving long sentences and backed by several flunkies and the collusion or tolerance of guards and sometimes officers, enforced a hierarchical order

Objects of Reformation among inmates within a cell with intimidation, bullying, and even torture. The aim was extortion or “cell dues” to be paid in exchange for privileges of food, sleeping locations, and other benefits within the cell. Hardest on the weak and isolated so called “fresh fish” new arrivals, cage-head bullying relied on connections to corrupt authorities and fierce codes of loyalty, which made investigations to dislodge them difficult. Peng Zhen, Zhang Mingyuan, and other CCP members incarcerated in the Hebei No. 3 Prison in Tianjin in 1930 wrote of their ultimately successful struggle to resist cage-head bullying and extortion and have them investigated and prosecuted by the authorities. Their effort only succeeded, however, after their young comrade, Communist Youth League cadre Zou Zhennan was incessantly bullied, forced to sleep by the excrement commode, subjected to beatings, and had hot wax poured on his head—all for not paying his “dues” to the cage-head; Zou eventually died from this incessant torment.41 The violence of cage-heads and even more mundane aspects of prisoner society and culture at times created environments entirely incompatible with the ideals of the penal reformation mission. Prisoners had much to worry themselves about within their own world. Yet, the greatest threat to the program of reformation in prison life was not of the prisoners’ making: It was the episodes of abusive violence and corruption by prison authorities themselves. Prison guards, as the lowest ranked, lowest paid, least trained prison staff with regular contact with inmates, were most likely to engage in minor corruption or to physically abuse convicts. Indeed, the image of underpaid, corrupt guards was quite common in the 1920s. At the same time, the warden and reformist prison investigator Yin Bingdong argued that, by the 1930s, guards in the major prisons usually made enough money for a single man of little education to support himself; moreover, motivated by realistic hopes for promotion and respect for superiors, most of them upheld their duties. Other sources note how the close relationships formed between guards and inmates could involve considerable mutual benefit, trust, and even affection. Women inmates and women guards (and some male officers) in Shanghai and Nanjing often appear to have developed friendly, “family-like” relations on the ward. Of course, good relations often meant that guards took part in exchanges of goods, smuggling, and so forth that were against the rules and a form of petty corruption. In exchange for payments supplied by inmates’ relatives and friends, guards smuggled letters in and out and food, money, and other items to the prisoners. Yan Jingyue noted that when the Beijing No. 3 Prison in Baoding was closed in 1926 and all its inmates transferred to the other Beijing prisons, nearly every prisoner was found to be in possession of tobacco gained through trade with guards.42 This sort of

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Objects of Reformation covert material exchange could easily lead to abuses of prisoners by guards. Prisoner petition letters, notably from the Jiangsu No. 2 Prison in 1933, accused guards not just of taking payoffs, but of extorting money from inmates and their relatives and illegally confiscating for themselves money, food, clothing, and shoes. In May 1933, the Suzhou District Court convicted prison guard Kang Fengshan of obtaining valuables through fraud and misappropriation. Inmate accounts describe how guard extortion schemes were enforced with physical violence—clapping convicts in heavy leg-irons, forcing them to kneel for long periods, and beatings—until they agreed to cooperate. Some guards were just sadistic people. Even in the normally harmonious women’s ward of the Jiangsu No. 1 Prison, the CCP women inmates reported the case of woman guard Chen, who for a time in 1933 pampered and provided opium for rich prisoners who paid her off, while violently abusing all others. Zhang Jinbao vividly recalled an occasion in which Guard Chen brutally caned a new inmate within an inch of her life and forced her to kneel at length in the hot Nanjing sun.43 If guard abuses alienated prisoners, corruption and violence by senior officers and wardens fundamentally undermined the moral authority of the prison upon which the reformation process vitally depended. In the spring of 1920, two years before Shao Zhenji arrived at the Jiangsu No. 2 Prison, its founding warden, Ao Zhenxiang, was removed from his position following a massive prisoner escape and hunger strike and was sentenced to three years in prison for misappropriation of funds. Equally sensational was the case of Warden Li Yuwen of the Jiangsu No. 4 Prison in Nantong. Accused in 1927 of tolerating routine abuse, torture, and beatings of prisoners, which had resulted in the death of an inmate, Li fled to Shanghai to seek the support of political allies, with officers of the Jiangsu Provincial Procurate in hot pursuit.44 By regulation, the prisoners’ official recourse in cases of corruption and abuse was to file complaint petitions. It appears that such petitions were commonly used by prisoners, though they were generally treated with suspicion by authorities and the accusations suppressed under mountains of paperwork. In the 1930s, officials, often quite rightly, suspected petitions to be a result of CCP “agitation” or, as Warden Yin Bingdong found at the Anhui Hefei Prison in 1935–37, were part of cage-head schemes to resist his attempts to eliminate their influence.45 After writing several unsuccessful petitions requesting a review of his case and an early release, Chen Zhixi attempted to circumvent official channels and sneak a letter criticizing prison conditions and calling for relief to Yan Jingyue the first time they met. It was a risky ploy; Chen’s letter was intercepted by officers and he lost his work assignment, was clapped in irons, and thrown into solitary confinement. Yet if a large-enough group of prisoners joined the effort

Objects of Reformation and followed it with a hunger strike, it could yield results. The case of the 1920 Jiangsu No. 2 Prison hunger strike and preceding smuggled-out public complaint letter shows that this effective collective prisoner tactic predated the heyday of revolutionary politics in the prison. However, it was the educated CCP political prisoners, who entered the prisons in large numbers from 1927, that became the masters of this method. Their public letters accusing prison authorities of all manner of corruption and abuse was a principal means of declaring and justifying acts of resistance. Carrying out prison “struggles,” in CCP revolutionary terminology, evolved after several years into sophisticated strategies to appeal to penal-legal reformers and to arouse public sympathy through the sensationalist newspapers. Several such public letters seeking to embarrass and undermine the authorities with a litany of accusations successfully sparked official investigations, which confirmed some of the charges. As CCP inmate activists and prison officials both learned, common prisoners were most willing to unify in collective hunger strikes in cases of excessive violent abuse, usually involving guards or officers beating or torturing an inmate to death, and when there were significant reductions in food rations.46 In short, the most unified and sustained prisoner collective actions, whether they were led by CCP cadres or not, were nearly always a matter of inmates joining together to protect what they saw as the most elemental conditions necessary for securing their survival. Prisoner hunger strikes were proclaimed and performed loudly and emotionally in the name of moral righteous action and not always directed against all the prison authorities. A 1928 hunger strike by common prisoners at the Jiangsu No. 3 Prison in Suzhou, for instance, was launched to oppose the transfer of the warden, Li Junji, to another prison. According to the official investigation, the striking prisoners not only remained orderly and continued working in workshops, they wrote posters about Warden Li, who had only been at the prison seven months, proclaiming, “He is genuinely moral, loves prisoners like sons with an unrepayable kindness; bear hunger to retain him; rely on our mind and conscience to retain the warden; deeply feel the virtue; bear hunger, don’t eat”; and “the kind parent of all compassionate people is our Warden Li; we are willing to bear hunger and die working to retain him”; and “the warden is our recreated parent”; and “we have set forth our own true minds”; and “we nanyou are all feeling this emotion.” Inmates even “bitterly wept and wildly shouted out ‘Long live Warden Li.’ ” When the second section chief and several other officers and lawyers met with prisoner representatives to tell them Warden Li was not to be transferred after all, the prisoners refused to end the hunger strike until, eventually, Warden Li “in person, forcefully and clearly proclaimed to

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Objects of Reformation them that the rumor was mistaken.” At once, the prisoners “began to cheer, then returned to their cells and began eating.”47 Regardless of the specifics, such instances when prisoners made highly moralized pleas and engaged in always risky performances of resistance never represented a rejection of the prison system and its programs, but rather a negotiation strategy of the weak seeking to protect that which would allow them, at the most basic level, to live and maintain their own sense of human dignity. They were most often calling on the prisons to uphold their own regulated standards and were doing so with the moralistic language they shared with the prison authorities. The rare prisoner uprisings and attempted mass escapes in major prisons were sometimes similarly moralized performances, though in notable cases they also could be quite randomly violent and could come about when opportunities were created by chaos outside the walls or in the prison leadership. The notorious summer 1917 insurrection at the Beijing No. 1 Prison, in which the prisoner Gao Wu and his mates seized rifles and even injured Warden Wang Yuanzeng, and a more easily suppressed uprising across town at the Beijing No. 2 Prison came in the period of turmoil of General Zhang Xun’s failed coup attempt to restore the Qing dynasty. A decade later, amid the overcrowding of the revolutionary era of 1927, inmates at the Jiangsu No. 1 Prison in Nanjing took rifles from guards and tried to fight their way out of the prison. These and other uprisings, such as one at the Hebei No. 3 Prison in 1933, which resulted in the death of a guard, were always led by a small group of prisoners who knew how to use weapons and, unlike most of their fellow inmates, were willing to resort to deadly violence.48 Much of what might be termed the prisoners’ “everyday resistance”—“resisting orders,” “idleness at work,” “damaging materials,” “planning to escape”—was, in the view of the prison administration, not very common and often attributed to a small number of problem cases. For instance, Yang Sanmao, serving life for kidnapping and transferred to the Jiangsu No. 4 Prison after misbehaving at a county jail, broke rules so often that he was eventually permanently confined in heavy irons. Then there was Wang A’bao, who, rather unusually, received repeated punishments and special individual instructions at the Jiangsu No. 2 Branch Prison in Shanghai in the spring of 1936 due to his “bad conduct” and “bad character.”49 Yang and Wang were clearly perceived as not at all typical. Far more common than minor acts of resistance among prisoners appear to have been withdrawal and depression. Comments by instructors show that prisoners expressed considerable anxiety about the social stigma their imprisonment had on themselves and the “collective loss of face” it extended to their families. This was one reason that instructors knew that visits with family

Objects of Reformation members, which prison records show to have been common, were often traumatic moments for inmates. Add to this feelings of injustice and fatalism, fatigue and demoralization through illness and hunger, and the tedium of routines and confinement, and it is little wonder that the specter of despair lurked in the prison and constantly threatened its optimistic rehabilitative ideal. The political prisoner Zhang Mingyuan wrote that his prison depression reached an abnormal level and the aftereffects troubled him for years after his release.50 Held at the Jiangsu No. 2 Prison in 1928, political prisoner Li Yimin later wrote a chilling depiction of the feeling of isolation: “It was a seven to eight square meter room with nothing in it except a single bed of three planks of wood on a metal frame fixed to the floor. . . . I was like a small bird locked in a cage—eating, drinking, shitting, sleeping—this was the world of my life. . . . In this solitary prison cell, cut-off from the world, without being able to see any other comrade, a cold feeling of tremendous loneliness swept over my heart.”51 Some depression led to suicide, almost always by hanging. Although official statistics indicate inmate suicides to have been rare, the concerns expressed, preparations made, and contradictory comments of officials suggest that suicide and especially threatened suicide may have been more common than officially reported. By the 1930s, suicides were nearly always attributed by prison authorities to “mental illness.” Although rarely mentioned in Beiyang-era records, the Jiangsu No. 1 Prison reported thirty-three cases of mental illness in 1927, and the Nanjing Ministry of Judicial Administration would estimate soon thereafter that about 6 percent of the prison population suffered from mental illness.52 Chen Zhixi, as we will see, went through periods of both angry resistance and deep depression in prison, and some of these feelings were related to the criticisms of conditions and treatment he wrote of in the letter he attempted to slip to Yan Jingyue. With the admission of large numbers of political prisoners, including the leading CCP cadres Wang Shiyi, Ma Lin, and Li Zhimin, starting in the late spring of 1927 and the Ministry of Judicial Administration’s push for judicial independence and modernizing reforms in the early 1930s, even Warden Xu Bohua and his Shanxi No. 1 Prison were exposed to the harsh glare of external scrutiny. Evidently, Chen Zhixi had, for his own good, remained silent about many serious problems in the prison. In 1932 the ministry criticized Warden Xu’s administration for having over a hundred inmates die from illness annually for three years in a row. The criticism hinted at mismanagement or corruption involving inmate food rations—a particularly galling charge for Warden Xu, who had penned a detailed reformist 1924 report on his prison that laid out and decried the prison health crisis produced by endemic underfunding, rising grain

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Objects of Reformation prices, and the mismanagement and corruption of others (both higher officials and guards). Then in 1933 a group of prisoners led by Communists smuggled out to the press a complaint statement with damning accusations against Warden Xu and his staff and summarily went on hunger strike for improved conditions. The 1933 Letter from All Shanxi No. 1 Prison Inmates to Inform the Various Compatriots set out a long list of grievances: Section Chief Zhang and Guard Shen Guanghua engaged in extortion and illegal confiscations of care packages sent into prisoners in the name of “seizing contraband”; bribery could buy better treatment and conditions, furloughs, and even ease the way to parole, and it could be paid in money (for example, four or five yuan to a guard for the removal of leg-irons) or sexual favors provided by a member of an inmate’s household. A wealthy inmate, Cao Yuanqing, who had bribed a section chief to move him to the most comfortable ward so he could recuperate from an illness, had eventually been subjected to outrageous extortion by this senior officer. On his release in 1932, Cao took the matter to court and the section chief was dismissed. Inmates Gao Mingfu and Kang Wu’er lacked the resources for such recourse. Gao was savagely beaten by guard Shen Guanghua, who demanded to “borrow money”; and guard Zhu Guoquan beat Kang for extortion, seriously injuring his arm.53 The responsibility and moral fault, the complaint letter made clear, lay ultimately with Warden Xu Bohua. He was a figure of arbitrary autocratic style who ran the prison with his own “personal men.” And the corruption started with Warden Xu and his greed and patronage system. Just as instructors did with inmates, the CCP strike leaders sought to expose particular moral failings behind the “crimes.” Then they listed the evidence. Pay for inmate workshop labor was less than officially stipulated and often withheld, and it and workshop profits were skimmed by authorities; and they illegally pocketed money from the contract to produce shoe soles for the Shanxi Provisions Department. Warden Xu, the letter claimed, used his ill-gotten gains, the prison’s public funds and materials, and the services of guards for his own opulent Taiyuan household and stashed the rest away in a traditional qianzhuang bank, a temple hall, and a private grain storehouse (from which he resold the grain to the prison). These sensational accusations were not enough to bring down the powerful, long-serving Warden Xu; but he was officially reprimanded following an investigation, and this meant the ministry concluded there was some validity to the prisoners’ charges. After several such hunger strikes and continuing criticisms, Warden Xu Bohua was finally removed from his post in January 1936.54 Chen Zhixi admitted his own difficulties with Warden Xu’s regime in his early period in the prison, but he did not even hint (not that he could) at abuses

Objects of Reformation and corruption. What is clear is that prisoner culture presented real challenges to those intent on morally reforming convicts. Instructors would have to make appeals capable of encouraging prisoners to think beyond the pressing material issues of everyday prison life. The constant risk remained that either low-level or high-level corruption or abuses would undermine the moral authority of the prison administration and unify the prisoners against them. Even without such administrative failures, if there was one common aspect to prison life that stood as an obstacle to the reformation agenda, it was the solidarity of prisoners in their bond of the nanyou (friends in adversity) relationship, which established them as a moral community of opposition to the authorities. One way or another, the reformed prisoner would have to be one separated from the nanyou community. PERSPECTIVES ON EXPERIENCING EDUCATION AND REFORMATION

The first counseling Chen Zhixi recalled receiving in prison came not from a prison instructor, but from a visiting friend, who brought him the volumes Wise Sayings for Salvation and The Family Letters of Zeng Guofan—exactly the sort of popular moral prescriptive literature used in prison instruction. Not long after, he received a letter from his cousin written, much like Zeng Guofan’s letters, in the moralizing tradition of “loyal advice” and “precious good words.” “There is only resolving to cultivate good in order to return to the decree of heaven,” exhorted his cousin. “Set your will on studying hard in order to fully carry forth human affairs.” Chen recalled appreciating the point about studying, but rejecting the moralizing exhortation to reform, which he considered “the corrupt thoughts of stubborn old people.” He initially clung to—and this is one of the sub-themes of his account—his May Fourth iconoclastic new learning in the face of traditional ethical teachings.55 Yet, in time, Chen wrote of entering a stage during which he appreciated moral counseling and reading and reflecting on morality books and other ethical guides. Although he did not discuss the prison instructor, Chen penned a profession of faith in morally guiding the ethically flawed and criminal: “There are no bad people that have not suffered misfortune. Therefore, they are pitiable. What alternative is there to pitying them? Counsel them, that is all. What else is there to do but counsel them? Counsel them in the manner of speaking in gentle and genial words to enlighten them. Counsel them with upsetting words and warnings to be alert. Even if there is no other way but to punish them, still also counsel them. If you have authority, then counsel them

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Objects of Reformation through dignified actions. If you are without authority, do so by guiding them with wisdom. They ought to be sincerely moved by this, that’s all.”56 He withdrew further into his studies of such texts of religion and traditional ethics as the Confucian Four Books, the compilation Classics Perfectly Seen, the morality book On Awakening, Xue Dubi’s Speaking of Repentance and Selfrenewal, and the Diamond Sutra. He requested a single cell, where he spent hours in study and meditative self-cultivation practices such as writing in his “diary of prison self-examination.” Just as Shao Zhenji would have wanted, Chen wrote of his deep feelings of shame for failing his parents and his commitment to “repaying their kindness” through devoted service to them should he ever be released in their lifetime. If released after their deaths, he would honor them through living in an ancient mountainside monastery as a “wandering transcendental, truly free man.”57 Buddhist themes became more prominent in this stage of Chen’s selfexamination and withdrawal from the world. It corresponded with Warden Xu Bohua’s approach to instruction, which strongly encouraged meditation and the Pure Land Buddhist chanting practice of “reciting the Buddha’s name” (nianfo). Writing a poetic essay in imitation of a preface by the great Tang dynasty poet Li Bai, Chen Zhixi used Buddhist terms and images to muse mystically with a sense of distance on the material, social world: “Heaven and earth are the prison of humanity; reputation and wealth are the shackles of all living creatures; and life is like a dream; how much time is left?” The culmination of the essay came with Chen imagining his own internal transformation taking place before the immortals in the Buddhist paradise. He atones and the immortals cultivate him and the Bodhi appreciates his efforts. Yet Chen finally concluded that the beautiful dream of the poetic essay and this whole period of taking in instructions, removal, and “self-reflecting in quiet,” while important in calming his “recalcitrant and irascible disposition,” ultimately was insufficient because “my mind was disquieted, following the wind and the waves.” “A good mind that is not resolved is easily seduced by material things,” he wrote, and could again be led into evil and crime.58 In the narrative pattern of late imperial moral self-cultivation, Chen had progressed toward reform through stages of taking interest in moral counsel, acceptance of teaching, intensive study and self-examination, and a commitment to his own reform and pursuit of the good. But he was not there yet. Surely for most common convicts, especially since few had been touched by modern schooling, the familiar mix of Confucian ethics, Buddhist admonitions taught in simple aphorisms and stories, the emphasis on the emotionalpsychological demands of filial piety, the promotion of self-cultivation practices, and the threatening tales of retribution and recompense were more comprehen-

Objects of Reformation sible and more likely to tap into their mentalities of justice, fear, and guilt than many of the newer messages of building the nation and ordering urban society. But it did not appear that way to the prominent academic observers of the time. Professor Yan Jingyue, sharing the May Fourth secularism and rejection of tradition that Chen Zhixi had embraced as a student, strongly opposed the teaching of morality-book ethics and especially religion in prison. Marxist criminologist Li Jianhua considered such teachings “superfluous,” and Yan Jingyue argued they did not treat the real sources of crime. There is little doubt that Yan edited and published Chen’s account in spite of its celebration of moral education and Buddhism. Yan had actually argued that such teaching was beyond what illiterate prisoners could understand, and most of the content and methods, notably practices of self-examination, were unsuitable, ineffective, and failed to prepare the inmate to reenter society.59 He illustrated the point with an anecdote from one of his 1927 observations at the Beijing No. 1 Prison: “I heard an instructor instructing a recidivist thief. With all his spirit, he was speaking about benevolence, righteousness, morality, propriety and integrity and sense of shame and arguing why committing crimes was terrible and giving ample reasons. At the end, he asked the prisoner about his thoughts. The prisoner said, ‘Sir, what you have said is really reasonable. Now, I have understood it all. Later, I should keep it firmly in mind. But when I get out of prison and I’m hungry and can’t find anything to do, I don’t know that you, sir, have any way that will be able to save me.”60 Yan further suggested that the morality-book-style teachings of “good and evil and cause and effect retribution” could have “an anesthetizing effect” on some inmates and produce “aversion” and even worse conduct in others. At best, they only made “obedient good prisoners,” not “good citizens for social life.”61 Not just in this but in all aspects, Yan Jingyue was one of the sharpest critics of prison instruction programs, generally characterizing instructors as negligent and uncaring. Certainly, as already noted, prison records reveal plenty of evidence of formulaic practice and scaled-back curriculums that support Yan’s critical assessment.62 Yet, in his many quotations of prisoners and his facilitation of Chen Zhixi’s inmate narrative, Yan Jingyue, surely one of the keenest and most prolific witnesses of the prisons at this time, leaves us with contrasting prisoner voices. If the sense of multiplicity of views of the “subaltern”63 is insightful, it is evident that these voices were as mediated and restrained as those represented in official documents. Convicts like Chen Zhixi spoke to Yan in a way that they would be heard; and Yan quoted prisoners in ways that not only reflected his modernist-elitist perspective, but that served his argument that crime was a social-economic problem and required institutional, social, and political reform.

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Objects of Reformation Although Yan Jingyue’s critical perspective may tell us less about what the prisoners’ experienced than he suggested it did, it is significantly revealing about his own convictions over his years of observing prisoners and prisons. Yan, above all, criticized the prison system precisely because he believed in its great potential and its ideal of reforming prisoners through work and instruction. His articles, in this sense, were intentionally didactic and were aimed at exposing weaknesses to be reformed and highlighting exemplary successes. Indeed, he pointed to a number of examples that he considered successful prison instruction. His shining example was the Beijing No. 1 Prison’s education reform of 1921–24, with its progressive attention to literacy training, “prisoner repentance talks,” and the “prisoner periodical.” Describing witnessing one of the last of the prisoner repentance talk assemblies in 1926, Yan admiringly wrote how the inmate speaker “got everybody weeping, the mournful sound traveling far beyond the hall.” Clearly moved by this experience, Yan concluded that the prisoner’s talk had “inspired their self-examination and coming to awareness.” Not only did Yan ignore the consistent moralism of that reform, he ended up praising its achievement that most inspired him with the very language of moral cultivation and awakening through emotional inspiration that was at the core of the idealized Chinese regime of conversion.64 In another instance, when arguing against religious-themed instruction, Yan quoted from a letter received from a prisoner: “It would be better to practice the lecture method during the instruction time, through which they should clearly counsel about the meanings of the essential sayings, and explain them by means of analogies drawn from real situations in society. This can be done by the instructor or someone with noble qualities chosen from among the prisoners themselves. Whereas a prisoner may on his own not be able particularly to relate the good words to a mind-set of repenting and reforming, yet when other prisoners speak perhaps this can bring about ‘remembering past errors’ and ‘molding a firm will.’ ”65 Although Yan used the quote to make a specific point about involving inmates in instruction, it revealed how he and the prisoner thoroughly accepted the idea that prisons could successfully educate and reform the minds and behavior of convicts if the methods of reformation could be perfected. The sociologist Yan Jingyue was as much a believer in the ideal of reformation as any official, warden, or instructor. If articulated in terms different from those of Yan Jingyue, there was a similar dynamic tension between grim awareness of present realities and idealized belief in the system in the assessments of prisoner reform by prison officials and in prison records. Although certain summary reports routinely claimed success, the prison records reveal a common acknowledgment of the challenges faced

Objects of Reformation in guiding convicts, the difficulties in implementation of programs and maintenance of instruction standards. At the time of the parole of Jia Liaotou from Wang Yuanzeng’s Beijing No. 1 Prison in 1913, records showed only 10 percent of inmates were categorized as exhibiting either “excellent conduct” or “good conduct”; 90 percent were average or below average. The next year the prison listed 83 prisoners as “good and diligent” and showing “hope of reforming and repenting,” but the outlook for 148 inmates was not promising at all. Instructors and wardens were familiar with troublemakers who could not even be brought to accept the basic prison discipline.66 The most damning statistics for the reformation program were those for recidivism. Already in 1914 judicial officials estimated that up to 40 percent of former prisoners were likely to return to crime; and the Beijing No. 1 Prison attempted a special postrelease supervision plan for convicts who had served short sentences for drug and fraud offenses that were considered at high risk of recidivism. A decade later, in January 1925 the Beijing No. 2 Prison released 358 prisoners for Duan Qirui’s general amnesty and within a few months was again packed to capacity with large numbers of recidivists among the new admits. Another ten years later and among the 2,327 convicts who entered the Jiangsu No. 1 Prison in 1935, 516 were discovered to be onetime recidivists, 255 were imprisoned for the third time, and 17 for four or more times. With such figures, it is little wonder that historians have pronounced the rehabilitative project a failure.67 The Shanghai warden Sun Xiong even grimly concluded: Now twenty years have passed during which I was daily in the company of prisoners and was often engaged in prisoner education, and so I deeply know that when criminals enter prison there are more and better conditions for them to learn evil ways, while the conditions required for training them in good are few and difficult. Taking a look at the prisoners’ ‘Records of Merit and Demerit’ and speaking of prisoners as a whole, those with recorded demerits were not more than those with recorded merits. Speaking of individuals, the recorded demerits were not more than the recorded merits. Yet in the details of the recorded merits one cannot avoid finding hypocritical attitudes meant to deceive the eyes and ears of officers in an attempt to gain some rewards. In the details of recorded demerits, there were very rarely hypocritical matters. Indeed, many of these demerits were given with the attitude “as there is doubt, let the punishment be light.”68

The prison officials were aware of their systemic failings and the prison administration’s contribution to it.

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Objects of Reformation But there is another side to this story. Amid his pessimism, Warden Sun Xiong invested enormous effort in prison instruction programs, and his 1930s “model” Jiangsu Shanghai 2nd Special District Prison typically reported success in “moving and reforming” over 40 percent of its inmates. It might be difficult to educate prisoners, but he, like many of his colleagues, doggedly attempted to do so nonetheless. It helped if a prison had a highly talented instructor like Shao Zhenji, whom Jiangsu No. 2 Prison Warden Wu Kui praised for having “greatly subdued the social restlessness and actually attained clear results.”69 Yet many leading prison and judicial authorities expressed a patient optimism on the basis of the mixed results found in official charts and statistics. Instruction charts designed to evaluate progress, for instance, generally indicated that most prisoners were well below the average standard, but that there were always some who were progressing well toward reform. So, for instance, at the Jiangsu No. 1 Prison in 1917, 60 percent of the inmates received overall low instruction grades under 70 percent, which placed them in the third tier of a four-tier achievement ranking system. But the report stressed that progress was represented by higher numbers across the board over the previous two years; 14 percent scored in the top tier as compared to 9 percent in 1915. Most prison instructors recorded inmates in the category of having “understood the words” of instruction with only a relatively small number listed at the higher level of having “understood the meaning.” At the Beijing No. 1 Prison in the 1920s typically as few as 20 to 30 inmates at any time were reported to have “understood the meaning,” while it was a slightly larger minority of 116 at the Beijing No. 2 Prison in June 1925 and 96 at the Jiangsu No. 1 Prison in January 1927.70 The message these charts projected was that most prisoners still needed to be taught “the meaning”— they deserved to be imprisoned and to undergo the process of reformation— and yet some, and so potentially any inmate, could be educated over time and reformed. By the 1930s, several instructors, probably quite cynically, made absurdly exaggerated claims in their charts. Jiangsu No. 3 Prison instructor Zheng Longkui, for instance, reported the percentage of prisoners “moved” in a month by his instruction as high as 97 percent in 1933 and 90 percent in 1935 by simply counting all the prisoners who had not been punished! The morecommon and yet still strikingly optimistic calculations of these years were that around 45–50 percent of prisoners were “moved” at the Jiangsu No. 2 Prison and Jiangsu 2nd Special District Prison.71 Not only was there no official room even to question whether reform was even possible, all the standardized statistical formulas and procedures of the prison instruction programs were built around this conception of an inexorable process.

Objects of Reformation Many official reports and documents likely to be reviewed by government leaders or made available to the press were written as narratives of continual institutional progress and improvement and, in cases, were blatantly selfpromotional. The optimism about the prospects of reformation in such documents can appear unwarranted. Beijing No. 1 Prison officer-trainee Zhu Ziyuan, for instance, highlighted the model parole cases of Jia Liaotou and Li Wanfu (who, after his release, became a prison work instructor) and all the good news from the record to support his advocacy for the success of the reformation program. When the evidence was lacking, as when discussing instruction materials and content, Zhu resorted to such expressions of faith in the system as, “even if there is no way to prove (the effect of) those texts . . ., most likely there is a method in it that makes them find fault with and correct themselves.”72 Professing faith in the success of reformation became, in effect, the unofficial creed of the penal and judicial officials. Beijing No. 2 Prison warden Liang Jinhan reported in 1919 that “the prisoners have been moved to know repentance, and there have been no escapes. It has become possible to reap the rewards of the transformation of the bad, which can comfort everybody.” A 1922 Jiangsu No. 3 Prison instruction report declared, “In recent years, there have been quite a lot of prisoners who have under-gone reformation suitably enough to be paroled.” In 1923, the Jiangsu chief high procurator chimed in, “No matter how evil a disposition a convict has, he also can be made to cherish virtue and fear authority through attaining the consequences of reformation.” Toward the end of the decade, Supreme Court Chief Justice Yu Qichang praised the “excellent achievements of the prisons,” especially the Beijing No. 1 Prison and the new Shandong prisons, boasting, “After the offenders get out of prison, they all have occupations and can make a living and some have even become officials and successful merchants.”73 The consensus was that while prisons could not rehabilitate all convicts, they were able to reform some significant number. Such confidence in the system in spite of all the evidence to the contrary, was an easy target of criticism by officials of later regimes seeking to expose the insincerity and corruption of their predecessors. But no regime had a monopoly on sincerity, and all showed a similar bravado about their own institutions. The phenomenon recalls David Rothman’s argument about the failure of imagination among American penal officials once their penitentiary system and its interests were in place.74 One way to look at this in the Chinese case is, as the evidence suggests, that the presumed value of penal reformation was both enshrined in standardized bureaucratic procedure and simultaneously upheld by many as an idealized belief in its potential. There was a creative and, ultimately, rather potent tension to this interaction between regulated procedure

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Objects of Reformation that kept the system churning on day after day until it undermined its own purpose in meaningless repetition and the hopeful ideals that, if unsustainable in everyday practice, repeatedly inspired periodic calls for reform and renewal of the lofty aims. The mechanisms of instruction, assessment, and parole, notably, required officers and instructors to identify likely candidates who would follow their guidance along a path of progress to reform and early release; and of course the incentive to “progress” for the prisoner was clear. Paroled early release was, by regulation, a standard practice that had to be carried out at regular intervals. In the 1920s, the Beijing No. 1 Prison steadily paroled ten prisoners a year, marking the occasions with ceremonies before an audience of prisoners that ritually pronounced the parolee “reformed” amid a celebration of the reformation ideal. When in the later 1920s and 1930s parole became far more common and mechanistic as one of the strategies to respond to prison crowding, idealistic defenders of reformation periodically surfaced to decry the loss of the original purpose of parole.75 Ultimately, even as the prison system acknowledged its inability to reform all prisoners, it proceeded along the presumption that some prisoners were always successfully reformed. This had to be the case for the institution to justify itself, and so functional standards were set by which reform could be determined to have been attained. This may seem to suggest that the prisons were engaged in a grand pantomime of self-delusion just to keep themselves in business. How could the prison officials believe they were inspiring conversions in which so many offenders willfully determined to transform themselves? Did not recidivism prove the failure of reformation? Our discussion has revealed the many obstacles confronting any attempt to instruct and change prisoners: Inmates, for various reasons, often felt morally justified in their actions; they had much more than the prison’s educational programs to concern (or distract) themselves with when living behind bars; and they shared the bonds of the nanyou moral community of fellow sufferers united before (if not against) the authorities, which could be tipped into full-scale opposition by official corruption or violence. Literate prisoners, most of whom, unlike Chen Zhixi, were political prisoners, often led acts of resistance in the Nanjing Decade (1927–37) and have left accounts that lambaste prison and judicial authorities and their institutional aims. The 1930s political prisoner at the Jiangsu No. 1 Prison with the pen name Hua Yiwen mocked the ideals of the prison, quoting a fellow inmate remarking about the sounds of guards beating an inmate: “Is this perhaps the so-called ‘reform (ganhua) of the prisoner’?”76 And yet prisoners, and this became a major issue for political prisoners in the 1930s, could not get through the prison experience and be released without

Objects of Reformation making some compromise with the institutional demand to show evidence of reformation. Consider the case of Lian Luotuo, literally Camel Lian, who entered the Beijing No. 1 Prison on March 2, 1920, to serve a life sentence for murder. By all indications in the prison records, this once-fearsome individual from among the forgotten Beijing underclass experienced a thorough personal transformation guided by the instructors and was declared “reformed” and paroled in a ceremony before fellow inmates on May 12, 1927.77 In contrast to the similarly named eponymous fictional Beijing rickshaw puller of Lao She’s 1937 novel Camel Xiang Zi, we have no entry into the mind, no account of the daily struggles and experience of this real-life 1920s Beijinger named Camel; nor do we have a specific sense of how he may have contributed to shaping the prison environment. What can possibly be said about the supposed internal transformation of such a voiceless “subaltern”?78 Though perhaps not satisfying enough to some, one answer is that much of our exploration shows the historical tracks in the snow of exactly such voiceless prisoners. The prison instructional programs were adapted to suit the common prisoner, and the process of reformation, ultimately, was arranged just so that figures like Camel Lian could succeed in being paroled. Moreover, in participating in such institutionalized processes, Camel Lian could not have emerged unmarked. This is not to say that anything like the ideal of reformation existed. Rather, it is only to recognize that Camel Lian, over a considerable period of time, had to function sufficiently as an institutionalized person not only living within the discipline of the institution, but performing the rather complex role assigned him in the process of reform. As with a student deemed to have satisfactorily undergone the institutional process of modern schooling, there are no grounds for assuming he or she has been “educated” in some ideal sense; but it is not unreasonable to assume that, one way or another, such an individual has had to, at the very least, conform in some degree to institutional authority and is subsequently marked by the experience. THE REFORMATION OF CHEN ZHIXI

When we last left Chen Zhixi, he was, by his own account, making good progress toward reform, following the Buddhist-influenced ideas promoted by Warden Xu Bohua. In the end, it was out of the adversity he faced due to a conflict with prison authorities that led Chen to his ultimate internal transformation. His punishment for attempting to smuggle out the complaint letter to Yan Jingyue followed on his period of reading and reflection. The length of time in painful, heavy leg-irons and the five months in the small, dark solitary

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Objects of Reformation confinement cell were unusually long and severe. Chen recalled initially being enraged by this treatment but subsequently entering into a kind of delirium in his isolation from all human contact—sleeping intermittently, losing track of time, absently reciting poetry or chanting the Pure Land Buddhist mantra “namo emituofo,” “almost like I was half crazed.” He descended into a deep depression, even contemplating suicide.79 At this lowest moment in his life, something extraordinary happened to Chen. He recalled that when he finally calmed down a little, “I self-reflected and thought on it for a long time.” He then, in a Zen-like moment, “suddenly realized” that his predicament was his own fault and not that of the officers and the prison. Chen understood this as “my doing evil on this occasion was the mechanism that finally brought me to consciousness. The punishment this time impelled me to become aware.” This was similar, he held, to Mencius’s idea of reform and to what the Buddhist master Xing’an meant by his exhortation to “take suffering as a mechanism by which it is possible still to attain transcendence; it spurs one to have faith and drives one into awareness.” Deep suffering began the process of catharsis, which proceeded first to a recognition of his own faults.80 What is fascinating is that in this crucial point in Chen’s narrative—when he acknowledges the just authority of the prison to punish him and takes this as the impetus to his internal transformation of the sort demanded by the prison and so also opens himself to the guidance of the prison instructor—the actual moment of decision is entirely his own, carried out in deepest solitude without any mention of counseling from instructors. Even as he claims genuinely to accept the prison’s moral authority and embark on reform, he remains very much the author of this personal self-transformative process. It is his decision, he reports, at this point to change his approach to selfcultivation from the method of “reading to dispel worries” to one of “quietly meditating and reflecting on my faults.”81 Out of the steady cultivation and purification of his mind, he comes to realize that “The root of my illness was first that I didn’t understand self-examination and only thought others were wrong and did not see my own faults. Second, my irascible disposition lacked the capability to make the effort to be kind, patient, caring and tolerant. From here on, I would always be careful. I would examine myself in everything and feel that in general affairs I ought to blame myself and not blame others. Therefore, in outward appearance I must reflect on being gentle. In manner, I must think of being respectful. In words, I must think of being loyal.”82 Chen’s exploration of his moral faults, his intense practice of self-cultivation techniques, were of course entirely consistent with the teachings of prison instructors. He shows

Objects of Reformation and speaks openly of accepting the authority of the prison and, for the first time in his narrative, writes specifically of receiving the support and guidance of prison instructor Wang. Chen makes it seem as if Instructor Wang only comes to see him after Chen has already spent three months in solitary, which would have been a significant breach of regulations if it were true. Most likely, this was the first time Chen had willingly received Instructor Wang’s teachings. In a dramatic performance of submission, when Wang entered, Chen dropped to his knees to kowtow, knocking his head on the ground before Wang and thanking Amitabha Buddha. Instructor Wang sought to counsel Chen with the methods common to Shao Zhenji and other prison instructors. He brought Chen morality books and collections of wise sayings, The Treatise of the Most Exalted One on Moral Retribution, the Essentials of Jade Laws and Cycle Rules, and the Essentials of the Jade and Gold Rules. Chen recalled, Instructor Wang “exhorted me earnestly with good words that made me weep bitterly and unceasingly.” Chen had reached the cathartic emotional release that we have seen was considered vital to the reformation process. Instructor Wang continued to hold a weekly session “to advise and console” Chen. Wang’s “humble and peaceful attitude,” Chen wrote, “was particularly capable of making someone as irascible as me take up a mirror and show me my own reflection.”83 Chen Zhixi was well on the road to self-renewal. In a certain sense, Chen was an even more ideal model of reform for Warden Xu Bohua than Jia Liaotou had been for Warden Wang Yuanzeng in 1913. This prison account had Chen openly appreciating Instructor Wang’s effective counseling and Warden Xu treating prisoners like a parent and helping him to reform. In his own words, Chen described experiencing the mentalities and the various stages that prison instructors considered necessary to internal transformation. The entire account, moreover, was written as a self-examination text, recounting in detail the internal process of reformation. If you ask what I was like in the past, well I was a bad person. In everything, I only understood blaming others and did not understand “self-examination” or “overcoming desire” and that was the source of my illness that made me do these various most serious crimes. What was fortunate was that “heaven enlightened his mind and made him repent,” so in the midst of suffering I came to consciousness. Thus, due to this, though I would dare not say that the “me of today” is without faults, still I have corrected myself. I sought out the source of the illness, and then cut off that source of illness so it would not be joined together, and I turned all my thoughts toward good as if captivated by beauty. So, “the me of from now onward” may always be a person of few errors.84

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Objects of Reformation What was the ultimate moral problem? He listed many but concluded, exactly in the manner prescribed by instructors, that his greatest ethical failing and the source of his immorality was his lack of filial piety toward his parents. “Really I ought to die,” he wrote, not for taking a life, but for causing his father to be “worried and anxious.”85 Chen was seemingly the perfect student: He recognized his internal ethical failing, experienced the transformative emotional moment, and with various references to classical texts and Buddhist concepts, committed himself not just to a single act of reform, but to continual examination and maintenance of a pure mind. He described exactly the idealized internal ethical transformation that the proponents of reformation dreamed inmates would experience. It is little wonder that he received increasingly better treatment, had his sentenced reduced, and, finally, shortly after the publication of his account, was given a paroled release in 1929. But the perfect student Chen was also an obsessive convert. In the wake of his “reform,” he undertook a strict regime of daily self-cultivation, which was inspired by a passage written by none other than the public moralist Xue Dubi. Chen summarized it as: “Now evil thoughts do not arise from nothing. Really they mostly originate from seeing and listening. The mouth and the four openings also may not speak or do evil without any cause. Really such things are incited in the mind. Thus if you do not want to have evil thoughts spring up in your mind, you must first block out evil sounds and sights, and not perceive them with your ears and eyes. If you don’t want anyone to engage in saying evil words or doing evil deeds, you must maintain good thoughts in your mind. I fear the re-sprouting of evil thoughts in my mind, and the return to evil deeds by my body.”86 In seeking to regulate his mind, Chen Zhixi, much like the late imperial elites who used “ledgers of merit and demerit,” began to keep a “selfexamination diary.” In the June 7, 1929, diary entry reproduced in his account, he noted the weather (“a little rain this afternoon”), his regimen of “work” (“wrote four curriculum lists for the Guard Training Institute”), “calligraphy” (“practiced small standard script, 108 characters”), “reading,” (“read one chapter of Zhu Xi’s Commentary on The Great Learning”), and “study” (having read the second-century-bce Han emperor Wudi’s “Autumn Wind Song,” he copied into the diary the lines: “Counsel great happiness! How much sadness, how many times forgiven? How can it be otherwise for this old one!”) The quote from Han Wudi prompted Chen to jot in his diary the comment, “This situation immediately made me feel sad; even the emperor could still have this feeling. Why do we lust after the world of cares doing unseemly acts that will be calculated for a thousand years?” Such emotional personal reflection in the diary, however, was clearly of secondary importance to the main purpose of calcu-

Objects of Reformation lating “good” and “bad” deeds, words and thoughts—moral merits and demerits—recorded with plus and minus marks in boxes under the four main categories: “Do not look upon that which is opposed to propriety,” “Do not listen to that which is opposed to propriety,” “Do not say that which is opposed to propriety,” and “Do not do that which is opposed to propriety.” Chen claimed he had progressed from recording mostly minuses to breaking even by the end of the day.87 It is striking to encounter this imprisoned murderer in the late 1920s practicing self-cultivation and studying like a late imperial literatus—even if that was entirely consistent with prison instructor teachings and those of public moralists like Xue Dubi. In one respect, he was giving evidence that the idealized reformation through late imperial–style moral education and training, in fact, worked for some. Like other inmate accounts or accounts about inmates published in this period, however, Chen’s piece could only be published because it was seen by prison authorities not just as a positive confirmation of the institutional mission, but because it was a didactic morality tale useful for educating others. As a model of the ideal of reformation, it was meant to be a revelation of an individual’s deep personal mind and genuine thoughts and yet had to be composed within the restraints of what the institutional authorities and the editors would allow.88 Yet insofar as he presented himself as a zealous true believer in this process that, in theory, depended most crucially on the consistent expression of his individual will, Chen Zhixi, in the same move, was able to express his own distinctive voice through a series of moralizing, surely didactic, but also deeply personal comments. And as much as these moral cultivation practices, traceable not just to morality books, but to the great Neo-Confucians Wang Yangming and Zhu Xi and on back to Mencius, were inwardly concentrated on the moral self and preserving the pure mind, they were presumed to relate outward to the ordering of the family, community, state, nature, and cosmos. In such self-cultivation, P. J. Ivanhoe has observed, “The transformation of the self fulfilled a larger design inherent in the universe itself . . . that a peaceful and flourishing society could only arise and be sustained by realizing the grand design.”89 With the aid of this Neo-Confucian ontology, Chen Zhixi held forth, well beyond what was called for in such an account, on matters of cultural politics, social change, and governance. One subtheme Chen consistently pursued, doubtless to the delight of Instructor Wang and Warden Xu, was to represent his reformed self as a vigorous defender of the prison’s morality-book-based instruction curriculum and, more broadly, of traditional morality against the assaults of the May Fourth iconoclastic radicalism, which he had formerly supported. Although ultimately

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Objects of Reformation ambivalent about teachings of supernatural interventions to carry out justice, Chen praised the usefulness of morality books, noting that The Treatise of the Most Exalted One on Moral Retribution was a particularly good basis for “the examination of the mind and moral cultivation for bad men and ruffians” and was “a good medicine for my disease.” Indeed, like Instructor Shao Zhenji and public moralists like Xue Dubi, Chen argued that this old morality was essential to solving the ills of Chinese society. Criticizing those who, as he had once done, shouted out, “Down with old morality,” called it “slave morality,” and called all to, as in Shi Cuntong’s famous 1919 polemic, “oppose filial piety,” Chen wrote that “in this cruel, unbenevolent society, it (morality) not only cannot be brought down, but on the contrary should be expanded, adapted and sincerely practiced.”90 This led Chen to launch a discussion that closely resembled Shao Zhenji’s and Xue Dubi’s views in its simple theory of a utopian society founded on a mix of popular morality-book-style Confucian ethics and the new civics-textbooksstyle concepts of civic society and nation, and in which the self-cultivated perfection of individual morality was, in the pattern of The Great Learning, intimately linked with the rectification of society, state, and the world at large.91 At this point, Chen’s confessional memoir shifts into a kind of moralphilosophical treatise on humanity, society, and the state, though, for the most part, his message seems consistent with the prison’s moralizing teachings. Yet the passionate forcefulness of his statements are striking for a prisoner when, like many moralists, he bemoans the disastrous state of the government and society and calls for a Confucian ethical renewal and the realization of the aims of the Republic and nation. In his free-flowing commentaries on such core Confucian virtues as “honesty” and “sense of shame,” Chen furiously excoriates corrupt officials who exploit and extort like “hungry tigers” and “ravenous wolves,” and the “shameful” warlords and high officials, all of whom bear responsibility for China’s disgraceful poverty and the miseries of its marginalized and unfairly treated laborers. Under the Republic, the Confucian concept of loyalty, he explained, meant that “the citizens are the masters of the nation, so officials cannot but loyally serve their masters.” The prisoner seems, at this point, to have turned the tables on the system and is taking all in authority to task. And that’s not all. Chen goes on to argue that the remedy for China’s social problems should be what sounds much like a radical socialist-cum-Confucian “great harmony” (datong) utopia based on the ethical reform of the people and for the good of all the people. He sets out a quote from the morality book given to him by Instructor Wang, Essentials of the Jade and Gold Rules: “The measure of benevolence is to regard all under heaven as one family. The propriety of

Objects of Reformation benevolence is to regard China as one person. Thus if you want to become established, first establish the people, and do not divide affairs into big and small. If you want to advance, advance the people, and do not separate relatives by ranks.” With obvious excitement about this ideal of unity and equality, he commented, “Is this not the idea of universal harmony? . . . Is this not the highest morality?”92 This utopian vision, Chen continued, would require, though he did not name it so, an anticapitalist communalism in which all profits would be distributed among the people and in which the people would be encouraged to live honorably without seeking wealth. Chen’s discussion crescendos with a fire-and-brimstone defense of Confucian morality for the common people: If we disdain our nation’s morality as slave morality, oppose it all, bring it all down, children will not be filial to their parents, and will let them go hungry and be cold. If brothers do not have love and friendship with each other, then they will take up arms against those they live among. If the government is not loyal to the people, then it will be arbitrary and deceiving. If friends are not faithful, then you will be rude and I will be insulted. If one is not righteous in undertaking one’s affairs, then one will disregard one’s own conscience and do harm to principle. If officials are not honest, then they will engage in corruption and bribery. If everybody is without a sense of shame, then nothing but evil will be done. Those sitting in command of the whole world will become bastards —please forgive my cursing—and at that time, what kind of a nation will this have become? What kind of society will this have become?93

There is no question that Chen Zhixi had his say. Most of what he wrote conformed well with the teachings of Instructor Wang, Warden Xu, and the Beiyang-era prisons as a whole. And yet, in his enthusiasm for ethical renewal, this convict from a poor farming family assailed the ethics of the ruling authorities and called for a communitarian social morality of equality for the poor and marginalized that was far closer to his former student radical views and those of his Communist and freethinking friends. In editing and publishing his piece, Yan Jingyue was likely most interested in this “voice from the people” and so was willing to tolerate Chen’s praise of traditional morality. That prisoner Chen got to speak or at least write and be published, remarkably expressing his subversive view from below, even as he reinforced the institution, was obviously an extraordinarily rare case. But it hints at the broader condition for prisoners. Many illiterate prisoners could well have both acted or expressed themselves in ways that conformed with what the prison authorities wanted and, at

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Objects of Reformation other moments and situations, done so in accord with their other personal or relational priorities. Even while complying with the institution, there was much to be considered with regard to the relations they had outside the prison, the sense of dignity and moral position they had occupied or upheld prior to incarceration; there was much to be shared in the act of struggling to live and survive as one of the nanyou (friends in adversity). How many held to their own views of morality and justice, outlaw righteousness, sense of commonality in suffering, misfortune or poverty, even as they went along with enough of the institutional program to make it through to the end of the process? Whatever reformation processes did, they did so in relation to these personalities of individuals, who remained people with their own complex issues to manage in other settings. However, the fact that reformation did not create automatons does not mean that it was insignificant. This institutionalized process compelled compromise and the necessity of conforming in the presence of the authorities, producing, surely, many who could speak in multiple tongues, like in different languages, one reserved for institutional authority and others for other settings. The more intense that experience of institutional authority was—and there is little question that this was the most intrusive, persistent intervention by state authorities in the lives of common people ever in China to that date—the more it was readily activated and the less the mode of institutionalization could be ignored or shrugged off. The prison institution ultimately was compelled to accommodate and appeal to inmates as they were in order to have a chance of educating and reforming them to a plausible standard; yet they also applied restraints and pressures and a set script not just of lessons, but of the process to reform that inmates had, to some degree, to conform to, acknowledge, recite, and perform. Within the experiences of prisoners navigating between their own sense of what was proper and right, necessary and required for them in life and prison life, and what the instructor and warden required of them, and so speaking and performing in different ways in different situations and settings with different words, lies the evidence of the extent and limits of this regime of conversion.

4

REFORMATION FOR SALVATION: THE BUDDHIST MOVEMENT IN THE JAILS AND PRISONS OF 1920S ZHEJIANG AND JIANGSU

In the fall of 1928, the Jiangsu No. 2 Prison outside Shanghai came under investigation by the new Nationalist Party (KMT) government for “obstructing the propagation of party doctrine.” The KMT authorities accused the prison of failing to teach prisoners Sun Yat-sen’s Three Principles of the People and instead continuing “Buddhification [fohua]” instruction. Warden Wu Kui, in a November 30 response, refuted the charges, claiming that the prison had begun to teach KMT ideology. Yet he did not disavow the prison’s propagation of Buddhism. Even as he strategically observed that the teachings had been mandated by the pre-1927 Revolution government, Warden Wu defended the period of Buddhist influence as a golden age in the prison’s history. It had been a great moment for penal reformation when, he wrote, “silent transformation and influencing [them] unobtrusively and imperceptibly produced remarkable success.” He described lively convict participation in Buddhist activities and a flourishing “Buddhification” of all the Jiangsu prisons.1 In Warden Wu’s account, the modern Jiangsu prisons had become sites of a Buddhist soteriological revival in which the rehabilitation of the criminal had been recast as a religious conversion. The evident shock experienced by the revolutionary Nationalists when they arrived in Shanghai only to discover that the largest Chinese administered prison in China’s most modern cosmopolitan metropolis was dominated by Buddhists is easily empathized with by all who have read modern Chinese history through Nationalist, May Fourth–modern-secularist, and Communist historiographies. How could Buddhists, widely considered by revolutionaries and modernist intellectuals to be the epitome of conservatism and detachment 123

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Reformation for Salvation from society, have had any constructive role in the development of the modern Chinese prison? Warden Wu Kui, a highly experienced officer who had trained in Beijing under Wang Yuanzeng and was appointed by the KMT authorities to this wardenship in 1928, was reporting not just that the Buddhist presence in the prison was well entrenched, but that the Buddhist activists had realized the ideals of reformation better than anyone else. As we have seen, an array of figures—late Qing scholar-officials, Japanese advisers, leading early Republican judicial officials and prison wardens, mid-ranking instructors—found the reformation ideal compelling and contributed to its establishment and development. And some who supported it, notably public moralists, Christian and Buddhist preachers, academic legal scholars, penologists, and criminologists were from beyond the halls of government. The story of how activist Buddhist laity and some clergy in Zhejiang and Jiangsu Provinces extended the penal rehabilitative ideal and its mechanisms in the hope of indoctrinating convicts with a Buddhist vision for individual, social, and national renewal strikingly demonstrates how the modes of coercive transformation and indoctrination vital to the expansion of state power in twentieth-century China were neither solely the product of central government initiatives nor the inventions of the two militarized Leninist parties, the KMT and CCP. This regime of conversion was shaped over decades of theorizing, policy planning, and practice by people holding a variety of ideological perspectives, working for and outside the formal state and for varying purposes, and who were situated not just in the capital, but also in provincial cities and county towns. In this case, the Buddhist religion functioned as the ideological basis and social-cultural fabric of relations for a movement that advanced the transformative ideals and methods of the modern Chinese state. For all their differences, the Buddhists shared with Beiyang, Nationalist, and Communist officials alike the belief that prisons could be central to a great social and national transformation. BUDDHIST REVIVAL SOCIAL ACTIVISM AND THE MODERN PRISONS

Since the early years of the Republic, as we have seen, there had been advocates of Buddhist teachings as part of prison education taking part in Beijing policy debates and among the influential first generation wardens. As early as 1914, the activist Buddhist monk Juexian had organized and trained a team of Buddhist preachers in his Buddhist Preaching Cultivation Bureau in Beijing and applied for government permission to preach to army units and in prisons. Approved by the Ministry of Justice that September, Juexian’s petition, while

Reformation for Salvation primarily seeking permission to send preachers to the Beijing No. 1 Prison on Sundays, revealed his aspiration for a more-central role for Buddhism in prison instruction. While depicting the ideal Buddhist instructor as carrying out diagnoses of convicts according to the modern progressive methods of “individualization,” Juexian prescribed “treatment” with Buddhist preaching, explaining, “Buddhism is the easiest way to cleanse criminals’ nature, stimulate their natural goodness and inspire them to repent; so it secretly eradicates and quietly transforms into formlessness the various odious natures of the past and future.” But this suggestion that Buddhism could best fulfill the state’s reformative aims on the way to karmic salvation was not accepted at this point. Juexian and his Buddhist preachers were only permitted a weekly preaching and food distribution visit as a supplement to the Beijing No. 1 Prison’s instruction program.2 Juexian came from a tradition in which Chinese Buddhist clergy had, historically, extended compassion to convicts (even accepting them as monks), had preached to or led sutra chanting, for instance, at the Board of Punishments Jail in Beijing, and had taught that chanting the name of Guanyin could free the unjustly imprisoned or bring salvation to those condemned to death. But he was a new kind of social activist Buddhist—one much influenced by Meiji Japanese Buddhist reformers. Juexian was interested in Buddhist clerical reform through organization and education and Buddhist educational and charitable work in society, taking a founding role in several associations with these agendas. Even before any of the new-style prisons had opened, he had first proposed Buddhist preaching in the prisons at the end of the Qing dynasty after witnessing this practice in Japan in 1904. And he had won support for the idea from the newly established China Buddhist Association in 1912, adding prison preaching to the early Republican Buddhist reformist social-activist projects of running orphanages, clinics, hospitals, and workshops and schools for clergy and the poor. Buddhist interest in the prisons was an integral part of the new socially aware Buddhism expressed at the time by Abbot Jing’an’s poetic line: “Though I follow Buddhism, I have not forgotten the world.”3 The upsurge of Buddhist activism and organization of many kinds that has been described as the “Buddhist revival” of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries began with the post–Taiping Rebellion (1851–64) sutra recovery and publishing projects led by Yang Wenhui and later other Buddhist editorpublishers and the lay- and clerical-directed temple and monastery reconstruction and revivals of Buddhist religious ceremonies and preaching. By 1900 many leading thinkers, including Kang Youwei, Liang Qichao, Tan Sitong, Zhang Binglin, and Cai Yuanpei, were taking an interest in Buddhism as a new source of social morality. In the following years, as China’s Shanghai-centered

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Reformation for Salvation modern print revolution gathered pace, Buddhist publishing companies and bookshops sprang up, producing texts meant for mass religious and ethical propagation and also new-style periodicals of affiliated study associations and like-minded lay Buddhists. Lay religious and general ethical educational initiatives and newly vigorous poverty and disaster relief charitable work, often in cooperation with government officials, also began to grow in the last years of Qing rule and the early Republic. This was, in part, due to the Japanese Buddhist influence, especially after the Japanese secured the protection of their Buddhist missionary groups within the Qing Empire at the 1895 Treaty of Shimonoseki. The rise of Buddhist organizations, activism, and lay leadership was partly sparked by emulation of and defensive reactions to Japanese Buddhist enterprises and the social welfare and educational projects of European and North American Christian missionaries. With the founding of the Republic and especially the crisis of Japan’s infamous Twenty-One Demands of 1915, Buddhist activists increasingly drew these contrasts with their religious competitors in the language of nationalism. At the same time, Buddhists organized, in many cases, to protect property and resources in the face of such Qing New Policies state-building intrusions as the 1904 edict allowing local governments to expropriate temple properties to establish schools.4 The demise of the Qing Empire and the founding of the Republic brought a new and volatile situation for Buddhists, in which the proposed educative role of religion in the new prisons could only be controversial. The end of imperial controls and orthodox doctrine resulted in the sudden magnification of both the state intrusions that threatened Buddhist institutions and the new opportunities for Buddhists to expand their influence throughout society and within the state. Notably, the final removal of imperial protections exposed Buddhist monasteries and temples to new taxes, supervision, and summary appropriation by local authorities for use as schools or barracks. In response, Buddhists organized associations at the national and local levels to protect their properties and interests. These new associations and their active lobbying of the Beijing government exemplified how the end of the imperial restrictions had left a space for Buddhist political participation and contention over resources and ideology. For some, Buddhism was a “native” tradition of great depth and sophistication that was deeply rooted in society, long intertwined with China’s traditional ethics and yet seemingly untainted by association with the fallen dynasty and China’s cultural failings in relation to the West. It promised to provide the spiritual values for a new China that were deemed to be absent from foreign-influenced modern, materialistic society. Participating in new lay associations also meant engaging in collective spiritual, ritual, and philan-

Reformation for Salvation thropic enterprises that represented the living of a life of value that promised not just spiritual and earthly rewards, but a sense of grounded morality in a post-imperial era of considerable turmoil.5 Led and backed by clerical and lay activists, and supported, in cases, by senior officers with Buddhist beliefs, the Buddhist incursions into and growing influence within such new-style prisons as the Beijing No. 1, Shanxi No. 1, Fengtian No. 1, and Zhejiang No. 1 Prisons were also fueled by the debates with government Confucian secularists and the competition with and emulation of primarily Protestant Christian groups interested in prison preaching. Foreign Christian missionaries had preached in Chinese jails even before the new prison system had been built, and by the 1920s many Protestant Christian denominations and a few Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox priests (brought in mainly for Russian prisoners) regularly visited major prisons in Beijing, Xi’an, Taiyuan, Nanchang, Suzhou, and Shanghai. As noted, the Christian version of reformation did not depart markedly from the typical models, though there is little question that the Christian influence was significant in the major Beijing prisons by the mid- to late 1920s. In those years, there were preachers from the Presbyterians, Salvation Army, and other groups, though the Chinese YMCA preachers and, in the case of the Beijing No. 2 Prison’s Xu Jialin, prison instructors appear to have been the most vigorous Christian prison educators. Although the Christians never matched the dominance the Buddhists would gain in central-eastern China, they remained for many years in the mix, often as exemplars and competitors for the Buddhists.6 Even as the Buddhist presence in the new-style prisons emerged in many places as part of Buddhist revival civic activism, it was from within a particularly puissant regional site of this revival that the most ambitious Buddhist prison education movement arose and produced its own version of the reformation ideal. The Zhejiang and Jiangsu Buddhists had a grand vision that they would pursue in spite of considerable opposition. In the process, the ideal of reformation was advanced by a movement involving interactions of clerics, laity, and officials, among those in rural counties and others in major cities, above all, Shanghai. But it began in earnest on a small island. THE LOCAL ORIGINS OF THE ZHEJIANG BUDDHIST JAILPREACHING MOVEMENT

Buddhist lay devotee involvement in the Zhejiang County jails emerged from a vibrant regional Buddhist cultural context. The Lower Yangzi region was home to the wealthiest, most flourishing Buddhist monasteries and lay associations in

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Reformation for Salvation China. In 1923 an American scholar described “a very living Buddhism” extending from the coastal city of Ningbo in northeastern Zhejiang to Jiujiang up the Yangzi River in northern Jiangxi. Off Ningbo lay Putuoshan Island—“the Buddhist land”—a center for monasticism and pilgrimage for the Pure Land cult of Guanyin. The provincial capital Hangzhou was another center of famous monasteries and active lay devotee associations.7 It was Buddhist officials and gentry-elites in Ningbo, Hangzhou, and on the Zhoushan island county seat of Dinghai County, which included nearby Putuoshan, that launched experiments with Buddhist instruction in the jails. The county officials and gentry-elites were first drawn to penal reform due to their concern for local social order at a moment when they faced the new, expensive, and troublesome judicial system requirement to incarcerate most convicted local criminal offenders in county jails without receiving any central or provincial government financial support. Their creative response to the problem was shaped and organizationally enacted through their identity as Buddhist lay devotees. Lay devotee associations flourished in the 1910s and 1920s, particularly among gentry-elites and members of the new bourgeoisie. These groups “recited the Buddha’s name” (nianfo), chanted, fasted, and listened to preaching. They published and distributed sutras and introductory Buddhist texts, organized mass releases of animals, and supported charitable ventures, all of which were thought to bring karmic merit. Although some of their members also took an interest in other religious traditions, especially Daoism, these lay devotees primarily took collective social action in the lay Buddhist associations’ ritual and charitable endeavors, through which they forged communal solidarity and a shared cultural identity. Many social elite Buddhist lay devotees exhibited a distinct sense of style and taste through which they presented themselves as connoisseurs and conservationists of all the “best” of Chinese culture. In the opinion of one European observer, these lay devotees with their “Chinese gown of blue, gray or bronze colored silk” and refined “habits and gestures” seemed to “cling to the Chinese past more than almost any other group of educated people.”8 More precisely, these men, who had been educated before the fall of the Qing Empire and the rise of the New Culture Movement, had taken on this identity as a means not just to preserve customary values in the face of challenges associated with a foreign-influenced modernity, but to resituate themselves within a universal and yet Chinese social-ethical and metaphysical worldview that offered its own salvationist utopian promise. In effect, they preserved the Confucian gentleman’s ideals with a Buddhist spiritualism and ritualism that offered a Buddhist “way out” for a Chinese culture and society in crisis.

Reformation for Salvation One of the first Zhejiang officials to initiate Buddhist preaching in the jails, Huang Hanzhi, was a Shanghainese lay devotee who had compiled several introductory texts on Buddhist ethics. Appointed intendant of the circuit in Wenzhou in 1918, this forty-four-year-old former Shanghai Local Court judge began his reform very much in the manner of a Qing official. He was concerned about the miserable conditions, overcrowding, and illness in the Wenzhou Jail, not just out of benevolence for the prisoners, but because he feared that the deaths in jail of those serving short sentences for minor crimes would constitute an injustice for which officials could be held accountable before earthly and cosmic authorities. Thus he sought support and donations from the procurate office and local gentry to repair buildings, add bathing and infirmary facilities, and provide medical supplies at the jail. The plan was so successful at reducing illness rates that he urged magistrates in his circuit to undertake similar reforms. Concerned also about the large numbers of people being incarcerated, Huang wrote and distributed over ten thousand copies of a simple vernacular pamphlet that counseled people to avoid going to jail by becoming aware of new laws and not getting into fights. Transferred to Ningbo in 1920, Huang initiated similar reforms at the Yin County Jail and the jails in the nearby counties. This time he began disseminating morality books and sutras and invited Buddhist monks to preach to the inmates. He even established bimonthly occasions when monks would preach and local gentry devotees would attend, fast, and contribute funds. Subsequently, in 1922 the Yin County chief procurator, Jin Zhaoluan, employed the traditional Buddhist method of raising contributions from local gentry, through subscriptions that promised karmic merit, in order to fund a new prison in Ningbo that would serve the surrounding ten counties. In this way, he completed a provincial plan for prison construction in his district that neither the provincial nor the central government had been able to finance.9 While such official-gentry cooperation for social order resembled patterns common in the late Qing Empire, the pressures on these county jails that spurred local officials and gentry into penal reform were largely new. The transition from the late imperial noncustodial punishments of mainly beatings and banishment to the system of incarcerative rehabilitation had imposed enormous burdens on the county jails. Even as the new-style prisons came to incarcerate thousands of prisoners, in 1924 they still held only about one-third of those sentenced to penal servitude. The majority of convicts were locked up in the 1,622 county or prefectural jails. Often located within imperial-era government office compounds, these jails had not been designed for long-term incarceration. Most were dark, filthy, poorly aerated places in which prisoners

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Reformation for Salvation frequently died of malnutrition and illness. In the first years of the Republic, the Ministry of Justice had promulgated policies and regulations to reform the “old jails” and to establish new detention centers within them. There is evidence that in some counties already in the 1910s, reformist magistrates and wardens backed by local elites carried out genuine reforms to improve jail structures, inmate living conditions, and treatment and also attempted work and education programs. Yet, as the Beijing government mandated penal reform without providing funding or much guidance to implementation, successful cases were rare. Most commonly, as one county gazetteer noted, “the hellish style jail was still standing” after the 1911 Revolution. Many prisoners in county jails continued to be kept in wooden cages, in shackles and chains, and in miserable conditions without proper food, medicine, or any effort to reform them. In fact, in many jails, conditions were likely far worse than ever before, as structures built for temporary detention teemed with prisoners serving penal sentences under the new laws. Whether crime was on the rise (as most officials thought it was) or not, the pressures on these jails, in some cases structures that dated to the Ming dynasty, were intense. And the record of abuses in county jails and detention centers was sobering.10 In 1919, the Wujin County (Jiangsu) warden complained to the Jiangsu High Procurate that, “Since the escorts of convicts into exile stopped being carried out in the former Qing dynasty, the prison convicts have suffered from overcrowding. The number of prisoners has reached the point where the dead are lying around on top of each other. In other counties, this has been a time for escapes.”11 The imposition of the incarceration-based penal system had sparked a crisis in the counties. Prisoners attempted escapes or instigated uprisings just to save their lives. Almost all of the 1,891 incidents of prison escapes in China in 1914 were from county jails, and many of these resulted from violent uprisings.12 The Zhejiang Buddhist penal reformers were also motivated by a second consequence of the new penal system—the injunction to carry out the reformation (ganhua) of prisoners. Difficult to implement even at the most advanced provincial prisons, the work training and instruction programs through which convicts were to be reformed were often not even attempted in county jails. But Huang Hanzhi accepted this challenge and proclaimed Buddhist preaching to be the most effective means to attain the ethical transformation of prisoners in accord with the requirements of the new penal system. Seeing an opportunity to demonstrate the value of Buddhism as a mode of personal transformation, Huang invited monks to preach and also gave his own inspirational lectures to prisoners. Combining a Buddhist compassion with the Mencian-inspired NeoConfucian faith that “at origin the nature of all people is essentially good,”

Reformation for Salvation Huang argued against those that wanted convicts to “suffer when they go to prison,” holding that offenders should be guided “to reform and repent.” In essence, he identified the humanitarianism of the rehabilitative ideal as quintessentially Buddhist. In 1922 Huang’s efforts were bolstered by two Ningbo gentrymen and Buddhist lay devotees, Zhang Meiyi and Chen Xunzheng, who petitioned to preach on the sutras and provide meals for prisoners in the Yin County Jail. Their Buddhist mission came with a strong dose of Confucian commitment to transformation through ethical education, appealing to local officials and gentry jointly as a means to channel religious and Confucian patriarchal impulses. It seemed to work. Yin County officials reported that instruction in the county jail only began to succeed after the introduction of Buddhist preaching and sutra chanting.13 THE BUDDHIST JAIL OF DINGHAI MAGISTRATE TAO YONG

At the Dinghai County seat on Zhoushan Island in 1921, Magistrate Tao Yong began a Buddhist jail-preaching program much like that of Huang Hanzhi in nearby Ningbo. Magistrate Tao appears to have been a vigorous, charismatic figure. Interested in jails since his youth in Hunan, Tao had developed an expertise in penal affairs during two decades as a minor official in the late Qing Empire and early Republic. Appointed magistrate of Dinghai in 1920, Tao found that this county, despite its proximity to the “Buddhist land” of Putuoshan, was not immune from crime and disorder.14 In fact, under the pressures of the new incarceration system, the Dinghai County Jail was overflowing with, at its worst, some two hundred mainly theft and robbery convicts. Little changed since Qing times, and battered by sea storms, the jail was in a grim state. Lacking sufficient financial resources, Magistrate Tao led the county into debt just to keep the inmates fed. Then, in the summer of 1921, as in many neighboring counties, a violent uprising and attempted mass escape erupted at the jail, leaving many injured.15 In response, Magistrate Tao Yong initiated a reform in which the jail was refurbished, prisoners were to be properly fed, and they were to be pacified and reformed by Buddhist instruction. Following an initial attempt led by the county warden (and former magistrate from Ningbo), Yang Xin, that encountered official criticism, Magistrate Tao organized an Association for Preaching on Sutras in Prison. As Tao explained it, he would have liked to have built bathing areas and an infirmary and set up work and instruction programs that followed the Ministry of Justice plans, but that was beyond the means of Dinghai County. In his view, the Buddhist approach to reforming prisoners was the most

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Reformation for Salvation realistic hope for the county jails. Though not impressed by the experiments in Ningbo and Hangzhou, Tao concluded that “there is no alternative.” Besides, he believed in the transformative power of Buddhist teachings and salvationist faith. So, in the fall of 1921, he expanded the county jail’s instruction hall, established a shrine to the Buddha within it, and sent letters to the Putuoshan abbots requesting the services of an eminent monk or lay devotee to preach to the inmates.16 In his letter to abbots Liaoming and Lianxi, Magistrate Tao noted the shaming example of Catholic priests and Protestant ministers in China, who “preach tirelessly with a zealous perseverance that is marvelous and admirable.” He asked, “Do we not have such people among us Buddhists?” Tao made it clear that he did not want a sophisticated theologian or pedant, but someone who “genuinely believes in Buddha and is intent upon exhorting the people to be good.” For such a preacher, he would provide room and board and a salary of twenty yuan a month. But while Tao vowed that his invitation was not just “official extortion by another name,” the Putuoshan abbots were wary of his request and initially tried to avoid involvement. Tao Yong was persistent, however, and appears to have succeeded through a direct appeal to the venerated monk Yinguang, then a resident of Putuoshan. Sixty years old when Magistrate Tao contacted him in 1921, Yinguang had been a monk for forty years, spending much of this time in seclusion in monasteries on Putuoshan. After the publication of The Collected Writings of Master Yinguang, first edited by the lay devotee Xu Weiru in 1918—a volume that quickly became an often reprinted Buddhist publishing sensation—Yinguang gained national prominence as the spiritual leader of a revival movement propagating the Pure Land Buddhist belief that salvation could be attained through faith alone in Amitabha. He encouraged the practice of the “recitation of the Buddha’s name” (nianfo) and belief in the realization of the “Buddha-nature” within oneself. His simple, coherent rearticulation of this popular tradition and his charismatic asceticism proved attractive to a great variety of people, making him widely renowned and revered, especially in Zhejiang and Jiangsu. So it was through the intercession of this famous monk that the Putuoshan abbots, after considerable debate, finally agreed to Tao’s request and selected an eminent retired monk from the Fayu Monastery, Zhide, to preach at the Dinghai jail. More importantly, Magistrate Tao had attracted Yinguang’s influential support for Buddhist involvement in jails and prisons.17 Initially, however, Magistrate Tao’s plan provoked much anxiety among local elites, military and police officials, and the county warden. They worried that, in this time of frequent jail uprisings, gathering the entire inmate population

Reformation for Salvation together for the preaching sessions in a jail so close to residential areas would pose a serious security risk. Some argued that, in any case, preaching to criminals would be of no use. In Tao Yong’s account, it was his insistence that “convicts are people too” that finally overcame the opposition. Yet clearly Magistrate Tao was greatly aided by the perception in Buddhist circles that his plan was a religiously significant act that would spread the salvationist Pure Land message. Zhide, after all, was the former abbot of the Longxing Monastery in Changzhou and was famed for his rigorous abstentions and a pilgrimage on foot to Southeast Asia out of devotion to the Zhentuo Sutra. Not only was this plan supported by Yinguang, but the monk Zongde, on hearing of it, came all the way from Beijing to participate in the first preaching session, bringing sutras and financial contributions. This ceremonial first session, with its music, speeches, and ritual, represented the combined religious and social prestige of the project. There with the two hundred prisoners, the guards, and police in the Dinghai jail instruction hall sat local military and civilian officials, leading gentrymen, the directors and faculty of the local schools, in all numbering about one hundred prominent social elites and officials. The addresses by masters Zhide, Zongde, Magistrate Tao, Warden Li Dingyu, and the heads of the local Education Association and Farmers Association presented this new preaching plan as a joint official, gentryelite, and religious enterprise. Magistrate Tao explained the new system of penal reformation; the head of the Farmers Association, surnamed Zhu, called for generous contributions for what sounded like a popular educational project. Yet the central events of the day—Zhide’s short sermon and a ritual offering to the Buddha performed by the prisoners—were religious. Lay Buddhist officials and local elites, in sum, promoted this plan for the reformation of convicts through Buddhist preaching out of their multiple, intertwining impulses to restore social order, cultivate the morality of the local populace, and spread the Dharma.18 In the manner of many prison instructors, the venerable monk Master Zhide began a regular instruction schedule of three afternoons a week (1:00–3:00 p.m.) at the Dinghai jail, preaching separately to groups of long-timer, short-timer, women, and unsentenced detainee prisoners. And, as we have seen with other 1920s instructors, Zhide exhorted the inmates to be good and to reform, with moral lessons phrased in simple language and full of examples of the ethical system of “cause and effect retribution.” Yet Zhide was, in other respects, entirely unlike other instructors. He was not just using religious teachings; his preaching was a religious act through which he treated and involved inmates not as “offenders” but as fellow Buddhists and participants in his salvationist

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Reformation for Salvation ritual. He made a point of calling the inmates “fellows in listening to sutras”— one of the earliest instances of what would later become a common practice of referring to the objects of reformation not as “convicts” or “offenders” but by a term denoting their participation in the reformation process. The sessions also involved collective religious practice and ritual and an emblematic act of compassion with the provision of a special meal of congee—surely a welcome incentive for prisoners. Like monks or lay devotees, the Dinghai prisoners were enjoined to memorize and recite sutras, meditate, and chant mantras to the accompaniment of the “dharma instruments” (a set of drums, flutes, and a wooden fish). Magistrate Tao considered these religious practices so essential that he believed, contrary to the law, of course, that prisoners who failed to be able to recite sutras should not be released even if their sentences had expired. This view, so surely sensible with respect to the theory of the rehabilitative ideal—that release ought to result from demonstrable reformation as opposed to the end of a set sentenced period of time—anticipated later Communist and Nationalist methods. Exceptions, Tao conceded, were to be made for the “old and dull witted” who could just learn the simple recitation of the Buddha’s name. To ensure the completion of the Buddhist education, the jail would provide any plodders with special tickets upon their release that permitted (or, more precisely, required) them to return to attend a number of additional preaching sessions.19 As was popular in most of the new prisons, Magistrate Tao required collective singing, though, in this case, the songs were hymns of praise to the Buddha that Tao had composed himself. He wryly commented that while he hoped the songs would “move the prisoners,” he at the very least could be sure they would give the prisoners something to sing instead of their “little ditties with obscene lyrics.”20 But most collective activities for the prisoners were not based on new methods of indoctrination; they were collective religious rituals that inmates had to carry out or participate in with the utmost solemnity, often in front of what was termed the jail’s “Buddhist and Confucian” shrine located in the instruction hall. One of the most striking such rituals harkened back to the sacrificial worship traditions of the jailers and seems to have been included in the ritual practices to fuse the jailers’ beliefs (and so collective commitment) with the Buddhist reformation program. Each year on the First Frost Day and the Buddha’s Birthday, Magistrate Tao, on behalf of the warden, jailers, and prisoners in attendance, stood before the tablet of Gao Tao, the mythical first judge and jailer of ancient times and jailer deity in the Qing period, in the jail shrine, to make an offering of incense, spirit money, wine, and fruit. He would repeat an incantation that began, “I bow down in consideration that in order ‘to

Reformation for Salvation assist the teachings by clarifying the punishments’ you were dispatched by Heaven to serve as the knight who searched out the ancient writings to make an illustrious origin for judicial officials. With a face like sliced-up melon and finshaped body, even when seen it does not obscure the eminence of your spirit shade.” In response to the endemic problem (since late imperial times) of abuse and corruption by subofficial jailers in underfunded county jails, Magistrate Tao brilliantly co-opted the jailers’ deity (even claiming it for all judicial officials!) in a new ritual that, entirely unlike the jailers’ former secret rites in jail shrines, unified the jailers with the magistrate, warden, Buddhist monk instructor, and the prisoners in an open ritual community committed to the new interpretation of education as the penal method. And the inmates’ presence at the ritual was vital to this. He used a similar publicly performed revised communal ritual to seek spiritual support as a centerpiece to his reformation program. On entering the jail, all convicts first had to bow at the shrine and carry out a rite of “earnestly confessing and repenting” before Buddha. A similar ritual was required just prior to release.21 Magistrate Tao Yong’s innovative refashioning of ritual practices and deployment of religious mystical power to compensate for the weaknesses of the unfunded and yet mandated modern penal system is an example of the sort of creative hybrid formulations pursued in local settings remote from central state authorities that was a significant part of the development of the regime of reformation. Magistrate Tao, like Master Zhide, acted for reasons sensible in his own mentality for the local setting and situation. His choices were both a matter of pragmatic governance and deeply held belief. Magistrate Tao appears to have been among those who turned to Buddhism in the post-imperial era to revitalize a Neo-Confucian sense of principles of conduct. Tao’s view of himself as a stern but benevolent Confucian magistrate was complemented by his Buddhism. Amid the social turmoil of the time, he understood his paternalistic role to require severity. “As to the cruel and violent who have done all sorts of evil,” he stated, “I consider killing them to be compassionate. . . . The sooner they are finished off the better; the more killed, the better.” Yet, his preference was to employ moral suasion—“to transform through teaching [jiaohua].” Like most early Chinese proponents of penal reformation, Tao believed in the original goodness of human nature. Most criminals were, he explained in terms typical of late imperial magistrates, “compelled by hunger and cold, or through making bad friends or making the wrong decision at a moment of weakness” and “lacked education,” by which he meant moral education. He expressed, however, the idea of the capacity to reform with a Pure Land Buddhist salvationist faith: “All people . . . can be Buddhas.” Tao infused a Buddhist mysticism,

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Reformation for Salvation spiritualism, and universalism—elements feared lost to Confucianism at this point—into his Confucian duty to instruct the people in morality for the attainment of social harmony. With the aims of human moral transformation framed in relation to a karmic metaphysics with immediate eschatological consequences, there was a striking intensity and urgency to Magistrate Tao’s Buddhist salvationist reformation.22 Locating value both in the Confucian utopian past and Buddhist religious images and concepts, Magistrate Tao was generally unimpressed with and often opposed to foreign-influenced modernity. “Today people are constantly intoxicated by Japanese and Western culture and do not read the ancient books,” he lamented. Yet his creative response to his circumstances led him to become a partisan of the modern regime of penal rehabilitation in an attempt to preserve cherished ideals of moral transformation and good governance and to advance his religious vision. So not only did this conservative county magistrate unequivocally accept the system of rehabilitative incarceration and its basic design, he aggressively promoted some of its techniques.23 Notably, as a central part of his initiative for Buddhist penal reformation, Magistrate Tao championed parole—a key form of conditional release to the modern penal system. Magistrate Tao Yong pragmatically recognized, especially with respect to the limitations of his county administration, that the incarceration system would only function properly if prisoners were moved through it at a dependable rate and were neither left to languish nor quickly and haphazardly released without any effort to reduce the likelihood that they would soon return to clog up the local court and jail. But parole presented some thorny challenges. First, although some, like Huang Hanzhi, thought of it as a compassionate act similar to medical releases, commutations, and the former imperial pardons, parole, as clearly set forth in the Republic’s laws and regulations, was based on the entirely different principle that the reward of freedom could be earned by the inmate through a rational, demonstrable process of behavioral transformation.24 Second, parole had proven one of the least successful imported new methods of the early Republican penal system. This was due, Warden Wang Yuanzeng held, to compromises made in the formulation of the system with skeptical, conservative opponents. Pursued in a cautious manner and limited solely to the best behaved convicts who had served more than half of a long sentence, parole was granted sparingly. The Ministry of Justice recorded 20 paroles in 1915, 147 in 1920, and a peak of 349 in 1922. Even the 1922 figure represented a minute fraction of the total number of prisoners entering and leaving the system. Moreover, for the most part, county jail applications for parole were far less likely to receive approval from the higher authorities than

Reformation for Salvation those from the new-style prisons. This was lamented by county wardens and magistrates, who hoped, contrary to the theory of parole, to use the system to relieve the crowding in their jails. But the parole system remained too mired in regulatory and administrative restrictions to offer them much hope. Huang Hanzhi expressed the common suspicion that the Ministry of Justice approved few paroles from county jails due to fears that corrupt local officials would petition for paroles in exchange for bribes.25 In Magistrate Tao Yong’s view, however, the paucity of paroles from most county jails was due to the failure of magistrates and wardens to follow regulations and their lack of interest in genuinely reforming prisoners. Parole could be used, he held, as a means to reduce crowding and also could serve to instill hope in the most desperate inmates. Tao wrote, “The greatest misconception among long-term convicts is that, unless they die or escape, they will never get out under the sun and sky again. Thus the strong cause uprisings while the weak die of hunger and cold or, even worse, commit suicide.” His solution was to educate inmates about parole and guide them through the process in strict accordance with ministry regulations. Integrated into his Buddhist curriculum were detailed lessons about parole and how to prepare for it. Similar couplings of religious teachings and lessons in the modern penal system appeared in his related method of evaluation, where, along with ministry standard identity, work, and conduct ledgers, Tao added charts on compliance with “listening to scripture bonds,” which recorded each inmate’s progress in Buddhist learning. Parole and its attendant mechanisms of informational control were advanced in Dinghai for both the aims of better penal governance and the glory of Buddhist transformation.26 Magistrate Tao Yong’s reforms became particularly associated with promoting parole when word spread about the thirty-seven-year-old robbery convict from Xiamen, Wei Ruyi, who was paroled in early 1923 to Putuoshan Island, where he “shaved his head and became a monk.” The details of this case that became emblematic of the movement are revealing. In his letter to Abbot Ancha requesting a parole guarantor for Wei Ruyi, Magistrate Tao made two separate arguments that were close to being contradictory. Tao described Wei as “the first person to be morally reformed” since the establishment of the Buddhist preaching program at the Dinghai jail. Wei had shown “evidence of repentance,” completed all requirements, and received ministry approval for parole. But Tao then proceeded to describe Wei as a victim of injustice at the hands of the ineffective, overly bureaucratic judicial system. Tao noted that Wei had been one of the least serious offenders in a robbery case during the last months of Qing rule in 1911, and that, under the Qing Empire, his sentence to “execution

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Reformation for Salvation after the assize” would have soon been commuted to exile or nullified by imperial amnesty. Yet, after the revolution, Tao pointed out, Republican officials had not considered the case as a whole, but simply followed regulations equating sentences under the new code to those under the old, which resulted in Wei being sentenced to life in prison—a far more severe sentence than those handed down to the leading offenders in his case. After Wei had been transferred from Ningbo to Dinghai in 1916 and earned a reduced sentence and finally parole for being a model prisoner, no organization from his home in Fujian would serve as parole guarantor. And Magistrate Tao’s own petition to act as Wei’s parole guarantor had resulted in accusations of malfeasance.27 For Wei Ruyi, Magistrate Tao was asking Abbot Ancha to redress the failings of the judicial-penal system, while never questioning the system itself. This request reflected the manner in which Magistrate Tao perceived Buddhism as providing the spiritual and moral basis that was lacking in the new national penal-judicial system. “The nation has too many regulations,” he stated, “so it is without spirit.” Buddhism could provide the spirit that would save the penal system. A line from one of Magistrate Tao’s Buddhist hymns summed up his view most succinctly: “When the national law has been worn out, the Buddha says ‘I enter the prison.’ ”28 The spirit of Buddhism could compensate for the financial, administrative, and moral frailties of state authority and reinvigorate the Confucian mission of moral suasion of the people for social order and a wider social-cosmic harmony. For Tao, all of these elements and the idea that the reform and salvation of convicts would aid a social and karmic process of transformation would naturally reinforce each other. The rural county magistrate and sharp critic of foreign-style modernity and the failings of the new penal system was, nonetheless, with his creative Buddhist–Confucian–local-religion correctives and innovations, a vigorous promoter of penal reformation and its attendant techniques of control and supervision—spreading the regime to areas and cultural realms little touched by central state reforms. THE RISE OF THE BUDDHIST REFORMATION MOVEMENT

By the early months of 1922, Buddhist instruction predominated not just in the county jails of Dinghai, Yin (Ningbo), and Zhenhai, but at the Zhejiang No. 1 Prison in Hangzhou, as well. Before the year ended, prisoners in most northern Zhejiang County jails between Xiangshan south of Ningbo and Jiashan on the Jiangsu border were being taught the Buddhist way toward reform. This rapid expansion owed much to Zhejiang’s provincial chief procu-

Reformation for Salvation rator, Tao Sizeng—a figure in many respects quite typical of his generation of judicial officials. A reformist Hunanese like Magistrate Tao Yong (who does not seem to have been a relative) and Instructor Shao Zhenji, Tao Sizeng had earned the first-level imperial examination degree at age fourteen but then gone on to study foreign law and administration in Japan. Returning to work in reformist branches of the Sichuan provincial government in the last years of the Qing Empire and, then, as an adviser to Tan Yankai in his native Hunan after the revolution, Tao Sizeng went on to Beijing, serving in staff positions for the 1915 National Judicial Conference and Legislation Drafting Bureau. Appointed Zhejiang chief procurator in October 1916, Tao was a knowledgeable, experienced proponent of the modern justice system. In 1922, however, he was most impressed with the Buddhist prison preaching and rituals in Dinghai. In fact, he was very familiar with the Dinghai County Jail warden, Li Dingyu, who had been transferred to the same post in Hangzhou. And he also thought highly of instructors Wang Yujie and Qi Sizhou’s program of Buddhist teachings and recitation of the Buddha’s name at Hangzhou’s Zhejiang No. 1 Prison. Indeed, Tao Sizeng had clearly already become a Buddhist lay devotee. Convinced the Buddhist approach to prisoner reformation was the best way to save the overburdened, failing county jails and bring salvation to their inmates, he announced a plan to extend the “instruction on Buddhist principles” to county jails throughout the province.29 Between February and May 1922, Procurator Tao appointed a group of traveling Buddhist instructors, each assigned a circuit in northern Zhejiang along which they would preach at county jails. In time, Tao made several additional appointments, and these were joined by volunteers from more-remote places, who offered their services without a formal appointment. Among the first three appointed itinerant instructors, there was Wang Jingyuan, a young student of Buddhist studies from Yichang, Hubei, who was to travel a circuit of six county jails to the north and northwest of Hangzhou; Qi Sizhou, one of the Zhejiang No. 1 Prison instructors, who was assigned a series of county jails to the south of Hangzhou and around Shaoxing; and Zhang Yuancheng, who was based in the Jiaxing Prefecture, which included Pinghu and Jiashan Counties near Shanghai. These instructors would visit a county jail for several days, preaching, teaching sutra and mantra recitation, and distributing texts, ritual items, and food. Setting out on his circuit in April 1922, Qi Sizhou brought five hundred copies of the Basic Introduction to Pure Land and three hundred strings of prayer beads to distribute to prisoners.30 By May 1922, a petition from the Ningbo lay devotee Zhang Meiyi extended Procurator Tao’s orders to the Xiangshan Peninsula south of Ningbo. But in lieu of appointed circulating instructors, the

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Reformation for Salvation senior Mount Tiantai monk Chengji came to preach at the county jail and arranged a schedule for monks to preach there. Soon eleven monasteries in the region were sending monks to run instruction at the local county jails.31 The instructors of Procurator Tao Sizeng’s plan served as missionaries both for Buddhism and for the regime of penal rehabilitation. In all of these county jails, Buddhism became the means by which reformation was to be achieved. Though there were variations in approach, most instructors presented a simplified version of easily adopted Pure Land Buddhist teachings and practices popular among lay devotees. An instruction session opened as a religious event with the instructor intoning a prayer or the “Great Compassion Chant.” The lectures that followed most often discussed good and evil and the inevitability of the karmic ethical system of “cause and effect ” and the “cycle of rebirth.” Some talks enumerated the “Ten Goods and Five Abstentions,” spoke of the Pure Land, heaven and hell, and included “true” mystical stories about the supervision of ghosts and spirits and karmic forces and the consequences they wrought for evil acts. The preaching also often concerned such favored Pure Land texts as the Amitabha Sutra, the High King Sutra, and the Heart Sutra. And the instructors always taught prisoners meditation and the recitation of the Buddha’s name—meaning the repetition of the phrase “I put my trust in Amitabha Buddha [namo emituofo].” Also, as in the Yin County Jail and the Zhejiang No. 1 Prison, they helped the county wardens to organize a “steadfast cultivation” system, in which each prisoner was assigned a schedule for daily recitation of a sutra or mantra. This combined practices of Buddhist selfcultivation with a regime of bureaucratic recording of daily and monthly inspections on inmate progress, which resembled the evaluative surveillance methods used in the modern prisons. Even as these instructors concentrated on religious preaching and practice, they never lost sight of their aim of reforming the prisoners for the penal system. Preserving a pure mind, cultivating morally upright conduct, and striving to repent and reform were part of all lessons. Instructor Qi Sizhou taught the prisoners to sit quietly with their eyes closed and contemplate the details of their lives before they committed the crime, and to judge their own crime, so as to stimulate a sense of repentance and a desire to reform. This approach, termed “Buddhist reformation” (foxue ganhua), spread the rehabilitative ideal throughout the Zhejiang county towns in the guise of a religious conversion. This shift to Buddhist teachings and the leading roles of lay Buddhist gentryelites and monks, however, never for a moment imputed or marginalized the role of the state in the process. The movement was consistently presented as a state project with officials in command and all documents generated as official instruc-

Reformation for Salvation tions, regulations, and reports of the provincial judicial bureaucracy drawn up in accordance with Ministry of Justice standards. The Buddhists were not just partnering with officialdom, they were insinuating themselves and their ideology into the county and provincial government apparatus.32 In doing so, moreover, they showed a reformist zeal for laying bear the actual conditions in the jails. The traveling Buddhist instructors’ regular official reports candidly described miserable living conditions and staggeringly high illness rates and, despite their own hopes for prisoner reform, tended to offer sober assessments of their own progress. The reform of inmates, which they judged by the sincerity of a convict’s acceptance of Buddhist faith, was, as one report observed, “relatively slow.” The most optimistic report described thirty-seven convicts who showed promise, between eight and ten who had “believed,” and two that had reformed and taken vows to the Buddha at the Lin’an County Jail. Yet Instructor Qi Sizhou reported encountering considerable resistance at the Shangyu jail, where he initially had only two converts and was “unable to move the rest.” The jail later triumphantly reported that eleven prisoners “wholeheartedly were reciting the Buddha’s name” and that the first two converts had learned to chant a sutra, but said nothing of the remaining seventy-two inmates. In the Huzhou jail, Instructor Wang Jingyuan found it difficult to teach short-term prisoners and those that spoke Jiangsu dialect. In the Fengyang jail, prisoners laughed at the instructor and did all sorts of impolite things until he left, concluding the place was filled with too much evil karma.33 The mission of “Buddhist reformation” had spread quickly in Zhejiang, but, by the Buddhists’ own account, conversion was a struggle. The challenges faced by the Buddhist instructors were no deterrent to Procurator Tao Sizeng’s ambitions. Seeking to bring the Buddhist instructors’ achievements to the attention of the authorities in Beijing and other provinces, Procurator Tao used the occasion of a Ministry of Justice investigation into prison instruction to submit a May 1922 petition requesting a ministry order directing all jails and prisons in the nation to institute Buddhist preaching. Tao’s petition, in fact, followed upon an idealistic written request by Zhejiang No. 1 Prison instructor Wang Yujie to spread the “Buddhification” that had pacified convicts and brought order to the Zhejiang prisons and jails. In Wang’s view, these Buddhist conversions—“a return to the superior mind of the Buddhist Dharma”—represented a step toward karmic salvation that would naturally contribute to the “peace and social order of the nation.”34 Buddhist transformation was, thus, offered as a source of earthly salvation not just for prisons, but for the troubled nation. Instructor Wang’s vision and Procurator Tao’s aspiration for “Buddhification” were not as quixotic as it might appear. A number of Buddhists, some with high

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Reformation for Salvation official positions, great influence, or wealth, were interested in pursuing similar agendas. In the fall of 1922, for instance, the noted senior national-level politician Xiong Xiling founded a reform school in the Fragrant Hills outside Beijing that used Buddhist teachings to reform juvenile delinquents. Moved into the city and renamed the Beijing Reform School the following year, this ganhua xuexiao, which linked the term “reformation” thereafter to the re-education of troubled youths, was China’s first and only reform school in the 1920s. In the Wuhan area also in 1922, the modernizing-reformist Zhejiangese monk Taixu began sending his seminarians to preach in the local prisons. Meanwhile, Warden Xu Bohua, as we have seen, already emphasized Buddhist instruction at the Shanxi No. 1 Prison, and the Shandong chief procurator and leading lay Buddhist activist, Mei Guangxi, was developing Buddhist instruction in Shandong’s five new-style prisons. In 1921 Mei had petitioned the Ministry of Justice, requesting that the Buddhist texts used in the Shandong prisons, which included Master Yinguang’s collected writings and two volumes by none other than Huang Hanzhi, be adopted in prisons nationwide.35 Buddhists in many places were seeking to expand their influence within the new institutions of rehabilitation and introversion. One of the chief strategies in this regard of the Zhejiang Buddhist prisonpreaching movement, as it was for Mei Guangxi and other Buddhist activists, was to pursue energetic promotion through religious Buddhist publications. The lay Buddhist publishers and editors of the mainly Shanghai-based Buddhist publishing companies and within the major commercial presses were nearly as important to the prison preaching movement as Buddhist judicial officials. In the rapidly expanding and modernizing Shanghai publishing world of the 1920s, both specialty Buddhist publishing houses and secular presses supported and took full advantage of the revived Buddhist interest in propagation and education and the opportunity to satisfy the age-old Buddhist interest in reproducing sacred texts to earn karmic merit with mass-production mechanized presses. With popular Buddhist texts being churned out at record pace, they also represented the most effective means of promoting Buddhist initiatives. In early 1923, the Zhejiang prison-preaching movement had its first publication in Dinghai jail warden Yang Xin’s The Essential Documents of Tao’s Dinghai Association for Preaching on Sutras in Prison, which was published and distributed to provincial high courts and procurates and to lay Buddhist associations. Before the end of the year, China’s largest commercial press—the Commercial Press in Shanghai—published a volume compiled by the Yin County chief procurator Jin Zhaoluan entitled A Record of Reformation (Ganhua lu), which combined the Dinghai book with documents and instruction materials from

Reformation for Salvation the Ningbo group, Procurator Tao Sizeng, and a host of notable lay devotee contributors.36 A Record of Reformation, in one respect, represented an idealized unity between Buddhist doctrine and the state pursuit of order and justice through the means of “reformation.” The compilation included instruction lectures and documents by such figures as Mei Guangxi and the justice of the Shanghai Mixed Court and founding member of the Shanghai lay devotee Pure Karma Society, Guan Jiongzhi. Mei provided the calligraphy on the frontispiece, which read “Save all living things.” The text noted official approval by the Ministry of Justice, and the title calligraphy had been supplied by the vice minister of justice, Zhang Yipeng.37 As a compilation of documents, the volume was a testament to the Zhejiang prison-preaching movement and its ideal of “Buddhist reformation.” In his preface, Jin Zhaoluan claimed that “the Buddhist illustration of cause and effect and emphasis on repentance have specially attained real benefits in reformation.” And this reform of prisoners, he continued, was an important step toward a moral reform of all citizens for the benefit and salvation of the nation.38 At the same time, taken as a whole, A Record of Reformation was primarily designed as a practical guide to “Buddhist reformation” for prison officers, county wardens, and magistrates. Resembling in many sections the introductory Buddhist readers filled with stories and commentary about karmic retribution, heaven and hell, and avoiding anger, lust, and foolishness, compiled by such leading Buddhist publishers and editors as Xu Weiru, Ding Fubao, and Mei Guangxi in this period, the volume included a collection of prison instruction talks, mostly written by the Yin County Jail instructor. These lectures stressed Buddhist themes through stories, quotations, and exhortations and yet mixed them with the teachings in basic Confucian social ethics and the civic duties of the citizen that, as we have seen, were common in most prisons. Just as in Magistrate Tao Yong’s formulation, Buddhism was promoted in the volume as the source of the spirit and faith that would make the transformation of the criminal into the “good citizen” possible. This meant that Buddhist instruction also included educating convicts about the modern prisons’ requirements for hygiene and discipline, the regulations and methods of supervision, parole, and the system of reform.39 As both a celebration of and a guide to the Buddhist preaching in the jails, A Record of Reformation propagated the striking combination of religious indoctrination and modern penal reform pioneered by these Zhejiang lay devotees. A Record of Reformation also made it amply clear to any reader that this Buddhist prison reformation movement was not the work of some fringe

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Reformation for Salvation religious group, but rather stemmed from the enormously popular social activist, humanistic Pure Land Buddhist revival advocated by the famed Putuoshan monk Master Yinguang. On the face of it, this reclusive, older monk, whom reformist clerics and many new intellectuals alike considered a reactionary opponent of Western influences and modernity with simplistic ideas and a misguided tolerance for superstitious beliefs, may have seemed an unlikely spiritual guru for a movement that vigorously promoted modern penal reform. Yet, if we appreciate what a phenomenon Yinguang had become in the early 1920s, it becomes clear why he was so important to the lay devotees leading this movement. These were the years when, following on the publishing sensation of his collected writings, Yinguang and his advocacy of simple Pure Land practice was attracting the interest of ever-increasing numbers of urban social elites and common folk throughout central-eastern China and beyond. And, although generally thought of as a monk in island retreat, Yinguang was, in fact—in determining to “come out from the mountains”—an energetic agent in building his own public charisma. He threw his support behind monastic and lay engagement in an array of Buddhist social welfare and educational enterprises and forged close relationships with the influential lay Buddhist leaders, wealthy philanthropists, editors, and publishers just a relatively short steamboat trip away in Shanghai and the other major cities of southern Jiangsu and northern Zhejiang that had the wherewithal to make these enterprises succeed. He invested much of his time in these years in visits to (and welcoming the visits of ) his “followers,” preaching, and, above all, through exhaustive writing, especially correspondence with lay devotees. Yinguang, indeed, owed much of his great popular reputation and influence to his followers’ promotion of him, and they, in turn, made the most of associating themselves and their projects with his public charisma. Yinguang’s imprimatur, in the form of prefaces, quotes, references, and advertising promotions in published books and magazines became a means of asserting the value of a Buddhist publication and so provided significant promotional support to Buddhist prison-preaching initiatives.40 This was not just in his contributions to A Record of Reformation; Yinguang further expressed his support for Magistrate Tao’s program with a postscript to Xiang Baicu’s Account of a Visit to the Preaching on Sutras at the Dinghai County Jail, and for Buddhist prison preaching in general, with prefaces to Master Ju’de’s Generally Speaking of the Three Refuges and Five Abstentions on New Year’s Day 1924 at the Beijing No. 1 Prison and Shao Zhenji’s Introduction to Moral Instruction.41 Yinguang’s comments in these writings offer significant insights to the religious vision behind the movement: “Buddhification,” in his view, was the ideal way to transform criminals and lead them to salvation in the Western Paradise.

Reformation for Salvation This began with a compassion for the poor, suffering, and ignorant: “I was sorrowfully reflecting on the ignorant commoners’ lack of education and their suffering from breaking the law and becoming prisoners. The origin of this is that they do not understand cause and effect retribution, which is good fortune for good and calamity for evil, nor about the cycle of reincarnation and such things as the Three Paths of Retribution for evil.” Buddhist teachings and practices would bring convicts, Yinguang argued with a line echoing penal reform discourse, “to reform their errors and renew themselves and again be law abiding good people.” Yet this process would derive from Pure Land practices and beliefs that purified their minds and brought them to “know their own mind is the Buddha mind.” And so, Yinguang repeatedly stated, “the prison becomes a temple [daochang],” with the term “daochang” implying a site of religious transformation.42 PREACHERS, SHANGHAI LAY ELITES, AND THE “BUDDHIFICATION” OF THE JIANGSU PRISONS

Before 1923, the Jiangsu prisons and county jails were unlikely to be confused with places of religious worship. The only notable Buddhist influence was in the Jiangsu No. 2 Prison, where the Buddhist lay devotee from the New Universal Cultivation Hall, Zhou Gongding, preached weekly Sunday sermons and Instructor Shao Zhenji occasionally lectured on Buddhist ethics. Indeed, as Warden Wu Kui later reported, instruction at this prison prior to 1925 focused primarily on “common morality,” a term that denoted the mix of jiaohua moralism and the new civics lessons in the duties of being a good citizen.43 The situation began to change, however, when influential Shanghai lay devotees started to distribute the texts of the Zhejiang movement and support its organizational extension into Jiangsu. Even before the end of 1923, a Jiangsu County Jail warden reported using A Record of Reformation and recommended it be adopted in other jails and prisons. And Rugao County Magistrate Shen Chenqi invited the monk Fancheng, who had preached in prisons and consoled the condemned before executions in Beijing as early as 1916, to preach in his county jail.44 In 1923 the leaders of the Shanghai Buddhist Pure Karma Society—the city’s elite lay devotee association that included leading members with close ties to leaders of the Zhejiang movement—threw their considerable influence and financial support behind Buddhist prison preaching. In May 1923 the Jiangsu Prison Reformation Association, a self-proclaimed “gentry organization,” was founded in Shanghai as a direct offshoot of the Zhejiang movement and fully backed by the Shanghai Buddhist Pure Karma

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Reformation for Salvation Society. The association’s founding documents praised Dinghai Magistrate Tao Yong and Chief Procurator Tao Sizeng, celebrated the convict who became a monk, and repeated Master Yinguang’s phrase that the jail had become “a temple.” Claiming also to be motivated by Christian preaching in Jiangsu prisons, the Jiangsu association described itself, in its petition for government recognition, as a “non-political” organization seeking only “to aid the nation’s prisons’ primary aim of carrying out reformation [ganhua]” through dispatching monks and lay devotees to preach, bring food donations, and assist with parole cases in prisons and jails throughout Jiangsu. The original Buddhist instructor in Hangzhou’s Zhejiang No. 1 Prison and also one of the Zhejiang traveling instructors, Qi Sizhou, was appointed one of the Jiangsu association’s three vice directors and principal lecturers. Qi’s fellow vice directors were the senior lay devotee Shen Hui and none other than Huang Hanzhi, the initiator of Buddhist preaching in Ningbo, who at this point was the actual director of the Jiangsu group from his base in Shanghai. Although Huang still held the official post of intendant of the circuit in Kuaiji (Shaoxing), Zhejiang, there was no question that the Jiangsu association was run out of the large compound headquarters of the Buddhist Pure Karma Society in the Shanghai International Settlement.45 After various delays, the Jiangsu Prison Reformation Association finally began its activities with considerable fanfare, holding a prison “reformation meeting” on the Buddha’s Birthday, April 30, 1925, at the Jiangsu No. 2 Prison at Caohejing. Led by the association’s well-known senior Shanghai lay devotee elites, Feng Menghua, the mixed court justice Guan Jiongzhi, and the wealthy business leader and painter Wang Yiting, the event launched twenty days of preaching by the association’s chief lecturers, Deng Jichang and Qi Sizhou. From Shanghai, they began a mission to bring the teachings and rituals of “Buddhist reformation” to the remaining four new-style Jiangsu prisons (Jiangsu No. 1 Nanjing, Jiangsu No. 3, Jiangsu No. 3 Branch Suzhou, and Jiangsu No. 4 Nantong). During extended stays at these prisons—they spent ten days, for instance, in Suzhou—Deng and Qi taught prisoners that reform and release from prison along with personal salvation could be attained through Buddhist faith and the sincere recitation of the Buddha’s name. Since human nature, they pointed out, was essentially good and only sullied by contact with worldly things, it could be cleansed through faith, confession, and repentance. Thus, Deng and Qi argued that the penal system’s purpose of “reformationism [ganhuazhuyi]” was compassionate in the Buddhist sense; and that the prison was “the benevolent ferry on the bitter sea of life [kuhai/sangsara]” which transported people to the shore of salvation.46

Reformation for Salvation Deng Jichang and Qi Sizhou’s message and rituals were well-received in all the prisons where administrators seemed impressed both by the spirit of the Buddhist activists and the official and unofficial forces backing them. Notably, the Jiangsu chief procurator, Zhou Yigou, publicly demonstrated his support as an official and lay devotee for the project by attending one of Deng and Qi’s prison lectures, contributing money and ordering ten thousand copies of a moral instructional text printed for them. He also sent instructions to county magistrates and wardens proclaiming official approval and support for the Association and their promotion of Buddhist “reformationism.” Moreover, he requested charitable donations of Buddhist books for the county jails and ordered pictures of the Buddha to be hung in all prison and jail instruction halls. For any who might question the seriousness of the orders, he warned that he would send inspectors to investigate whether the jails had implemented the Buddhist methods. With these official orders and the evident public backing of the wealthy and socially influential Shanghai, Jiangnan (that is, southern Jiangsu), and northern Zhejiang lay devotee social elites and the blessing of Master Yinguang, the enterprise took off. In relatively short order, all of the modern Jiangsu prisons, which at this point ranked among the largest and most sophisticated in China, adopted the Buddhist approach to inmate reformation.47 The Yenching criminologist Yan Jingyue did not at all approve of the Buddhist incursions into the modern prisons. Like most New Culture–influenced intellectuals who considered typical Buddhist lay devotee elites to be reactionary opponents of “progress,” Professor Yan declared Buddhist prison instruction to be “superstitious,” ineffective, and contrary to the aims of modern penal reform. The Buddhists’ social-philosophical vision surely contrasted sharply with that of Yan and his colleagues. Yet in Zhejiang and Jiangsu in the 1920s, no group contributed more than these lay Buddhists to the expansion of the regime of penal reformation.48 The Buddhists’ success derived both from their formidable skills in organizing and pragmatically fusing old and new methods and techniques in support of their social activist endeavors, as well as bringing together and activating the shared resources of an alliance of officials and social elites, notably the powerful network of lay devotee elites based in Shanghai, to advance their agenda. The crucial element to these fusions was the Buddhists’ grand religious vision expressed most significantly through communal ritual. Consider, for instance, that the wealthy Shanghai lay devotees of the Jiangsu Prison Reformation Association funded the construction of the Jiangsu No. 2 Prison’s new instruction hall in 1926. As at previous such occasions, the June opening ceremony for the hall publicly represented the completed construction project and the

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Reformation for Salvation Buddhist prison preaching project as a joint enterprise of lay devotee elites, clergy, and judicial officials. Along with some five hundred of the prison’s eight hundred convicts seated in the large new hall draped with festive pennants were assembled the warden and his officers, the Jiangsu chief procurator, Zhou Yigou, the chief justice of the Supreme Court, as well as leading Shanghai court and police officials, lawyers, and, in pride of place, the Shanghai philanthropist, lay Buddhist leader, and, at this point, titular head of the Jiangsu Prison Reformation Association, Wang Yiting, and his coterie of “gentry”—meaning the social elite lay devotees. The dignitaries delivered speeches, a venerable monk preached, and the entire congregation sang, chanted sutras, and joined in the recitation of the Buddha’s name. Much attention was given to the role of the Shanghai lay devotees, who in effect were publicly performing their joint civic and religious commitment within a state institution. The warden listed all of the financial contributors to the new hall, and Procurator Zhou praised the service of the Jiangsu Prison Reformation Association preachers, Deng Jichang and Qi Sizhou, and its leaders (at this point), Wang Yiting, Shen Hui, Zhang Xiaoliang, and Guan Jiongzhi. These lay devotees, Zhou told the assembled dignitaries and prisoners with the phrase Master Yinguang had used, had “gathered the prisoners as Buddhist monks and transformed the prison into a temple.” Much impressed, the Shenbao newspaper reporter covering the event reported that these chanting prisoners with shaved heads and simple clothing appeared “very much like Buddhist monks.”49 The Buddhist movement in these prisons was a branch of and, to an extent, a microcosm of the Shanghai lay Buddhist elites’ larger civic-philanthropic and educational activism. Mostly members of the Buddhist Pure Karma Society and, later, the Shanghai Buddhist Preservation Association, these Shanghai lay Buddhists, while expressing a range of religious interests, pursued much of their charitable and educational endeavors through the Buddhist revival and its aim of extending “Buddhification” throughout society. Along with their involvement in the prisons, these associations provided charitable support to religious and social relief institutions, especially monasteries, orphanages, and hospitals, promoted the propagation of Buddhist teachings through popular education, mass publication, and radio stations such as the Sound of Buddha, Radio XMHB Shanghai. They organized public rituals and religious worship, mainly ceremonies to release animals, listen to preaching, jointly fast, chant sutras, or recite the Buddha’s name. While such activities to save the world both in karmic time and in the present and to amass karmic merit for the activists’ own personal salvation continued long-standing lay Buddhist traditions, the means by which this activism was pursued in the 1920s reflected the wealth, power,

Reformation for Salvation and technical expertise of the Shanghai elites. Along with judicial officials like Guan Jiongzhi and Huang Hanzhi, the lay devotee network included among its leaders and most generous supporters such notable Shanghai capitalist tycoons as Wang Yiting, the Nanyang Tobacco tycoon Jian Yujie (who donated the Shanghai mansion compound for these associations), and the textile and property magnate Nie Qijie. Lay devotee ties linked these wealthy philanthropists with Buddhist editors and publishers, charitable organization workers, preachers and mid-level educators, police officials, and county magistrates and gentryelites in the counties of Zhejiang and Jiangsu. And most of these lay devotees looked to the charismatic spiritual guidance of Master Yinguang. Official position, wealth, print media, personal relationships, and religious spiritual charisma could all be deployed in support of enterprises to “extend the Buddha’s will.”50 The mentality of the lay devotees shared much with the first generation architects of penal reformation, though their Buddhist beliefs fueled their endeavors in important ways for their moment. Although widely seen by their critics as traditionalists, the Shanghai lay devotees maintained a complex relationship to the phenomena of foreign-influenced modernity. They did not oppose foreign influences with regard to “function” (yong). Many of the leading lay devotees had studied Western languages, law, science, and engineering, made their careers and fortunes incorporating modern technologies and methods of organization into their enterprises and activities, and lived at ease with many of the latest everyday technologies and amenities. The value of the practical application of these foreignoriginated implements had become so internalized for them as to be unquestioned—which in effect was the same attitude they took to modern penal methods. What worried them—and this resulted in their being dubbed conservatives or reactionaries by a younger generation of educated elites—was the “substance” (ti) of the scientific, materialist, consumerist-commercial, and liberationist values they associated with Shanghai modernity. In fact, they often absorbed and promoted certain modernist concepts nonetheless. Yet they often represented themselves as nostalgic for what they thought of as a lost era of morality and spiritualism. Deeply concerned about social-moral disorder, they held firmly to the Confucian interpretation of social and political turmoil as consequences of a moral crisis, wrapping it in a Buddhist cosmic view. Indeed, their spiritual leader, Master Yinguang, cogently expressed this perspective. “China’s poverty is from not relying on propriety . . .” he wrote. “The greater half of the Chinese people are reprobates. Thus the foreign nations have become strong and China weak.” While popular Pure Land Buddhism had long incorporated Confucian ethics, Yinguang coherently articulated a place

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Reformation for Salvation within his belief system for both the Confucian ethical code and The Great Learning social-cosmic pattern that imagined that the moral perfection of individuals could bring harmony to society, state, and the universe. For Yinguang, Confucian moral cultivation to attain original goodness was really the same thing as the Buddhist quest to attain the “Buddha mind.” This greatly appealed to elite lay devotees raised on the Confucian classics and anxious about what they perceived to be the moral-social chaos surrounding them. In the wake of the collapse of imperial Confucian orthodoxy and unrelenting attacks blaming Confucianism for China’s weakness and poverty, this Buddhist movement offered a reformulated means of expression to deep-seated elite Confucian beliefs. The Confucianism within the Buddhist movement helped lay devotees to share in the perception, common among the earliest Chinese modern penal reformers, that penal reformation represented a mechanism for government and elite moral suasion of the people. And so just as Yinguang upheld the value of filial piety to Buddhism, so Buddhist moral education in the prison was assumed to teach basic Confucian values.51 Yet, as had clearly been the case for Magistrate Tao Yong, the Confucianized aspect of the Buddhist movement was construed neither as an attempt to return to imperial orthodoxy nor to preserve Confucian values in a static manner. Rather it situated Confucian moralizing impulses within a universal and metaphysical Buddhist system consumed with the radical transformations of its salvationist vision. Hence, the Shanghai lay devotees and Yinguang agreed that the extension of morality originated with an ontological grounding in faith in karmic “cause and effect” and the related cosmic forces. There was a radical intensity to these beliefs. Ding Fubao and Mei Guangxi, for instance, firmly believed in the “real evidence” of karmic consequences, visions, and possession in the world around them. Guan Jiongzhi spoke of ghosts and spirits that “see like electricity” and possess “vision more ingenious than the movies.” He held that due to the interventions of spirits and karmic forces often “in major [criminal] cases the offender casts himself into the snares of the law.”52 This was, of course, a plainly Buddhist version of the popular “cause and effect retribution [yinguo baoying]” ethics already taught to prisoners by instructors like Shao Zhenji. Yinguang and the lay devotees were profoundly committed to them as familiar, native Chinese spiritual beliefs that linked individual moral conduct with a universal cosmic justice that was at once present and tangible and proceeding along karmic time to an ultimate transcendence. By rejecting fatalism and adhering to the view that good deeds in the present could change the consequences of past karma in the present life, Yinguang and his followers inspired religious activism for a personal and cosmic

Reformation for Salvation salvation that the individual could pursue in faith, moral cultivation, ritual practice, purification of the mind, doing good deeds, and so “extending the Buddha’s will.” Buddhist reformation in prisons was a branch of the larger process and a microcosm of it. Counseling a follower on his preaching in society, Yinguang wrote, “Instruct them gradually to begin to believe in cause and effect, and then they will believe deeply in the Dharma; then finally that will direct their lives to the Western Paradise and finishing life and escaping death. If one person like this has boundless merit, how much more so for many people. Truly one must personally act without flaw and then one will be able to reform (ganhua) such people.”53 Clearly, Yinguang understood “reformation” to be the vital process of conversion through which all would be transformed. Therefore, despite cautious claims by certain lay devotees that their activities were “non-political,” the all-pervasive nature of “Buddhification” could hardly be kept from the governmental sphere. Yinguang and many lay devotees wrote often of the relationship between individual reform and the ordering of society and the state and urged Buddhists to contribute to reforming the nation.54 Not only was there a political ideology to much of the Buddhist propagation, the Buddhist dominance in these years of the instruction programs within the leading penal institutions asserted, in effect, a Buddhist form of state doctrine. Throughout China, religious influence in the prison system reached its apex in the last years of the Beiyang period. As we have noted, Christian preachers and instructors predominated at this time in the Beijing prisons, though Instructor Chen Hong at the Beijing No. 2 Prison added a distinctly Buddhist component to his teachings by the mid-1920s.55 This was the period in which Chen Zhixi so thoroughly converted to Buddhism in Warden Xu Bohua’s Shanxi No. 1 Prison. For a brief moment in 1927, the Beijing Ministry of Justice even formally defined prison instruction as a primarily religious endeavor to be carried out solely by “religious people.”56 In central-eastern China, above all, this had already been the case for several years, and the instruction was thoroughly Buddhist. In the five Jiangsu provincial new-style prisons, Buddhist teachings had dominated since the summer of 1925. Instructor Feng Chao at the Jiangsu No. 4 Prison in Nantong based his teachings on the Buddhist Record of the Teachings of the White Venerable One and the Great Cloud Magazine. In Suzhou, at the Jiangsu No. 3 Prison, Instructor Zheng Longkui possessed—as a graduate of a legal administration school and teacher training institute and as a former county jail and modern prison warden and director of a police training institute—the ideal credentials for the job from the bureaucratic perspective; yet Zheng’s instruction curriculum, just like that at the attached Jiangsu No. 3 Branch Prison, focused on Buddhist ethics and relied heavily on Pure Land texts. One Suzhou prison

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Reformation for Salvation report noted, “We order the prisoners to chant sutras night and day in order to help with their repentance.” Meanwhile, in Nanjing, the Jiangsu No. 1 Prison instructor Xia Shupei clearly had been recruited to the position in 1926 because he was such a devout, fervent Buddhist preacher. Xia regularly lectured on the “Three Refuges and Five Abstentions,” “cause and effect retribution,” and “abstaining from killing and protecting life,” listing among his teaching texts such popular Pure Land titles as the two books especially favored by Yinguang, Long Shu’s Pure Land Scripture and The Complete Works of Anshi, Yinguang’s own collected works, and the Dinghai prison preaching collection. Instructor Xia had the inmates collectively practice the reciting of the Buddha’s name—the central practice of Yinguang’s movement—in order, as he put it, “to overcome the consequences of their past lives and broadly attain merit.” Like Magistrate Tao Yong, he integrated ritualistic Buddhist vows into the procedures for inmate admittance and release. Before release, a convict would have to “repent before the Buddha and vow to repay the Buddha’s kindness,” ceremoniously intoning vows never again to commit crime, to examine himself, and to strive to expel any as-yet-undetected faults, to recite the Buddha’s name regularly, to respect the written word and rice, and to memorize the eight-character phrase “Do not do anything evil, act in accordance with good.”57 The program to transform prisons into Buddhist sites of conversion was at its most vibrant in the largest and most technically advanced of these prisons— Shanghai’s Jiangsu No. 2 Prison. While the Buddhist dominance did not entirely exclude other types of religious and secular instruction, Buddhist teachings formed the core content infused into the prison’s “progressive” system of “individualized rehabilitation.” Along with Instructor Yao Chengqing’s Buddhist-themed group lessons and individual counseling, lay devotees and monks regularly came to preach at the prison. According to Warden Wu Kui, inmates and prison staff enthusiastically engaged in the printing of sutras for distribution in society, an enterprise intended to accumulate karmic merit.58 This and the other Jiangsu prisons had become extensions of Master Yinguang’s revival backed by the lay devotee associations of Shanghai and the other major cities of Jiangnan. The making of the criminal into good citizens had been thoroughly reinvented as a Buddhist conversion. CONFLICT AND COMPROMISE WITH THE NATIONALISTS

The late 1920s were a time of major disruption to the Chinese prison system. In 1927, the anti-imperialist, Soviet-supported Nationalist Party–led revolution and liberating conquest had, proceeding north from their base in Guangdong,

Reformation for Salvation succeeded in taking the Yangzi Delta and had advanced into northern China only to be rent asunder by open conflict between left and right factions. This culminated then in Jiang Jieshi’s (Chiang Kai-shek’s) great purge of Communists and other left-wing opponents. In the last days of the Beijing government and various regional militarists, the new-style prisons were forced to admit many troublesome political activists, and arbitrary amnesties and the evaporation of state funding brought about crisis conditions. In the summer of 1927, the Beijing No. 1 Prison depended on a major contribution from a former convict, An Qishan, to stave off starvation.59 When the KMT entered certain areas, they replaced prison officers with party cadres, who sought to revolutionize the prisons. Yan Jingyue was generally more critical of these intrusions than he had been of the Buddhists: “The party members came and spoke all day of the Three Principles of the People and not of prison reform; some in the prison even called the offenders ‘comrade’ and in their actions they did not maintain an aura of discipline and leadership. Guards openly sold alcohol and cigarettes to the prisoners. They were probably practicing the slogan that was pasted up everywhere in the prison—‘The Three Principles of the People are prisoner liberationism.’ ” Yan recorded that when asked about their method for managing the prison, the KMT cadres “are vague, saying that this prison is under political influence.”60 This politicizing involved the suppression of “religious superstition,” which more broadly was one of the revolutionary campaigns initially pursued by KMT activists, especially in the Lower Yangzi. In 1928, in one of the birthplaces of the prison-preaching movement, KMT public security units ordered the prohibition of “the worship of idols” in the Hangzhou prisons.61 As it turned out, amid the haphazardness of early KMT rule, certain prisons, notably the Anhui No. 1 Prison in Anqing and Xu Bohua’s Shanxi No. 1 Prison in Taiyuan, initially maintained their Buddhist routines unmolested.62 But a prison as prominent as the Jiangsu No. 2 was not to be ignored. The difficulties for the Buddhists in this prison began in May 1927 with the influx of young, mostly intellectual political prisoners caught up in Jiang’s purge. These assorted Communists, “Trotskyites,” left-wing KMT, and actual and accused opponents of Jiang Jieshi brought with them the tensions of the revolution. Aside from their obvious differences over religion and politics, the Buddhist prison officials and the young radicals were sharply divided along lines of generational and cultural affinity. Two young members of the CCP in the prison when it came under investigation in 1928, Zhang Weizhen and Li Yimin, recalled their deep antipathy for the Buddhist regime. Li wrote disparagingly: “One day [the instructor] came to my cell, sat on the bed and asked me to sit down too. He said to me, ‘Do you know that you are sentenced to life imprisonment? Life

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Reformation for Salvation imprisonment means being locked up in prison forever. From now on you should not think of anything at all, just only recite ‘Amitabha Buddha’ with your entire heart and mind.” The instructor (Qiao Xunru) gave Li a copy of the Amitabha Sutra; but Li recalled cheekily replying that as he could say “Amitabha” three times on his deathbed and still go to the Western Paradise, he felt it unnecessary to do daily recitation. “The instructor got very angry,” Li recalled, “stood up and said, ‘You won’t get to paradise. After death you will still have to go to hell, and still have to be imprisoned.’ ” With that, he left Li copies of the Guanyin Sutra and Diamond Sutra, ordering him to read them daily and have them memorized within a month. Li Yimin admitted to complying with the instructor’s order, though he was resentful of his manner and his “using Buddhism to wear down the prisoners’ will.”63 The similar reaction of another young intellectual political prisoner in the Jiangsu No. 2 Prison proved far more dangerous to the prison officials. Zhang Dinghua, a twenty-four-year-old Guiyang native and Beijing University graduate who had become a KMT propagandist and editor of the newspaper of the Political Department of the National Revolutionary Army, had been falsely accused and imprisoned during the early stages of the 1927 party purge.64 Released after a year and four months and again in a position of influence, Zhang was determined to reform the prison. He conducted an official visit to the prison and wrote a letter to the warden outlining necessary reforms. Then on October 29, 1928, he sent a letter to the Shanghai Special Municipal Nationalist Party Affairs Steering Committee that sparked an investigation into the prison’s instruction program.65 Zhang Dinghua’s letter vividly expressed the sharp cultural and generational antagonism between the self-consciously modern revolutionary youths and the advocates of Buddhification. Harboring elitist assumptions about “frail scholar” political prisoners like himself, Zhang argued that they deserved access to books and should receive special treatment in the prison due to the weakness of their constitutions and their potential to “serve the nation” in the future. At the same time, he showed his condescension and contempt for the prison’s Buddhist instructors. Even though he described Instructor Yao Chengqing as “himself good and honest,” Zhang concluded that Yao was “simple and unsophisticated.” And his view of Yao’s successor, Qiao Xunru, the same instructor that Li Yimin had recalled with such aversion, was sharply critical: He has been arbitrary and heedless of all restraints, each day more than the last, preaching Buddhism to the prisoners and repeatedly talking random and crazy talk. . . . For example, he said, “All of you who believed in the

Reformation for Salvation Three Principles of the People on the outside should believe in Buddhism now that you are in prison. It doesn’t matter whether you want to believe in it or not. You have to believe in it.” He has a reckless and arbitrary attitude, is fierce looking and fearsome, carrying on him a wooden fish and chimes that bang and clack everywhere, disturbing peace and order. I do not understand . . . how it is possible for you to tolerate this kind of foolish and reckless person.

This characterization of Qiao as a wild-eyed religious fanatic—a stereotypical “dissolute Buddhist” from out of Chinese literature contrasted to political prisoners cast as “upright scholar-heroes”—revealed more about Zhang’s antireligious antagonism than about the Buddhist prison instructors. Hardly “wild monks,” Qiao Xunru and Yao Chengqing were both graduates of the respected Jiangsu No. 1 Normal School. Qiao had been a primary schoolteacher in his rural township and an instructor at the Jiangsu No. 1 Prison in Nanjing. In other words, Qiao and Yao had received a modern education and could claim intellectual status. They too had worked within new institutional structures and were committed to reforming hearts and minds for the transformation of society, nation, and a higher purpose. Yet the contrasting approaches to these aims separated Qiao from Zhang as much as the fact that the instructor was somewhat older, poorer, and from a different region than the former prisoner. The differences between the Buddhist lay devotee and the revolutionary had to do with cultural affinities defined in relation to perceptions of modernity, particularly with regard to the aspect of rational secularism, and so engaged core issues of identity in matters of ritual and doctrinal teachings.66 Zhang Dinghua, to be clear, was not obdurately antireligious in the manner of some KMT activists and, with some ambivalence, moderately concluded, “Although I observed that the prison was made into a temple, whether or not that matter is proper is something you ought to petition the government about some other day.” What bothered and surprised him the most was the intensity of the Buddhification movement in the prison and its contention with KMT ideology for doctrinal supremacy in the instruction program. From this came his most serious criticism of the prison authorities as being “audacious in the extreme by forbidding prisoners from reading books that propagate the Three Principles of the People.” Noting that such books as The Collected Lectures of the Nationalist Party and Wu Zhihui’s Collected Talks were not permitted to be sent to inmates, Zhang recalled that the instructor had rudely rebuffed his inquiries about the policy, saying “Read the books we permit you to read and don’t ask about those we don’t permit you to read.” Zhang asked, “What is this autocratic boldness? And what actually is the reason for it?” The reason was,

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Reformation for Salvation clearly, the unabated power of the Buddhification movement. As Zhang put it, “It is none other than the desire to use autocratic measures to compel people to believe in Buddhism and to recite ‘Amitabha Buddha’ all day. . . . The Buddhist disciples of your honorable prison, by overly strongly carrying out this policy toward the common people, seem to be acting recklessly.” Zhang observed that still under the new government, “the power to hire the prison instructors is actually handled by means of recommendations from the great elders of all the Buddhist associations, which makes for (instructors) that only propagate Buddhist teachings.” A year into KMT rule in Shanghai, the Buddhist lay devotees’ influence over the prisons remained unchanged. This led Zhang to make a chilling threat: “To have those that receive official salaries from the party government then obstruct party doctrine propaganda is the sort of action that really violates the law on counter-revolution. If you, sir, do not strictly suppress this, then it will in time become a criminal problem. Then who will get the blame?” At a time when such accusations could easily lead to imprisonment and even execution, Zhang Dinghua’s attack on the Buddhist instruction program at the Jiangsu No. 2 Prison was a deadly serious matter for the warden and his staff.67 When on November 4 the Shanghai Special Municipal Party Affairs Steering Committee requested the Prison Office of the Jiangsu High Court to investigate and to resolve the situation, it reiterated Zhang’s most powerful accusation that “they are preaching Buddhification at the Caohejing Jiangsu No. 2 Prison and it is obstructing the propagation of party doctrine.” In a November 10 response, the Jiangsu Prison Office noted Buddhist instruction’s effectiveness in reforming prisoners, and yet conceded that they “ought to understand the principles of revolution” in accord with the June 1927 order that prisoners be taught the Three Principles of the People. The Jiangsu High Court, moreover, ordered the prison to implement the June 1927 order and report back. That prompted Warden Wu Kui’s remarkable report on instruction, which, despite its defense of Buddhist teachings, also dubiously claimed that since 1927 the prison had “focused on the Three Principles of the People and have used the Buddhist doctrine era materials for reference.” His further assertion that the prison had been carrying out rituals of commemoration to Sun Yat-sen, taught his main ideas, and placed copies of Introduction to the Three Principles of the People in all cells “to make the average criminal come to a completely clear understanding of the real meaning of the revolution” was at best a gross exaggeration. Most likely, these practices had been instituted after the prison came under investigation and was forced to accept the doctrinal primacy of KMT ideology.68

Reformation for Salvation By accepting the leading role of the Three Principles of the People and yet claiming a supporting part for Buddhist teachings, Warden Wu Kui attempted to fashion a compromise that would retain Buddhism in the prison under KMT rule. Within less than a year, Warden Wu, his top staff officers, and Instructor Qiao Xunru had all been removed from their posts. But under his successor, Warden Mei Guangfu in 1929–30, Warden Wu’s compromise was maintained. The official doctrine of the prison was now KMT ideology, but Instructor Zheng Qingfen reported drawing upon a series of Buddhist texts, including the writings of Master Yinguang and other key works of the Buddhist movement.69 By 1933, the Buddhist content in the prison’s instruction curriculum had been reduced to infrequent standardized lectures on “cause and effect and good and evil” or “prison as the ferry on the bitter sea of life.” These Buddhist topics were interred within a program devoted to a mix of civics, ethics, and KMT doctrine.70 Even as some Buddhist teaching was tolerated and preserved, it had been compartmentalized, standardized, and sanitized in a manner that extinguished the moment of Buddhification with a whimper, not a bang. THE BUDDHIST CONTRIBUTION

The demise of the salvationist Buddhist movement in the Jiangsu and Zhejiang prisons occurred as part of the broader process of compromises that constituted the derevolutionizing of the KMT state. The negotiations, some more and some less formal, went on for years. The influence of lay Buddhists and Buddhist sympathizers in the top ranks of the KMT government, as well as the skillful political lobbying of the Buddhist reform leader Taixu, blunted many of the assaults by KMT antisuperstition activists.71 With regard to the prisons, opposition to Buddhist influence remained strong in the 1930s among secularist academics and KMT proponents of the purity of party doctrine. There were also figures like the influential Shanghai penologist and warden Sun Xiong, who tolerated only limited use of Buddhist teaching in his prisons in the 1930s, expressing an elitist Confucian distaste for what he deemed the weak moral fiber of most Buddhists. Over the course of his career, he claimed to have found that “many monks committed murder, banditry, theft, fornication and swindling; and there were even more among them that were opium smokers.”72 Still, some Buddhists continued to promote their version of charitable or educational “reformation” conversions in various institutions, especially in Shanghai, and Buddhism and Buddhists continued to have some influence in the modern prisons. There were even still believers in the mission of Buddhification,

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Reformation for Salvation such as a Beijing-based former county magistrate from Sichuan named Chen Zhao, who published a book in 1935 titled With Buddhism: A Proposal for the Management and Reformation of Convicts. Chen rejected the view that “superstition is not permitted by the party-state,” arguing that the Buddhist way of reformation suited “national conditions and the people’s sentiments” while removing evil karma from the cycle of reincarnation.73 Neither the proponents nor opponents, however, were pleased by the compromises of the 1930s. In 1935, the National Judicial Conference and the new draft prison code made explicit the government tolerance of visiting Buddhist preachers in the prisons. Remarkably, one of the proponents for accepting Buddhist preaching was none other than Wang Shurong, who had so opposed it two decades before. And a number of monks and lay devotees continued occasionally to preach in the prisons.74 Yet, the KMT toleration of Buddhism and relegation of it to a supporting role, in which it was to serve within the narrowly defined modern category of religious needs as opposed to a universal ideology, effectively removed it from doctrinal contention within the prisons. In the Jiangsu prisons by 1936, Buddhist talks, largely provided by Shanghai’s Sound of Buddha radio station, were a standard feature of the daily afternoon broadcasts over the new loudspeaker system at the Jiangsu Shanghai 2nd Special District Prison. But the instructor did not incorporate Buddhism into any of his regular lessons.75 With the exception of moments and places of revived religiosity, mainly during wartime, the patterns of this compromise continued and the flourishing of the Buddhification movement faded and, for decades after 1949, seemed entirely forgotten. The clash in the prisons between the advocates of KMT ideology and the supporters of Buddhification exposed the vigor of the Buddhist movement in the Zhejiang and Jiangsu prisons in the 1920s. It had followed upon a previous decade in which, out of the early Republican Buddhist resurgence, proponents of Buddhist prison teachings and preachers like Juexian made themselves contenders for influence within the new prisons. The rise to dominance of Buddhist teachings in the Zhejiang and Jiangsu prisons, then, originated with lay Buddhist local judicial officials and social elites concerned with social order in their districts. Their innovations in the county jails were sparked by the challenge of maintaining a new penal system based on incarceration that was far more expensive and difficult to administer than the former system. Indeed, the Buddhist approach was a relatively low-cost solution. Prefiguring later regimes, the Buddhists had found a way to build institutional control, at least at the county and provincial level, through collective action generated through fervent belief, will, commitment, and ritual, where financial resources and

Reformation for Salvation advanced technologies were lacking. Their shared beliefs, aims, and ritual practices were the unifying elements of these social-cultural networks, through which an alliance of local officials and elites for the preservation of social order and the cultivation of morality among the populace could be enacted in the era following the fall of the imperial state and ideology. Indeed, there was an intertwining of official and social elite roles and a frequent blurring of the distinctions between these identities. The Jiangsu Prison Reformation Association described itself as a “gentry association,” yet one of its top leaders was a judicial official in Zhejiang, and one of its main lecturers had formerly been a salaried instructor at the Zhejiang No. 1 Prison. In Jiangsu, the Buddhist preaching at the Rugao County Jail was carried out by a monk, while farther north at the Siyang County Jail, the Buddhist instructor was a former staff member at the Jiangsu No. 1 Prison. Many county jail instructors were former teachers or students from county towns, while certain gentry supporters of the movement had once served in some official capacity. Most participants in this movement were not state officials, yet, crucially, in this era of central state weakness, their utopian dreams of reforming the people presumed a process in harmony with the state, and they considered themselves to be working within the state.76 The legal scholar Chen Junsan writing in The Legal Critic in 1925 quite rightly observed that, with regard to penal reform, “the Buddhist philanthropists have very different interests from those essential ideas of modern reform.”77 Simply put, the lay Buddhists saw prisoner education as an opportunity to assert their religious vision not just as a balm to social disorder, but as a source of mass transformations of minds that would realize utopian aims of social harmony and ultimately a worldly and karmic salvation of the Chinese people and nation and all beyond. They were acting as participants in a salvationist movement that flourished through the spiritual leadership of Master Yinguang and the promotional activities of wealthy and influential Shanghai lay Buddhist elites. The charismatic aspect of the Buddhist movement and its propagation by Shanghai elite-sponsored organizations and publishing enterprises subsequently drove the rapid expansion of Buddhist prison preaching and made possible its stunning dominance in Jiangsu and Zhejiang. The rituals and beliefs of Master Yinguang’s revival not only unified Zhejiang monks, provincial procurators, county magistrates and wardens, Shanghai capitalists and publishers, and lay devotee preachers and organizers, it inspired them to serve the cause of Buddhist penal reformation. For some, this may have had as much to do with the social prestige that accompanied such participation as it did with genuine religious fervor. It was clearly dignifying for those preachers in the county jails, for instance, to know that Master Yinguang had written that they “all honor me by following me

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Reformation for Salvation as disciples.”78 But ultimately their service in the prisons was practiced as a public religious act. They worked with and within the state, for local society and the nation, but their eyes looked to a power transcendent. In the process, these Buddhist officials and elites of Jiangsu and Zhejiang embraced and extended, particularly to the county level and reinvigorated within the major provincial new-style prisons, the recently imported methods of rehabilitative incarceration. Like the Nationalists and Communists, the Buddhists too had dreams of transforming and saving the Chinese people and nation and restoring social order, which they believed could be served by the process of penal reformation. Hence, these self-avowed conservative critics of modernity became for a time the leading force behind the revitalization and extension of the ideas and methods of the modern regime of penal conversion in China’s most urbanized and economically developed region—the Lower Yangzi. During a time of political chaos and limited central state direction, they carried the banner of reformation and so contributed to the formation of a mechanism of state power essential to the subsequent party-states. Like those who followed them, the Buddhists made reformation a central mechanism of their larger agenda for transformation. In November 1928, the Jiangsu High Court order that effectively ended the Buddhification of the Jiangsu No. 2 Prison simply noted that now the Three Principles of the People were to be “thoroughly and genuinely inculcated.”79 Amid contention and commotion, the mechanisms and principles of penal reformation were passed from one regime and one vision for the transformation of China to another.

5

A MECHANISM FOR ALL OFFENSES: THE NATIONALIST EXPANSION OF THE REFORMATION REGIME, 1927–1937

It had been six months since Jiang Jieshi’s April 12, 1927, launching of the purge of CCP and other leftists from the ranks of the KMT. The recently deposed chair of the KMT’s Party Purge Judicial Committee, Hu Yimin, was returning to Nanjing from his father’s funeral in his native West Mountain village in the hill country near Yongkang in central Zhejiang when he stopped in Hangzhou to visit his colleague, the Military Affairs Court justice, Jiang Bocheng. The reception Hu received on this October day was far from cordial. Jiang had Hu arrested on the spot, accusing him of being a “counterrevolutionary element.” For Hu, it was a return to a nightmare that had begun in midJuly in Nanjing, when he was abruptly summoned to Jiang Jieshi’s office. The furious KMT leader had pounded the table, shouting that Hu should not be releasing so many arrested suspects. As Hu tried to explain, Jiang had slapped him back and forth across the face and had him dragged from the room into detention while the “rumors” were investigated. His second arrest was, in Hu’s opinion, a revival of these unsubstantiated personal and political attacks. “Youths full of hate,” above all, his younger colleague Liu Bolong, Hu later wrote, were angry that he had protected “youths of unstable wills” when adjudicating purge cases. Liu and another Purge Judicial Committee member, Wu Jinzhang, had clashed with Hu over his insistence on evidence and legal procedure. As Huangpu Military Academy–trained National Revolutionary Army (NRA) officers fiercely loyal to their “schoolmaster,” Jiang Jieshi, Liu and Wu viewed Hu’s procedural concerns amid the life-and-death struggle to save their national revolution as proof of disloyalty. At trial, a CCP turncoat accused Hu 161

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A Mechanism for All Offenses of being secret CCP, that his secretary was also CCP, and that Hu had knowingly released CCP prisoners and, oddly, taken CCP bribes.1 Hu Yimin’s world turned upside down. This thirty-seven-year-old son of farmers had come a long way. In the early years of the Republic, he had acquired an advanced legal-administrative education in his home province, become a lawyer, passed the national civil service examination, and received a posting as a judge in a minor county-seat district court in northern Guangdong. Hu had met and become a supporter of Sun Yat-sen before the Leninist restructuring of the KMT in the early 1920s, and by 1926 he had the reputation and connections to be placed in charge of the Military Legal Administration Section and Military Court of the NRA as it set out on the Northern Expedition liberationist conquest for national reunification. Known as one of the few formally trained and experienced legal experts in the party at the time, Hu also demonstrated the resolve to carry out executions, leading many to dub him “the executioner.” The April coup and onset of the Nanjing KMT administration had brought Hu’s elevation to his highest official position yet as a key leader of the prosecution and adjudication of the thousands arrested in the purge and also as warden of the Jiangsu No. 1 Prison. Yet, only a few months later in Hangzhou, he was locked in the bowels of the grim eight-hundred-inmate-capacity Zhejiang Army Prison, whose imposing observation tower and light red perimeter wall loomed incongruously alongside the legendary natural beauty of West Lake. One of the military prisons first planned at the end of the Qing dynasty, it was decidedly not an institution committed to rehabilitation. Previously used by military administrations to detain deserters and bandits, the prison was packed with those arrested in the ongoing purge. Here, Hu Yimin faced the disturbing consequences of his work. The conditions and sanitation were appalling, the diet minimal, illness widespread, and the treatment of the mostly unsentenced prisoners often brutal. A devastating beriberi epidemic eventually erupted in the fall of 1928. Only bribery or trading with the poorly paid, undisciplined guards could purchase protection from their bullying and some improved treatment. Hu Yimin was dismayed by the torturous length of the special judicial processes that left detainees waiting four to five months for trial and judgment. There seemed to be intentional bureaucratic stalling, as connections and bribes could expedite the process. Worst of all, many of his fellow inmates were held only on “suspicion” or due to false accusations, making for injustices that, he wrote, harmed “the national spirit and faith of the people” with “a policy that treated average youths as fodder.” Although many CCP members had been arrested, Hu learned that in the antiCommunist panic “local bullies and evil gentry” had sent troops “to round up

A Mechanism for All Offenses students, workers and merchants and indiscriminately extracted confessions through torture.” Later Hu recalled how he had released many due to “insufficient evidence”—the approach that got him in trouble—because, amid the exhaustion of the endless days and nights of interrogations (sometimes with torture), it was difficult even to ascertain if the names of the accused were correct, let alone their testimony. For Hu, the tragic excesses of the purge were personified by his fellow inmate, Luo Liliang, who, when arrested in Sheng County, Zhejiang, and accused of being CCP, was just ten years old.2 The chaos of the purge not only damaged the KMT cause, it undermined the legal system and overwhelmed the prisons. Already a year earlier, politically motivated executions and jailings by all sides had risen appreciably, increasing the numbers of political detainees in county jails and military prisons and bringing small but conspicuous groups of political prisoners, such as CCP founding leader Li Dazhao and his comrades, into the major new-style prisons. But in the first nine months of Jiang’s purge, some two thousand people were executed, mostly by firing squad—called out “to go see the Premier” in prison argot—and about fifty-six hundred arrested in the eye of the storm in Shanghai and Jiangsu. The special provisional courts, detention centers, and police lockups in Jiangsu and Zhejiang were quickly overburdened, as CCP members, other leftists and opponents of Jiang, the falsely accused, and unlucky bystanders joined many KMT activists arrested by the former militarist regimes, as well as “landlords” and “petty capitalists” previously detained by leftist KMT officials and still not released. The numbers grew as scores were settled not just between political factions, but also personally between former comrades. Accusations and denunciations ran rampant, and local power brokers took advantage of the situation. Even as far afield as Taiyuan, the model of introspective Buddhist reform, Chen Zhixi, was investigated on suspicion of being CCP just for writing a letter to his native-place association requesting, as custom dictated, that they transport the body of his classmate and fellow regional executed for being CCP back to his hometown. A guard later chillingly confided to Chen that, had it not been for the intercession of Warden Xu Bohua, he likely would have been shot. The deluge of detentions went on for months, and there were no plans to release most; they had to be put someplace. Along with the infamous Longhua Garrison Command Jail in Shanghai, major military prisons in the vicinities of Hangzhou, Suzhou, and Nanjing were enlisted and soon inundated with purge detainees. Many were also sent in to the major modern prisons.3 Dangerously overcrowded with an influx of what amounted to nearly 70 percent of entering prisoners in 1927 having been sent by military courts and units as unsentenced detainees or sentenced under the special military laws and

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A Mechanism for All Offenses regulations for, among other things, resisting the revolution, the Jiangsu No. 1 Prison was wracked by epidemics, an unprecedented 87 inmate deaths from illness, two escapes, and an armed prisoner insurrection that year. Even after 561 prisoners were given emergency releases to relieve the crowding, this “Tiger Bridge Prison,” as it was known in Nanjing, was still overflowing beyond its capacity at the end of the year. Even as by late 1928 the major Jiangsu prisons began to assert order and reduce inmate illness and death rates, crowding remained a problem. The Jiangsu No. 2 Prison was similarly overwhelmed in the wake of the purge and remained severely distressed during the first two years of KMT rule. Remembering “living a half-starving, inhuman life” with minimal, nauseating rations in the prison at this time, the CCP prisoner Li Yimin wrote of the great numbers of fellow inmates suffering from tuberculosis and typhoid, many of whom, little aided by the bowls of Chinese herbal medicine provided by the medical officer, died all around him. It was, he recalled, “very frightening.”4 Hu Yimin’s nightmarish experience in prison, finally, was brief, as the intercession by the senior KMT figure Zhang Qun and a personal telegram from Jiang Jieshi brought a full exoneration and release on December 12, 1927. But Hu did not forget the lessons of his imprisonment. As much as his 1928 published account delivered a sharp critique of the excesses of the purge, it was equally aimed at exposing the failures of the military prison in order to promote institutional change. Hu appended to his account a plan for prison reform.5 In this respect, Hu Yimin was emblematic of the quest of legal-judicial officials under the KMT to move beyond the chaos of the revolution and build well-ordered, just institutions in accordance with international standards. With respect to the prisons, they sought to carry out what they believed all others had failed before them—the perfection of the system of reformation. The Nanjing KMT government launched its first prison reform almost immediately in 1928–29, with an ambitious plan to order and expand the modern prison and county jail and detention systems and re-create them on the model of the latest international theories of punishment. There were to be new prisons built specially for juvenile offenders, for recidivists, for mentally ill offenders, for prisoners who would conduct labor outdoors, and for those suffering from tuberculosis and other chronic lung diseases. It called for the creation of provincial citizens’ prison associations that would mobilize support within society for prison work with volunteering and mass campaigns. The reform was complemented by sections of the 1928 Criminal Code, which, as revised under the leadership of Wang Chonghui, referenced the international progressive penological emphasis on the mental capacity and social condition

A Mechanism for All Offenses of offenders and the “individualization” of punishment. KMT and nonparty judicial-penal officials agreed that the moment had come to perfect China’s modern penal system.6 In theory, the KMT seemed prepared to abandon the moralism of the prisons and adopt the latest trends of progressive penology in accord with “international standards.” Prison reform and expansion were advanced as part of the KMT’s revived and intensified version of the early twentieth-century Chinese state’s persistent, related drives to bring about a negotiated end to extraterritoriality, in part, through domestic legal and penal reforms, and to discipline urban centers.7 The central arena was the KMT’s Jiangnan (southern Jiangsu) power base, particularly Shanghai, under the eyes of the large foreign community and the most influential journalists and public intellectuals. Demonstrating to the world that it could make an orderly and safe modern city out of Shanghai—a metropolis known for its reputation as a hotbed of crime and vice—was, as Frederic Wakeman has shown, a key legitimating goal the KMT set for itself. The presumed crisis of urban crime, disorderliness, and licentious urban culture more than ever preoccupied not just top leaders, high level judicial and penal officials, and police, but also a growing professional cohort of academic and government criminologists and penologists and was projected before the public through the press. The 1930s crime experts, much like Instructor Shao Zhenji in the 1920s, obsessively identified the crime problem with Shanghai’s urban poverty and modern urban culture of vice and dissolute entertainments. Even as they debated with competing theories, they generally shared the view that the urban crime crisis was a symptom of a broader social crisis of the nation, which could only be remedied by a massive state-directed cleansing and social progressive reordering of urban society. At the center of this social transformative process was to be an expanded, modernized prison system—“hospitals of society” with the latest international “scientific” techniques that would cure the individual ailments of those suffering from the “social illnesses.”8 However, the KMT would not advance far toward this progressive ideal, even though they readily incorporated many useful modern techniques and technologies of control. Not just the political alliances and compromises that Jiang Jieshi made, but also his philosophical inclinations and approach to state-building made for greater continuities with the former regime than he acknowledged. In penal reform, the KMT largely relied on officers from the former prison service to lead their plan for modernization and expansion. Wang Yuanzeng headed the Ministry of Judicial Administration Prison Bureau (1932–41), and other firstgeneration Beiyang-era wardens, such as Xu Bohua, Liang Jinhan, and Tian Jinghua, continued to run major prisons; many leading new wardens, such as

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A Mechanism for All Offenses Zhu Gang, Wu Zhiyuan, and Sun Xiong, had come up through the prison officer service ranks before 1927. And such leading figures in earlier legal-judicial reforms as Wang Chonghui, Luo Wengan, and Dong Kong again served in high-level leadership posts. Factional competition and conflicts notwithstanding, the key ministerial leaders and the penal-judicial bureaucracy were unified to the point of conformity in their views of the core patterns of prison organization and the methods and centrality of reformation (ganhua). New codes and regulations were closely related revisions of former ones. And prison instructors, as before, took their assignment to be “to cultivate the morality of the prisoners.”9 The conditions appeared to be in place not for a leap toward a progressive ideal, but rather for a steady expansion of the particular penal regime formed over the previous twenty years. This did not happen, however, because of Jiang Jieshi’s three major existential agendas for his KMT party-state in the 1930s: the efforts to assert state authority and initiate social transformation through the control and eventual eradication of the notorious drug problem, the suppression of the CCP insurgency, and militarization in preparation for war with Japan. Enlisted in the first two great KMT causes, the prisons were nearly destroyed as a result. And yet their importance to the state only increased, and the regime of reformation came to be extended to ever-new categories of “offenders” and reproduced in a host of new carceral institutions beyond the legal system. Indeed, even as Hu Yimin sought a way out of prison in Hangzhou, some of his former colleagues across town were designing a special new institution for political prisoners. WARDEN SUN XIONG AND HIS SHANGHAI MODEL PRISON

The August 1931 negotiated Chinese administrative accession to Shanghai’s French Concession Jail at No. 285 Rue Massenet and its renaming as the Jiangsu Shanghai 2nd Special District Prison was a moment to celebrate for the Nanjing government. It was a demonstration of progress in the KMT’s campaign to regain national sovereignty by chipping away at the system of extraterritoriality through legal-judicial-penal reform and urban policing. The treaty-port administrative hybrid, the French Concession Mixed Court, next to which the prison had originally been constructed in 1911, had been replaced by the Chinese-administered 2nd Special District Court in February 1930. The political import was enormous. The court and prison were showcases within Jiang Jieshi’s showcase city, with which the KMT intended to prove to the world that it could successfully administer modern judicial and penal institutions. With the expanded, refurbished eleven-hundred-capacity prison designated as the

A Mechanism for All Offenses new national model, there was considerable pressure to succeed placed on the first warden, Xie Fuci. Yet less than two years later, in June 1933, Xie was hastily removed from office on corruption charges, convicted, and sent back to prison as an inmate. It was an embarrassing scandal. Immediate action was necessary to rectify the situation. Again, Nanjing selected a long-serving prison officer, Sun Xiong. Widely considered one of the best and brightest of the new generation of wardens, Sun was brought in to clean up the mess.10 A native of Pingjiang in northeast Hunan, Sun Xiong recalled his defining coming-of-age experience occurring as a sixteen-year-old studying at the Shanxi Sojourners Middle School in Wuchang when he cut off his queue in rebellion and so broke the law and school rules, just prior to the 1911 Revolution that began in the city. It was the only time he would admit to have broken any rules or laws. When he returned to Hunan after the revolution, he committed to studying and upholding law and order. Graduating from the Hunan Public Law School, he worked from 1913 in a number of Hunan counties as a police officer, court clerk, government workshop director, county jail warden, and even as a regional military staff officer. Then, in 1922, like his co-provincial Shao Zhenji, Sun made his way to Shanghai. There he entered the modern prison service first as head guard at the Jiangsu No. 2 Branch Prison before quickly being promoted to section chief. Ostensibly, he was recruited by his fellow Hunanese, Warden Yang Xuanyou, who had learned of Sun’s “reputation in Hunan for his ability to govern jails,” though Sun’s move to Shanghai at this moment, as for Shao Zhenji, likely had something to do with the political instability in Hunan following the collapse of the provincial autonomy movement. It was during that first summer of 1922, while working and living at the No. 2 Branch Prison, that Sun befriended Shao Zhenji. Sun rose steadily through the ranks, serving in section chief positions at the Jiangsu No. 1, Jiangsu No. 2, and Jiangsu No. 4 Prisons and as director of detention centers and county jails in Wu (Suzhou), Jiangning (Nanjing), and Shanghai Counties. Following a harrowing stint running the Changsha Local Court Detention Center, when an inmate riot broke out amid the summer 1930 military uprising led by Peng Dehuai’s CCP forces, Sun was promoted in September 1930 to a major wardenship at the Jiangsu No. 4 Prison in Nantong. Soon Sun hired as the prison instructor Li Xizhong, a fellow Pingjiang native who had also studied at middle school in Wuchang and later at a legal administration school. Having spent the first part of his career as a schoolteacher in Hunan, Li turned out to be a talented, energetic instructor. Within a year, Sun and Li were gaining recognition for having turned the perennially lowest-ranked of the modern Jiangsu prisons into a paragon of reform.11

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A Mechanism for All Offenses Like Hu Yimin and other penal reformers, Warden Sun espoused the progressive ideals of the transformative effect of labor training and basic education. A voracious and uncritical reader and spouter of international and Chinese penological and criminological theories, Sun was interested in what he termed the “laborization of punishment,” suggesting, similar to later Maoist “reformthrough-labor,” that labor could remake the body and character of inmates and contribute to economic production to support the prison and the nation. His idea shared much with reform proposals throughout the 1930s, some influenced by progressive American practices, that imagined that the ideal of reformative training and institutional financial self-sufficiency could be attained together. Such optimism was countered by positions hardened amid the global economic depression demanding that criminal “parasites” be forced to work for the nationstate or be remade by the suffering of hard labor, like “long tempering to form steel.” In Nantong, however, Sun encountered the same practical problems that long had undermined idealistic work programs. Just keeping the prison functioning at all was a struggle. Indeed, Sun’s vaunted reputation as a warden derived much from having just maintained food and fuel supplies despite disruptions in funding and transportation due to natural disasters, reduced tax yields, and the two-month 1932 Battle of Shanghai between Chinese and Japanese military forces. The work program was not where he would make his mark.12 Prisoner education reform seemed to have more potential, though it was also a realm encumbered with dreamy-sounding progressive idealism. Year after year, proposals were put forth, notable ones emulating the 1924 reform plan and some calling for “reformation education” (ganhua jiaoyu), which made little headway. Even literacy training was slow to develop until the ministry’s 1935–36 prisoner “literacy movement.” As much as Sun Xiong had an interest in new theories, he knew well the realities buried beneath formulaic claims of success in official reports: Most prisons provided little to none of the ministry’s basic education program, and the few programs that did exist were small-scale modifications. Based on his own study begun in Nantong, Sun concluded that only 10–20 percent of prisoners in the major Jiangsu prisons received any basic literacy education, even though about 60 percent of those from southern Jiangsu and 80 percent from northern Jiangsu were illiterate. Hence, inmate literacy became a focus of Sun Xiong and Li Xizhong’s efforts at the Jiangsu No. 4 Prison. Instructor Li compiled his own elementary reading primer, wrote inspirational songs, and eventually reported, rather soberly, that significant success could be achieved given enough time with an inmate. His success stories were the kidnapper You Huaiqing and the robber Zhang Liufa, both of

A Mechanism for All Offenses whom had served sufficiently long sentences to permit them the time to learn to read well enough so that upon release the former became a police patrolman and the latter, a factory technical instructor. In March 1933, the Jiangsu High Court inspector Jin Ding rated Li’s education program the best in the province. Yet Instructor Li only admitted forty inmates into the program each year.13 The way to influence the greatest number of prisoners remained moral instruction. But this, as the Buddhist case in Shanghai demonstrated, initially required caution. Just as with schools, the KMT penal reformer Hu Yimin held, there ought to be “a partification [danghua] of education” in the prisons. The 1928 prison staff regulations stipulated that instructors were to “stress instilling the party doctrine.” There would be no tolerance of a coherent competitor like the Buddhist salvationists. Yet, after the revolutionary period of 1927–28 subsided, it was less shifts in KMT ideology than the decision to allow the existing prison service bureaucracy to continue building the prison system that resulted in the modern prisons, even in the KMT heartland of Jiangsu, never becoming effective instruments of political indoctrination in the prewar period. Not one of the instructors at the five new-style Jiangsu prisons even in the mid-1930s was a KMT member. Most—Zhang Baoyuan, Wang Zuwu, Xu Qingzhang, Yang Lisan, Li Xizhong, and Wang Mingxian—were products of specialized educations and training in penal, legal, or policing studies and extensive prison officer service experience before 1927. Their primary ideological commitment was to the institutional ideal of reformation. It was their motivating common creed, recited by officials and officers, readily regenerated with each reform in response to mismanagement and corruption, which were always ascribed to failed implementation, never to flaws in the system.14 Li Xizhong seems to have been one of the true believers. Only Jiangsu No. 3 Prison instructor Xu Qingzheng received as many plaudits after serving eight years without a single service demerit. But few could match Li’s fervor. Writing in 1936, he seemed convinced that he had “transformed vicious weeds into good people” and guided even those “cage-heads whose evil practices and wickedness had become second nature” and were “tyrannical, haughty and disobedient” to “gradually and successively” be “reformed and become good.” Like Shao Zhenji, Li invested much effort not just in designing his literacy program, but also in producing moral instruction lectures. He even wrote a book, A SelfAwakened Prisoner, purporting to describe an inmate’s reform.15 Instructor Li was tireless and gifted at adapting his teachings to meet his purpose in the prison and gain the approval of his superiors. He was also entirely unoriginal. Drawing on many of the same sources used by Beiyang-era instructors, including Shao Zhenji’s Introduction to Moral Instruction, Li taught a

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A Mechanism for All Offenses curriculum filled with popular jiaohua moralist teachings, lessons in social habits, civics and patriotism, and even a sprinkling of themes from the Buddhist period. Much of the language and many of the stories, aphorisms, and styles he used were no different from those of his predecessors. Although claiming that he taught equal parts “religion, morality and the Three Principles of the People,” his own reports show him to have spent little time on KMT doctrine. Exceptional as he was in many respects, Li was representative of his fellow Jiangsu prison instructors with regard to the content of his curriculum. Although 1930s Jiangsu prison instruction included some new themes, such as increased attention to women as citizens, hygiene and the national body, communalism and mutual aid, and references to Western political and social theory, this new content, much as with KMT political ideology, was generally presented in ways that conformed to the existing ethics, social conduct, and civics lessons. Most instructors were primarily teaching variations of an amalgam of preBuddhist-moment 1920s prison instruction themes.16 Political training, according to regulation and policy, was to be regularly carried out on the basis of the miniature twenty-two-page simply phrased training handbook, Introduction to the Three Principles of the People. Yet, by 1929, when KMT cadres in effect left the prisons to prison bureaucrats, KMT influence was felt primarily in the proliferation of commemoration days for national humiliations at the hands of the imperialists and for KMT revolutionary history, at which instructors led collective singing and loyalty rituals. Indeed, in 1930, with a series of orders on prison instruction, the Ministry of Judicial Administration formally approved the emphasis on “common morality” and patriotism, confirming the instructors’ existing themes (excluding excessive religious proselytizing). The ministry’s declaration of Shao Zhenji’s book as a standard prison instruction textbook merely extended official imprimatur to the most common text already used by the Jiangsu instructors. This corresponded with the KMT’s 1930–31 shift to a reconstructed, reified nationalistic ideal of traditional Confucian morality combined with social discipline and patriotism. Especially with the June 1931 pronouncement of the reinterpreted Confucian values of “loyalty [zhong], filial piety [xiao], benevolence [ren], love [ai], faith [xin], righteousness [yi], and cooperative-stability [peace; heping]” as the “principles for instructing the people,” KMT doctrine came increasingly to resemble prison teachings. This striking convergence was even more evident with the onset of the 1934 New Life Movement, which in effect promoted a grand transformative vision for national ethical renewal involving “civilizing” moral cultivation, disciplining of social habits, and demands for public mindedness and hygiene, which seemed much like a national-scale project of reformation.

A Mechanism for All Offenses Already by 1933, Jiangsu prison instructors were in the habit of mixing their ethical themes into lectures ostensibly on KMT doctrine, for instance, focusing on “propriety and righteousness, integrity and sense of shame” in a lecture on “the morality of the Premier.” The main theme of a lecture for commemorating the death of Sun Yat-sen delivered to five hundred inmates at the Jiangsu No. 2 Prison on March 12, 1934, was “To be able to reform errors, one must have a true heart that has undergone self-examination.” During the lead-up to and after the launch of the New Life Movement, certain KMT authorities pressured the prisons to increase their teaching of KMT doctrine and the Jiangsu instructors added lessons and incorporated such themes as “revolutionary spirit” and “the spirit of the nation”; but, taken as whole, the changes were modest. In 1935 Warden Niu Fuqi told a journalist that instruction at the Jiangsu No. 1 Prison focused on KMT doctrine only to proceed to describe it as “consoling and exhorting” and inculcating “establishing oneself and cultivating one’s mind” in order to “reform the convicts’ moral mind and ability to make a living.” Little had changed beyond adding a few KMT themes in a manner consistent with the established practice of harmonious accretion of disparate teachings, as long as such teachings could be meaningfully linked to the core process of internal ethical transformation.17 Instructor Li Xizhong excelled at adjusting his themes, accommodating new terms and requirements, and fitting them smoothly into a program aimed, as ever, at ethical reform. He touched on KMT doctrine and fashionable new terms, such as “mental hygiene,” but always returned to the point that “self-cultivation lies in correcting one’s mind.” Some instructors used new descriptions of their methods, such as “the moving people with earnestness method,” “the inspiration method,” “the strike the eye and warn the mind method,” and dubbed their lectures “inspirational talks.” But Instructor Li remained conventional, ever noting how he planned his weekly “ethical themes” by determining the inmates’ “deficiencies of moral disposition,” then taught them to make “self-examinations,” so that “with this sort of vigilance over one’s mind and conduct and the subsequent preservation of good habits and attitude,” they could “resolve to be a good citizen.” At individual sessions, he counseled inmates to “confess and recognize errors.”18 Regardless of how Instructor Li and Warden Sun presented themselves to those outside the prison, their reform of the Jiangsu No. 4 Prison had consisted of solid management and vigorously asserting the prison bureaucracy’s entrenched ideology of reformation. Their program had accommodated elements of KMT doctrine, but had not been transformed by it. When, in the wake of the Warden Xie scandal, Sun Xiong (after a few months at the Jiangsu No. 2 Branch Prison) was appointed warden of the

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A Mechanism for All Offenses Jiangsu Shanghai 2nd Special District Prison in July 1933, he seemed the ideal, fresh, progressive reformer informed by the latest international theories. Already the author of the largest compilation of prison reform documents, he wrote at a feverish pace and lectured at a number of Shanghai’s universities and law schools. He seemed to have read and written about every theory and theme in the international fields of criminology and penology and related topics in ancient Chinese political philosophy. He chauvinistically pointed to precedents to modern theory in Chinese classics, while devoting most of his attention to European theorists. A firm anti-Communist, he still praised Soviet Russian labor-reform methods and then, without critical comment, introduced racist, pseudogenetic Nazi German criminological theories. Much of what Sun wrote suggested he wished to present himself as a cutting-edge penologist, and there was no questioning his passion for his subject. Shao Zhenji wrote that Sun Xiong was ever “gesticulating and talking about the advantages and disadvantages of a prison.” And yet the details in archival records and Sun’s voluminous writings, in fact, reveal him at core to have been little different from his Nantong partner, Li Xizhong. He would state his loyalty to the KMT and respect for Sun Yat-sen and Jiang Jieshi, but turn his discussions of KMT doctrine toward themes of moral reform that resembled those of his friend Shao Zhenji. He glibly touched on the latest foreign theories and took great interest in new technologies of introversion, but concluded that all China’s problems of poverty, weakness, revolutionary politics, and the degenerate Western-influenced modern urban habits, styles, and entertainments could be traced to an ethical crisis that required the moral reform not just of criminals but of all citizens. The 2nd Special District Prison in the heart of Shanghai had been placed in the hands of neither a KMT ideologue nor an internationalized progressive, but of the preeminent prison-system technocrat whose deepest commitment was to the ideology of moral reform.19 Warden Sun’s initial reforms at the 2nd Special District Prison concentrated on asserting order, organization, and introducing modern techniques and technologies. He had an experienced group of officers in place, including the Japanese-educated Li Weicai, who had started out as an instructor at the Jiangsu No. 1 Prison in the early 1920s. Soon, Sun recruited his old friend Shao Zhenji as a section chief and head of guards.20 Along with shoring up facilities, security, food ration supplies and making sure that guards were properly paid and officers received subsidies, Sun backed Chief Medical Officer Hu Qipeng’s plan for improved hygiene and medical care. By the end of 1934, though tuberculosis, serious intestinal illness, and beriberi had not been eliminated, Sun proudly reported that the death rate had been dramatically reduced to two per

A Mechanism for All Offenses thousand—the lowest rate in the prison system, far lower than the “unspeakable” situation under the former French administration, and even lower than the rate for all of Shanghai. The prison was considered the healthiest and best maintained in China.21 Provided a generous budget, Warden Sun further sought to introduce the most modern techniques and technologies of mass propagation and control. The YMCA and other Christian groups, KMT cadres of the Capital Education Bureau, and some other prisons had pioneered experiments with such modern promotional media as film and gramophone records in prison education.22 Sun Xiong wanted such technologies permanently installed and controlled by the instructor. Inmates should not be left, he held, to sit in lectures and “lower their heads in apparent absorption with their work, though, in fact they have dozed off.” They had to be engaged not just by collective singing, lively recreational activities, and cultural entertainments, but also by having their senses stimulated through “scientific methods.” After inviting the Shanghai Motion Picture Education Society to screen morally uplifting films in 1935, Sun began regular Sunday film screenings for a time. The only problem, Sun and the film educators agreed, was that, with the exception of the 1926 film The Gate of Fairness (Gongping zhi men), few films qualified as “moral educational films.” Indeed, Sun soon proposed to the National Judicial Conference that the government fund the making of “morality films.” That same year, 1935, at a cost of nearly seven hundred yuan, Sun had the first loudspeaker broadcast system installed throughout the prison and began a regular schedule of broadcasted “national music,” “common folk songs,” and instruction lectures, along with some Buddhist preaching supplied by the Sound of Buddha radio station. Apparently the first Chinese institution in which this technology of perpetual, all-pervasive indoctrination later ubiquitous in the PRC was established, the 2nd Special District Prison reported the broadcasts to be a great success. In 1936, the ministry called for all major prisons to install broadcast systems, and the Jiangsu No. 3 Prison had one in place by the end of that year.23 At the same time, Sun Xiong realized the first thoroughly functioning systematic and presumed-to-be “international standard” version of such progressive programs originally introduced by Ogawa Shigejiro as “classification instruction” (grouping inmates by crime type) and the “progressive stage system.” As part of this, instructors had each prisoner maintain a “thought record” (sixiang lu) and experimented with psychological evaluation of inmates. Having seemingly succeeded in creating the most technologically and organizationally sophisticated Chinese civilian prison, Warden Sun saw his versions of these reforms become the templates for the new national policy in 1936.24

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A Mechanism for All Offenses Yet at the core of this most modern technological and organizational marvel prison was still to be reformation through moral education. Instruction, as Sun put it, would “transform and dispel evil nature” and “foster morality.” The main teachings and ideals of instruction did not just emulate Instructor Li Xizhong’s program in Nantong; it was based, initially, on more than a hundred handwritten booklets of Li’s lecture notes and songs, along with Shao Zhenji’s book and the ancient classics, morality books, ethics guides, Xue Dubi’s songbook, and civics textbooks from which Li had drawn. New Life Movement political lectures, indeed, reprised long-standing themes of self-cultivation of the citizenry, just with an added urgency linking it to mass mobilization for national unification, perfecting the “race,” and saving the nation.25 With such detailed lecture notes provided by Warden Sun and his two senior officers, Li Weicai and Shao Zhenji, both of whom had been seminal 1920s instructors, one might think the chief instructor would have just obediently followed the script. A cursory glance over the recorded lecture notes that Instructor Xiao Jian, the Jiangxi native hired by Sun Xiong in later 1933, regularly submitted to the Prison Bureau suggests exactly that. Page after page brims with wise sayings and quotations from the Confucian classics and Zeng Guofan, calls for self-examination, self-renewal, diligence, frugality, loyalty, being lawabiding, and having an occupation, avoiding the perils of gambling, drugs, and urban leisure culture. After a time, Instructor Xiao essayed some lectures bearing his own thematic stamp that, for the most part, were quite conventional. Xiao maintained a busy schedule of lecturing and individual guidance of mainly entering and departing prisoners, spending two hours a day filling in their “thought records” with them. He had managed well the morality film showings and installation of the broadcast system. He seemed a conscientious and diligent, if not inspired director of the reformation program.26 Warden Sun would surely have been dumbstruck to learn that Instructor Xiao, at least by 1936, was a Marxist and probably a secret CCP member. The evidence for this is not in the sparse biographical information on Xiao in the prison files that merely identifies him as a native of Yudu County in southern Jiangxi—a district between Ganzhou and Ruijin at the heart of the CCP’s 1931–34 Jiangxi Soviet base area—and a graduate of the Yushui Middle School in the region. There is no mention of previous employment, but also no indication that Xiao ever lived under the CCP-base-area government. Rather, what reveals Xiao Jian’s secret political loyalties are his summaries of four lectures he gave between May and August 1936, entitled “Theory of Knowledge,” “Attitude toward Study,” “One Should Accept Criticism,” and “Hope and Struggle.” Xiao was careful to omit all obvious Marxist language from his notes,

A Mechanism for All Offenses but otherwise these lectures faithfully reproduced sections from the translations and summaries by Li Da, Lei Zhongjiang, Shen Zhiyuan, and Ai Siqi of Soviet Marxist-Leninist dialectical-materialist philosophical and sociological theories, notably those of M. Shirokov, A. Aizenberg, and Mark Mitin, which were popular in leftist Shanghai intellectual circles at the time. These lectures read eerily like the theoretical articles Mao Zedong would write a year later in Yan’an, particularly, “On Practice” and “Combat Liberalism,” which were similarly derivative. Yet in passages where, for example, Xiao Jian and Mao Zedong used the same quote from Lenin, Xiao substituted the word “correct” for “revolutionary.” Rereading Xiao’s lectures with an awareness of his MarxistLeninist perspective, it is apparent that he was talking to inmates not just about Marxist-Leninist epistemology, materialist notions of dynamism, attaining liberation through struggle, and unity with the popular will, but was also making veiled criticisms of capitalism, the wealthy, KMT foreign and domestic policy, and was hinting at the need for social revolution.27 We do not know whether Xiao Jian left this record to avoid suspicious discrepancies between his talks and the reports or simply because he thought he could evade detection due to his superiors’ ignorance of the latest Soviet theory and his own clever, concealing edits. Either way, his was a brazen, dangerous game to be playing at a time when those accused of far less were being dispatched regularly to prison, his included. Xiao Jian, in the end, avoided exposure, and there is no evidence that he made any converts for the CCP.28 Still, the astounding fact that the instruction program in Nationalist China’s most sophisticated civilian prison of the 1930s was run by a secret Communist is indicative of a central challenge for the prisons at that point. Xiao posed no danger to the system of penal reformation; on the contrary, he helped establish new techniques and technologies. What he threatened was control of content and the moral authority behind the instruments of indoctrination. At the time, however, Warden Sun was consumed with what appeared to be a far more urgent danger than that posed by the CCP. Extremely serious overcrowding had resulted from crackdowns on drug offenders in the Chinese governed sections of Shanghai in 1933. Starting the year already over capacity, with 1,610 inmates, the 2nd Special District Prison’s population spiked to 2,100 in April and to 2,200 by July, largely with those sentenced to short-term “labor service” of less than two months, usually for failing to pay fines. Of the 7,910 prisoners admitted to the prison that year, 42 percent were drug offenders. Even though these short-timers rotated in and out quickly, crowding became so severe that Chief Medical Officer Hu Qipeng wrote, “There was not even enough room for prisoners to sleep on the floor of their cells. Without enough

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A Mechanism for All Offenses prison uniforms, over half of the prisoners wore their own clothes. Some had not even bathed once in a full month. So when summer came, the foul odor of stinking sweat filled the whole prison.” Worse yet, a lice infestation and a typhus epidemic in Shanghai swept through the prison between April and July, killing 33 prisoners and Dr. Chen, the medical officer at the adjacent drug-suppression center. This model prison soon received special attention from Sun Xiong’s “close friend,” the Prison Bureau director, Wang Yuanzeng, and was permitted to take the emergency measures of transferring prisoners to other prisons and awarding 876 special “guarantor releases” (baoshi)—a method of early release through the assigning of bonds and responsibility for the releasee to a local business or property owner that followed a late imperial practice revised as a prison-population-control device by the Beiyang Ministry of Justice in 1920. On his November inspection of the prison, Wang Yuanzeng found the prison’s population had been reduced to 1,700 and yet still declared it excessive and approved further reductions. By the end of December, the inmate population was down to 1,200. The 2nd Special District Prison was saved by the old guard prison officers. Sun Xiong, in the following years, was able to protect his prison from these state campaigns only through transfers of prisoners and early guarantor releases mostly backed by the philanthropic organization, the New Universal Cultivation Hall.29 This Shanghai model prison could only be maintained by special extreme measures and by limiting its role in the great social and political disciplining campaigns of the KMT state. No other prison would be similarly protected. DRUG-SUPPRESSION CAMPAIGNS AND THE CRISIS OF THE JIANGSU PRISONS

In 1931, Xu A’qin, a convict serving an eight-year sentence in the Jiangsu No. 2 Prison, managed through bribes to receive a provisional medical furlough to Shanghai’s Universal Cultivation Hall Hospital, where he paid off another inmate in the hospital ward, a short-term detainee named Wang Xuesheng, to assume his identification number and name and return to the prison in his place. Shanghai Local Court investigators eventually suspected that this same scam between the prison and the hospital had occurred four other times in 1931 and fifty-one times in May–June 1932. Official investigation reports and prisoner complaint letters and memoirs are filled with vivid accounts of all manner of corruption, including bribery, graft, embezzlement through manipulations of account books, speculating with prison funds, and complex fraud schemes usually involving the food rations budget and collusion with grain merchants.

A Mechanism for All Offenses Recognizing that corruption like mismanagement would fundamentally undermine institutional authority and purpose, reformist Prison Bureau officials and wardens struggled continually against endemic problems of insufficient resources and talent, unchecked relationship networks and factional conflict, imprecise accounting and opportunities to profit from public funds.30 Investigations that revealed corruption and brought, for instance, the cashiering of the Jiangsu No. 3 Prison instructor Zheng Lingjia for neglect of duty in 1934, or resulted in the arrests of guards and downfall of wardens, were part of serious state efforts to discipline and professionalize bureaucracies and uphold institutional standards as the prison system expanded. Never questioning the system, the reformist impulse was ever to correct practices and develop new plans and methods. The Ministry of Judicial Administration Prison Bureau pursued officer training, initially with the Prison Affairs Research Institute and, working with provincial high courts, launched major county jail reforms in Jiangsu and Anhui to upgrade management and hygiene, and to eliminate the cage-head problem. The ministry sought to rationalize finances and in 1935–37 substantially increased funding and standardization in the modern prisons. New, improved prisons were continually being planned and built. Eighteen major modern civilian prisons were completed between 1928 and 1936, including two special prisons for youth offenders in Jinan and Wuchang. With the addition of Sun Xiong’s 2nd Special District Prison, a new Jiangsu No. 2 Branch Prison in Shanghai (1930), the Jiangsu No. 5 Prison in Wuxi (1935), and the Jiangsu No. 6 Prison in Zhenjiang (1937), the KMT state core area of Jiangsu came to have the most advanced prisons housing more than a quarter of all inmates in the national new-style prison system. By July 1937, the construction of the massive 2nd Ministry Directly Administered Prison at Beixinjing in the western suburbs of Shanghai, the first of a planned six national five-thousand-inmate-capacity super-prisons was largely complete.31 Even though problems with mismanagement, corruption, and even serious overcrowding continued, much progress had been made since the early chaotic days of the 1927 purge. Although never pristine and ever falling short of policy ideals, the institutional development of the prisons was advancing in the 1930s under difficult conditions. To relieve crowding, the ministry had already circulated an order in 1930 urging judges to issue suspended sentences and prisons to use parole and guarantor release—though, as yet, the connection to drug offenders was not explicit. The great wave of drug incarcerations was just beginning.32 As several studies show, KMT drug-suppression initiatives expanded upon a succession of early twentiethcentury state projects since the last years of the Qing Empire to eliminate what had

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A Mechanism for All Offenses in the course of the previous two centuries become the widespread and widely accepted social habit of opium smoking. In the early Republic, the inspiration for criminalizing and suppressing opium and other recreational drug use came from the nationalist identification of opium with the “national humiliation” of China’s weakness and loss of sovereignty to foreign imperial powers, the adoption of new legal norms, and the growth of the international narcotics control regime, with its modern medicalized definitions of addiction that were advanced by social activists in China. And yet this criminalization coincided with the rise of the global and domestic commerce in such chemically manufactured narcotics as morphine and heroin, the emergence of powerful narcotics-dealing organized-crime gangs, notably Du Yuesheng’s Shanghai-based Green Gang, and the collusion of officials, particularly regional military authorities, set on funding their armies and administrations with drug revenues collected under the banner of opium suppression or through control of markets and production. All of this fueled drug commerce and consumption. Still, from the last years of the Qing dynasty through the 1920s, there was a presumption that prisons, along with sanatoriums for addicts, could educate and cure drug offenders; and imprisonment for drug offenses was common in several major urban areas. But institutional initiatives faltered and enforcement was inconsistent, muddied by corruption and largely ineffective. It was the KMT government that intensified the mutually conflicting drives, as Alan Baumler has pointed out, to strengthen the state through control of revenue extraction from narcotics commerce (even making a Faustian bargain with the Green Gang) and to pursue the eradication of the drug problem as a mobilizing symbol for nation-building. So even as drug manufacturing and trafficking increased markedly in collusion with certain KMT officials, as well as with the backing of Japanese authorities in Manchukuo and Tianjin after 1931, intensive central statebacked policing campaigns began rounding up large numbers of low-level drug dealers, opium smokers, and those addicted to the many colored pills, the “golden cinnabar” in Shanghai street-parlance, thought, like its Daoist namesake, to be cure-alls.33 Initial notable increases in drug offender imprisonments were evident in Beijing, Nantong, Suzhou, and Shanghai by 1929; but the first major spike began in Suzhou in 1930.34 Although crowding at Suzhou’s Jiangsu No. 3 Prison, the “Lion’s Mouth” prison to locals, and at its branch prison in 1929 had spurred the construction of a 300-inmate-capacity provisional prisoner holding center, these facilities were unprepared for the influx of prisoners that began in the latter half of 1930 due to a crackdown on drug offenses. From mid-1930 to mid-1931, 49 percent of admitted inmates at the Jiangsu No. 3 Prison were drug offenders, most of whom were sentenced for failing to pay fines or were unsentenced detainees. In

A Mechanism for All Offenses a pattern that was to play out repeatedly in many places, the prison was not only unable to provide inmates with instruction, work, or even adequate space to sleep, but soon faced dramatic increases in cases of dysentery, abdominal infections, tuberculosis, and typhoid fever, resulting in 210 inmate deaths in less than a year. In crisis, the prison began giving guarantor releases to large numbers of inmates.35 Shanghai authorities were undeterred by the events in Suzhou. By the end of July 1932, the newly appointed Jiangsu No. 2 Prison warden Tian Lixun reported that, overburdened with an influx of drug offenders, which brought the inmate population to twenty-one hundred inmates, more than double the prison’s capacity, the prison was “in crisis,” had run out of funds for food rations, and was getting by on private borrowing. He requested permission to provide one-third of the prisoners with immediate guarantor releases to forestall an uprising. In response, Warden Tian was replaced by one of the old-guard Beijing wardens, Tian Jinghua, and the crowding continued. Food ration quality and quantity fell, scurvy set in, illness treated only by bowls of traditional tonics and “heat releasing” pills spread unchecked, and order began to break down. In March 1933, Tian Lixun’s prediction proved correct, as political prisoners led a major hunger strike and smuggled out their grievances to the main national and Shanghai lawyers associations and the press. The warden was soon replaced again, though this time, in October, construction began on an adjacent drug-suppression center with state-of-the-art facilities, medical instruments, medicines, and doctors. Yet it was only built for two hundred inmates at a time when six to eight people were being squeezed into cells designed for two or three, most sleeping two-to-a-cot, even as new prisoners arrived in droves, many of whom were transfers approved to protect the 2nd Special District Prison.36 In the wake of the bad publicity of the hunger strike, the ministry and the Jiangsu High Court launched investigations of the prison in January 1934, which revealed not just the extent to which the crowding had created horrifying conditions, but also how they had been exacerbated by mismanagement and corruption entangled with the narcotics culture under yet another new warden, Ren Yi. Uncovering glaring omissions in the accounts, investigators had the two section chiefs whom Warden Ren had brought with him into the prison, Ji Xian and Tian Enpei, transferred to duties unrelated to finances and assigned four experienced prison-service-accounts experts to manage the books. Yet as the major problems remained unremedied after well over a month, inmates went on a one-day hunger strike in March to express their frustration. Renewed investigations culminated in a series of reports and petitions in May, including the

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A Mechanism for All Offenses particularly damning charges in the May 7 petition signed by “the representatives of the citizens of Caohejing Township in Shanghai County.” The petition accused Warden Ren of running the prison with his “personal men,” including the illiterate former “itinerant scamp practitioner of martial arts and seller of medicinal pastes” become prison guard and then section chief, Tian Enpei; the section chief Ji Xian; and four guards, one of whom was the brother of Ren’s concubine. Ren and his gang had falsified accounts and embezzled cash, skimmed from grain-ration funds through intentional misreporting, and exploited fluctuations in the grain market to pocket the difference. They had forced out Section Chief Fan Qi, who opposed them, obstructed and plotted against the newly appointed accountants and investigators, and, led by the “crude and abnormal” Tian Enpei, privately detained one person, and physically abused and tortured complaining prisoners so the terrifying sounds of their cries could be heard by the townsfolk of Caohejing. Meanwhile, Warden Ren had neglected his duties, spent his evenings with Section Chief Ji at Shanghai restaurants, brothels, dance halls, and gambling houses and many a day dallying and smoking opium with his new concubine. Indeed, the petition claimed that Warden Ren had been absent on the January morning the high court investigators first arrived unannounced because he was dealing with a new concubine who had absconded with a lover, her clothing, jewels, and two thousand yuan of his embezzled money. The ministry took action, but in careful, face-saving steps that would not further destabilize the prison and cause open conflict between officers and officials. Tian Enpei was immediately demoted, and over several months he and Ren’s other cronies were quietly removed, followed eventually by Ren in March 1935.37 As the KMT state’s limited but sporadically vigorous “drug war” overwhelmed the institutional capacity of certain prisons, the Ministry of Judicial Administration moved too slowly and without sufficient resources to respond effectively either to the miseries of crowding or to the often narcotics-culture-related corruption that flourished amid the resulting institutional disarray. In 1932, guards at Shanghai’s Jiangsu 1st Special District Prison for women were found to be smuggling drugs to the inmates, and high court investigators discovered that several drug convicts had bribed the Jiangsu No. 2 Branch warden to overlook their paying off others to serve their sentences. In early 1936, due to a neighborhood citizens’ petition provoked by the spectacle of the pimp Madame Qiu repeatedly shouting out her grievances at the gate of the Jiangsu No. 2 Branch Prison, police discovered that Auxiliary Head Guard Liu Shengquan was an opium addict, turned onto the habit by a married woman lover whom he had left for an eighteen-year-old Subei streetwalker, Liu Quanyun, after a chance meeting at the Yong’an Company

A Mechanism for All Offenses Amusement Park on Third Avenue. Even after contracting syphilis from Miss Liu, Guard Liu had convinced her to leave her pimp to live with him in an opium-smoke bliss, pursued in part at the opium dens at Yang Family Grave Mound at Tiantong Crossing and upstairs in the New Primeval Forest Sweets Shop at No. 163 North Shanxi Road. The citizens’ petition declared Liu “unpatriotic” at this moment “when the government is strictly prohibiting opium in order to arouse the nation.”38 “Opium traitors” like Guard Liu and major corruption cases undermined the moral authority of the prisons and the ideal of penal reformation; and the related overcrowding made it nearly impossible to carry out instruction and guidance. There is evidence that some instructors, even under the worst conditions, still attempted to teach and guide, even trying special drug counseling and treatment of addiction with homeopathic medicines. The efforts were futile. Reported instruction class sizes at the Jiangsu No. 2 Prison more than doubled in 1933; the instruction hall was turned into a workshop, and the reported enormous increase in instructor duties strain credulity and, if accurate, could hardly have been sustained for long.39 Little could be taught to masses of unhealthy drug convicts serving short sentences. By the summer of 1932, about seventeen thousand sentenced and nine thousand unsentenced drug offenders were clogging the Jiangsu prisons, jails, and detention centers. Something had to be done. The only low-cost option was to “clear out” the prisons with early releases. In 1932, the Ministry of Judicial Administration proclaimed a mass amnesty for drug convicts and put forth a reform plan that called for a range of methods— suspended sentences, new facilities, and early releases—to deal with “the rapid increase in drug convicts.” Even parole, the ultimate reward for demonstrable reform, which, despite the loosening of eligibility requirements under the KMT, had long remained controlled and restricted by firm regulations, could be used for the “clearing out.” Indeed, ministry commissioners sent to relieve crowding at the Jiangsu No. 1 Prison in 1933 recommended much larger numbers of paroles—as many as sixty at a time—than had ever been the practice before. But their most efficient solution was to use guarantor releases with charitable organizations serving as guarantors for batches of hundreds of prisoners. The other Jiangsu prisons quickly followed suit, making large-scale use of guarantor releases a common practice. Incarceration in these prisons had for most become a matter of surviving a short period of peril and misery, while release had largely become unrelated to rehabilitation.40 The enlistment of the Jiangsu prisons in the drug-suppression campaign radically altered their fortunes. Although integral to this major KMT state campaign, the prisons were

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A Mechanism for All Offenses overwhelmed and their programs thoroughly eviscerated by the resulting overcrowding. And the emergency mass early-release measures taken to save the prisons from the crisis fundamentally undermined the principles of reformation, the integrity of the penal system, and the antidrug campaign. At the same time, the drug-suppression campaign and resulting crisis in the prisons fueled institutional expansion of the regime of reformation through the construction and planning of new prisons and new kinds of carceral rehabilitative institutions within and beyond the judicial apparatus. Already in the first years of KMT rule, there was ample awareness of regional and provincial opium-addict work training houses, some even called “reformatories” (ganhuachang), and subsequently of official and charitable drug sanatoriums and clinics, often attached to hospitals in the 1930s. In response to concerns raised by the Nanjing government’s Drug Prohibition Committee about imprisoned drug offenders, the Ministry of Judicial Administration prepared ambitious plans in 1930 for separately treating drug offenders through guidance and medical methods in drugsuppression hospitals and drug-suppression centers (jieyansuo) in major cities and county seats. Such hospitals opened in Nanjing in 1930 and Nantong (attached to the Jiangsu No. 4 Prison) in 1933 and drug-suppression centers began operations in Nanjing, Changzhou, and Shanghai (one adjacent to the 2nd Special District Prison, and a second within the Jiangsu No. 2 Prison compound). More were planned, but the high costs per inmate involved militated against them and encouraged a search for low-cost alternatives.41 A recurring idea for a cost-effective solution to prison crowding was that of the rural frontier labor camp. Discussed as early as Xu Shiying’s 1913 prisonreform plan, the notion had resurfaced periodically in the 1920s with references to such precedents as the ancient construction of the Great Wall, Qing banishment to Xinjiang, and Soviet labor-reform camps. Hu Yimin wrote in his 1928 plan about “healthy . . . outdoor work” for prisoners at a time when the KMT had begun sending deactivated military units to undertake land reclamation in remote areas like Gansu. The Ministry of Judicial Administration’s 1929 penal reform plan called for the construction of “outdoor labor prisons” in the border provinces of Xinjiang, Qinghai, Ningxia, Jilin, Heilongjiang, Rehe, Chahar, and Suiyuan, where well-behaved prisoners would be sent as a reward to undertake land reclamation and farming in a healthy environment and eventually become free, landowning farmers. That year Hebei No. 1 Prison officer Wu Dingkai was sent to investigate locations for the first such labor camp in Suiyuan, but no action was taken.42 In 1930, the long-serving judge Chen Fumin circulated and published a detailed plan for “outdoor labor prisons” presented as an affordable solution to prison crowding that would avoid compromising

A Mechanism for All Offenses rehabilitative aims. Consistent with the projects of those interested in developing northwestern border areas, Chen’s plan held that labor camps would offer healthy outdoor physical and skills training for convicts and be like “an institute of learning” to improve “moral character.” Influenced by Chen and pitched as a way to relieve the crowding crisis, the ministry’s 1932 prison reform plan called for establishing two thousand-inmate prison camps on 450,000 mu (1 mu equals about 1/6 acre) of barren lands in Baotou, Ningxia, where prisoners, through good behavior and productive farming, could earn conditional release into adjacent farms and settle on the land. Prison Bureau Director Wang Yuanzeng thought it the best solution to the crisis, and regulations were promulgated and the issue pushed again in the summers of 1934 and 1936. Although some prisons had inmates working on farms outside their walls, no demonstrable progress had been made in developing rural labor camps before the war. But the plans remained on the ministry’s agenda.43 Both the constructive and destructive consequences of the crowding crisis intensified following the June 1934 announcement of the government’s Six-Year Drug-Suppression Plan and Jiangsu Provincial Chairman Chen Guofu’s related four-year plan for propaganda campaigns, registration, and certification of opium smokers and peddlers. Amid mass arrests and mass campaign confiscations and public burnings of drugs and drug paraphernalia in the eradication control zone of greater Nanjing, authorities in the administration zones throughout the province registered 188,335 opium users by November 1934. Planning to manage registered drug addicts with controlled drug supply outlets, unregistered users were deemed “opium offenders,” to be incarcerated in new drug-suppression centers.44 Between February and March 1935, 9,244 Jiangsu drug offenders “surrendered” for “treatment” in hastily established drugsuppression centers. Accounting for one-third of the cost of Jiangsu’s 1934–37 antidrug campaign, these new custodial institutions were to realize a medical detoxification of the most curable, youngest addicts as well as provide a “road to self-renewal” through “inspirational training,” “knowledge training,” and “labor training” (making shoes, socks, and towels). Instructors lectured on drug prohibition laws and regulations, ethics, hygiene, and KMT political doctrine. Inmates were taught anti-opium songs and slogans, which they rehearsed at nightly, pre–lights-out “self-examination” (fanxing) assemblies. At these sessions, inmates spent a minute in silent “self-examination” and periodically held inmate “self-governed” small group discussions. The purpose of such individual and small group self-examination was to give up the “evil and weak habit,” reform, and become a productive, moral, “perfect and robust citizen.” Although, as became common in such new KMT institutions, the term “training”

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A Mechanism for All Offenses (xunlian) was substituted for ganhua, these centers were in design and purpose unmistakably heirs of the modern prisons, incarcerative institutions committed to converting offenders through a highly moralistic process of reformation. Related Drug User Workshops and county-level Drug Offender Work Training Brigades (yanfan xilaodui) followed similar patterns of transforming offenders.45 Still, the mid-1930s drug-suppression campaign mass arrests carried out in Jiangsu by police, military, and special police forces, often with drug-sniffing canine units, swept up thousands more than could be accommodated in the new institutions. Authorities showed an increased willingness to execute serious offenders—some several thousand nationwide in 1937. But most arrested by civilian authorities were sentenced to prison by local courts, and many seized by military units under special emergency drug-prohibition laws were sent to prisons for “labor detention” or as unsentenced detainees.46 By the fall of 1935, the major Jiangsu prisons and fifty-six county jails were dangerously overcrowded again with 7,650 unsentenced and 3,769 sentenced drug offenders. The Jiangsu No. 3 Prison only staved off disaster by transferring prisoners to its muchexpanded branch prison and, in accordance with the emergency July 1935 Provisional Regulations for Clearing Out Prisons, liberally granting guarantor releases and watered-down paroles to 48 percent of releasees that year. The same methods were used at the Jiangsu No. 1 and Jiangsu No. 5 Prisons. Still reeling from its major corruption and overcrowding crisis, forced to accept hundreds of transfers from Sun Xiong’s 2nd Special District Prison and drug offenders detained by military units, the Jiangsu No. 2 Prison, even after constructing new wards, limped into the spring of 1935 depending heavily on donations from Buddhist and Christian charities and care packages sent by families to keep its inmates alive. Yet with the inmate population rising above three thousand for the first time in 1935, deaths from beriberi, tuberculosis, dysentery, and typhoid rose precipitously. What remained of the instruction program collapsed as the instructor reported attempts “to adapt to circumstances and find a way,” which meant relying on visits by Salvation Army and Catholic and Shanghai Buddhist Association preachers. Only after the new warden and KMT military officer Hu Renqing’s desperate December 18 appeal to the ministry for emergency relief did the prison begin slowly to emerge from crisis.47 In the “drug-free zone” capital of Nanjing, however, the Jiangsu No. 1 Prison faced its most serious crisis in 1936, as the Nanjing Garrison Command continued to send in drug offenders without regard to the limits of physical space. Even with the use of “clearing out” methods, the inmate population for this 900-inmate capacity prison reached 2,210 in August 1936, with more than half of the prisoners short-term drug-offender detainees. With most inmates

A Mechanism for All Offenses sleeping on straw mats on the ground, without uniforms, just in “short and coarse servants garments,” hungry, thirsty, and many desperately ill, even Gu Zhenglun, the battle-hardened Nanjing Garrison commander under whom so many had been arrested, lamented that these prisoners were not being punished with the “restriction of liberty, but rather the punishment of taking life, that is all. . . . It is no different from a death sentence.” But even as large numbers were given guarantor releases, newcomers, nearly all with multiyear sentences for selling morphine and heroin pills on the “drug-free” streets of Nanjing, took their places. In January 1937, a military judge began an investigation, and the leading KMT opium-suppression committee proposed a stopgap combination of guarantor releases, reassessment of cases, slowing the remanding of offenders, and an injection of funds to maintain and expand the prison. Yet, by the end of March, the number of drug offenders reached 1,540, 71 percent of the prison’s population. Short on food and so deep in debt that rice and coal merchants stopped selling to the prison on credit, Warden Zhao Xinyu telegraphed the Ministry on April 28: “When the governing of the prison resembles the skills of pawning, then dangers are lurking on all sides.” Within days, a program of special military guarantor releases was put into action that, only months before the outbreak of war with Japan, saved the KMT capital’s flagship prison from collapse.48 The enlisting of the Jiangsu modern prisons in the KMT state’s major prewar mass social reform campaign for narcotics control and suppression nearly destroyed these institutions in the KMT’s core area, which, under the direction of the prison bureaucracy carried over from the Beiyang period, had been developing steadily in line with their original purpose of holding and reforming common criminals. With respect to the legal system, Xu Xiaoqun has noted that state institutional capacity increased, but not sufficiently for the purposes set for them, because, fundamentally, revenue extraction was insufficient. These cases show KMT party-state leaders and their policing and militarypolicing agencies to have acted with blind disregard of the institutional capacity of the prison system, even as they expected it to serve their purposes without sufficient additional funding or innovating a low-cost alternative. Wardens were left to turn to Buddhist and Christian charitable organizations and appeal to higher authorities in desperation. The resulting crisis and the proposed emergency solutions both undermined the reformation programs and principles of the prisons. And yet the campaign and the crisis brought initiatives to expand the prisons and prison system and the development of new institutions, notably the drug-suppression centers, which extended the regime of reformation beyond prisons for a special class of offenders swept up in a grand social reform

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A Mechanism for All Offenses campaign. In the course of these events, much faith had been lost, no doubt, in prisons and the party-state and their leaders, but not in the ideal of reformation. POLITICAL OFFENDERS AND PENAL REFORMATION

The first assignment Jiang Jieshi gave Hu Yimin after his release from prison was to construct a military prison in Xuzhou, northern Jiangsu, in 1928, to house the many captured and arrested following the KMT military seizure of the area.49 Hu rejoined the KMT military and internal security apparatus that, even as the purge waned, continued rural military and urban policing and terror campaigns against the CCP and other political opponents. In the cities, particularly the frontline partially foreign-administered metropolises of Shanghai and Tianjin, the KMT marshaled not only police, civilian, and military judicial and penal systems, but also military police, party activists, and security agencies that carried out covert assassinations, violent assaults, extralegal detentions, and secret executions. Arrested suspects faced intensive interrogations involving threats, deprivation, torture, as well as enticements of rewards and status designed to “turn” CCP so they would betray their comrades. Both sides infiltrated each other’s organizations, attempting to manipulate factional conflicts and spread disinformation.50 This conflict in the shadows attracted personalities undeterred by the risks, obscurity, and required duplicity. A case in point was Yang Dengying, better known by his alias Bao Junfu, who, in April 1928, became the first Shanghai bureau chief of the KMT Center Organization Department’s Party Affairs Bureau of Investigation and Statistics, the internal security agency under the senior official Chen Lifu, which came to be commonly known as Zhongtong. This Japanese-educated Cantonese KMT member had many CCP friends and, like Hu Yimin, had been briefly imprisoned during the 1927 purge. Unlike Hu, however, Bao began to provide information to the CCP immediately after receiving his Zhongtong assignment, and was eventually reporting regularly to the CCP Special Services Department counterintelligence chief, Chen Geng. From his North Sichuan Road apartment and office across the street, where the undercover female CCP agent An E posed as his secretary and the brawny Soviet-trained former Shanghai British tram ticket-taker become CCP agent Lian Desheng posed as his bodyguard, Bao Junfu played a dangerous game. Ostensibly investigating CCP activity, he was surreptitiously tipping them off about impending arrests and the condition of their imprisoned comrades. Well funded by both sides, he lived well, bought automobiles, and enjoyed the Shanghai nightlife, amid which many of the relationships of the intrigues were

A Mechanism for All Offenses cultivated over expensive meals, drinks, cabaret, and dancing. The intelligence and assistance Bao supplied to the CCP was vital, and yet, as he advanced within Zhongtong through the release of controlled information provided by the CCP, he became ever more distant from his CCP handlers. When the CCP security chief Gu Shunzhang was captured in late April 1931 and, in a momentous reversal of fortune for the CCP, gave up hundreds of secret Communists, one of his two most shocking revelations was of Bao Junfu. Bao was arrested, subjected to long interrogations, and held in detention in Nanjing. Yet mysteriously, after a time, Bao regained the confidence of his Zhongtong colleagues and returned to the forefront of the KMT’s campaign to root out CCP members in Shanghai. In this twilight world, the relations between individuals, the knowing and keeping of secrets, the performing of difficult services and favors, and the guarantees these represented, if ever interrogated, were the bonds that mattered most and a currency that could ensure survival. Dealing with opponents had nothing to do with laws, procedures, or moral principles beyond loyalty.51 By contrast, figures like Hu Yimin advocated and became responsible for developing procedures, regulations, and military and civilian legal processes for those arrested for political reasons, most of whom would neither be executed nor co-opted. Hu’s political troubles in part stemmed from conflicts between advocates of legal-procedural and extralegal methods and between those advocating provisional special criminal courts and those supporting reliance on military courts—two systems with their own regulations and procedures. Following the 1927 purge, formal, codified systems increased in importance. Notably, the March 1928 Provisional Law for the Punishment of Counterrevolutionaries and related regulations established legal definitions and sentences for political offenses ranging from propagation to terroristic action. By November, liberal government legal reformers, led by Judicial Yuan Director Wang Chonghui, succeeded in having the special criminal courts abolished so, as it was put, “counterrevolution” and “local bully and evil gentry” cases would be adjudicated in the regular criminal justice system. It was not the full legal rationalization Wang Chonghui sought, and military courts remained involved, but criminal courts took a central role in processing political cases according to codified law and judicial procedure in the urban areas of Jiangsu and Zhejiang through early 1931. The 1931 Emergency Law for the Suppression of Crimes that Endanger the Republic signaled a countercurrent that revived the role of military tribunals and diminished legal obstructions to the extralegal interventions by security agencies. Still, in many urban centers and the KMT’s JiangsuZhejiang core, a legal-judicial regime involving civilian and military courts

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A Mechanism for All Offenses processed most political cases. The significance of these criminal courts is evident both in the frustration KMT activists and security agents felt for, and the appeals Communists made to, civilian judges and lawyers, who insisted on legal procedures, codes, and rules of evidence. Indeed, the CCP found the system sufficiently dependable to justify hiring, through intermediaries, prominent lawyers like Dong Kang to defend the party notable Deng Zhongxia in 1933. Criminal courts in Shanghai, moreover, handed down specific sentences for political offenders and often pronounced defendants innocent according to law. In this process was gradually formulated the initial modern Chinese legal designation and categorization of the “political offender.” Of course, there was a long Chinese history of punishment for political reasons, mostly involving disobedience, disloyalty, sedition, unorthodox beliefs, and lèse-majesté. In the early Republic, rebels, factional opponents, muckraking journalists, revolutionary activists, striking workers, and demonstrating students were executed and detained, often randomly, with provisional, short-term, ad hoc arrangements. The KMT state was the first to formulate a regulatory legal framework, which initially determined status in relation to the revolution (“counterrevolutionary”) and gradually moved toward defining the “political offender” as someone who had committed a crime under state law defined in relation to the duties of the citizen with respect to the security of the nationstate. Indeed, by 1936–37, the Jiangsu civilian prisons and courts routinely referred to those held under the Emergency Law as “political offenders” (zhengzhifan), not “counterrevolutionaries” or “reactionary elements.” This evolved with post-1927 KMT decisions that marked the modern Chinese state’s entrance into the mass, sustained incarceration of political prisoners as a standard practice of state control—a project that was consistent with trends in Germany, Italy, Japan, the Soviet Union, British India, and other colonial territories. The modern Chinese political prisoner was a creation of the KMT, and their variegated regime of political incarceration was experienced by tens of thousands in the 1930s.52 As a result, time in prison became the defining collective revolutionary experience for “white area” urban CCP cadres, much as the Long March was for those who fled the rural Jiangxi Soviet. Yet such “prisons,” in fact, included the full gamut of secret detention centers, county jails, police lockups, military garrison command detention facilities, civilian detention centers, and military and civilian prisons. Many CCP prison narratives describe events in military prisons, which remained key holding pens for political prisoners in the 1930s, due in part to a policy to limit their numbers in the civilian prisons. Like most sites of detention, most military prisons, regardless of their revised 1930 regulations, were not

A Mechanism for All Offenses committed to reforming inmates. They subjected large numbers of angry young men of various, competing political affiliations to misery and brutal discipline. In such powder kegs as Nanjing’s No. 1 Army Prison, Suzhou’s Jiangsu Military Prison, and Hangzhou’s Zhejiang Army Prison, it is little wonder the CCP was able to develop some of its most successful covert organizations and mount vigorous collective resistance.53 The major modern civilian prisons also held CCP and other political offenders, though by 1929 their numbers dropped precipitously. In the Jiangsu new-style prisons, political prisoners remained a small minority within populations filled with theft and drug convicts. For instance, at the Jiangsu No. 3 Prison in mid-1931, only 7 percent of the prison’s inmates were listed as “counterrevolutionaries.” Although some new-style prisons, like those in Shandong, held larger numbers of politicals than the Jiangsu prisons, and mass arrests in a city could briefly increase their numbers in a prison, the KMT authorities steadily took measures to reduce the number of political prisoners in the major modern prisons. By the end of 1936, there were only about nine hundred political prisoners throughout the entire new-style prison system. In the major Jiangsu prisons at this point most political prisoners were either famous VIPs, CCP women, or low-level activists sentenced in civilian courts in the big cities.54 Nonetheless, even this relatively small number of political prisoners posed serious challenges to the prisons and their rehabilitative purpose. Prominent liberal National Salvation Movement activists, such as the editor-journalists Du Zhongyuan (held briefly at the Jiangsu No. 2 in 1935) and Zou Taofen, as well as the other “Seven Gentlemen” detained in Suzhou in 1936, drew much unwanted public and official attention and criticism to the prisons. The same was true of prominent left-wing figures such as Chen Duxiu and the Comintern agents the Noulens couple held at the Jiangsu No. 1 Prison. These and other less well-known figures received public support from Lu Xun, Song Qingling, and the Chinese League for the Protection of Civil Rights, which in turn generated heightened scrutiny by journalists, foreigners, liberal senior officials, and the Ministry of Judicial Administration. The VIP political prisoners, thus, were handled gingerly, kept apart from the general inmate population and provided extraordinary special treatment and privileges. The costs for keeping Chen Duxiu and Mr. and Mrs. Noulens in comfort at the Jiangsu No. 1 Prison was significant, requiring the prison, at one point, to appeal to the ministry for emergency funds just to cover the Noulens’s medical care and Western food. At the same time, many political prisoners without national reputations and from various political camps were skilled at articulating alternative political visions, in part, by compellingly staking a claim to moral righteousness.55

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A Mechanism for All Offenses CCP members, by far the largest group of political prisoners, presented especially thorny problems for the prisons. Although there were a diversity of individuals and plenty of divisive factional and personal conflicts in CCP ranks, Yan Jingyue astutely observed that “Communists are most highly organized persons” that “dwell in another cultural realm” and so could not be easily disciplined or influenced. Widely believing that prison authorities were “reactionary” forces of “counterrevolution,” Communists often sought, when weak, to manipulate the liberal aspects of the legal-judicial system and, when capable of it in rural areas, to launch violent assaults on jails and judicial authorities. Once imprisoned, trained cadres were prepared with strategies and tactics for “prison struggles” in line with the cultural script of international socialist revolution. From the writings of Kropotkin, Lenin, and Chen Duxiu, as well as from Soviet revolutionary romantic novels and their own revolutionary oral tradition, CCP cadres had acquired the view that prison experience was a necessary crucible through which revolutionaries were tested, tempered, and trained by study and “struggle” to, if they survived, be purified, hardened vanguards of revolution. This ideal was shared by KMT cadres like Hu Yimin, who described his 1927 imprisonment as “a necessary process for a revolutionary, and also a step in the realization of going from ‘struggle’ to ‘sacrifice.’ ” For CCP prisoners, the first step was to live, as good Leninists, “the organized life” of the party, secretly communicating through wall knocking, hand signals, smuggled notes, and stolen gatherings to covertly establish leadership, committees, cells, and discussion of the party line. When possible, they formed tightly organized secret groups that upheld an alternative concept of justice.56 CCP resistance strategies began with secrecy and dissimulation, which defied efforts by authorities to investigate and categorize them. Identities of imprisoned CCP members were so well concealed by aliases that when Zhou Enlai and his CCP delegation were negotiating releases of their comrades at the onset of the wartime “united front,” they could only recognize a few names on the prison rolls. Then there was the strategy of militant confrontation through organized uprisings, collective slogan shouting, singing of revolutionary songs, and hunger striking. This was combined later with attempts to manipulate the legal system and public opinion through the newspapers. Some attempted to follow Lenin’s dictum to “make the prison a school,” covertly organizing study and training sessions, later dubbed by some as their “prison university.” Some extended this to pursuing “propaganda work” and “thought work” attempts to recruit non-CCP inmates and guards. Many young CCP intellectuals fortified their individual and group identity in resistance through the written or oral composition of poems and songs invoking tropes from international revolutionary romanticism and

A Mechanism for All Offenses the Chinese traditions of the righteous rebel, the loyal prisoner of war, and the upright remonstrating scholar. Quietly they asserted the righteous indignation and emotionally justified resistance of a revolutionary junzi (upright gentleman).57 CCP prison resistance strategies rarely went according to plan, but they could be confounding for prison authorities. The major impact of the militant approach came in the early years of KMT rule to 1930, when the numbers of political prisoners were at their highest. At the Jiangsu No. 2 Prison, where CCP prisoners organized sufficiently to establish a party branch in 1928, they used regular visits by the CCP-infiltrated National Relief Association, a sympathetic prison custodial worker, a bribed opium-addict guard, and used a replica of the instructionoffice seal carved in soap to secure supplies of food and medicine, communicate with the outside, and even smuggle in Marxist reading material. This group launched several hunger strike “struggles” in 1929–30 calling for improved conditions, but mainly involving boisterous slogan shouting, banging on washbasins, and singing of the “Internationale.” Although rattled, prison officials responded ruthlessly, calling in troops to restore order with truncheons and dispersing most involved to other prisons. With the suppression of the 1930 pre–Spring Festival hunger strike, the CCP organization at the prison was effectively eliminated.58 Soon CCP prisoners adapted their methods to avoid destructive reactions. The October 17, 1929, hunger strike at the Jiangsu No. 3 Branch Prison and attached detention center in Suzhou, for instance, was, according to CCP memoirs, led by their covert party branch in preparation for a citywide uprising ahead of the arrival of the Subei (northern Jiangsu) Fourteenth Red Army marching from Taiping County, Anhui. Yet archival sources show a desperate situation in the prison that was reason enough for revolt. Of the 1,060 inmates crammed into a facility built for 500, 40 percent were “counterrevolutionary” convicts, of which 1 in 13 had been sentenced to death; there was an entire ward filled with unsentenced political detainees. The hunger strike began in the militant mode, with demands for an open-cell-door policy, but quickly escalated to prisoners taking keys from guards and opening cell doors, and, as the subsequent investigation report put it, they “gathered and cursed and caused a disturbance.” Police arrived and forced most inmates back into their cells with the exception of the unsentenced political detainees, who locked themselves into their ward and continued the following day “to paste up slogans and hold meetings and give talks” mainly criticizing food, sanitation, and abuses by guards. The Jiangsu High Court sent in troops to put down the “uprising,” removing suspected leaders for interrogation.59 Under interrogation by Prison Bureau officers, the suspected “uprising leader,” Liu Aiqun, identified as a twenty-eight-year-old Hunanese medical

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A Mechanism for All Offenses student arrested in Shanghai on “suspicion of propagating Communism” and transferred to Suzhou from the Longhua Garrison Command Jail just five days before the hunger strike, explained that it all started when he had not been permitted to leave the cell to defecate. Liu told his interrogators that when after three days a guard finally took pity on him and allowed him out to defecate, Section Chief Wen learned of it and came with ten guards, called him out of his cell, beat him, and hung him upside down for over ten minutes, injuring his back, abdomen, and face so “blood streamed unceasingly from my nose.” Although a physical examination showed no signs of the beating, the investigators had reason to be skeptical of Liu’s initial confession to being the “chief commissioner” of the “uprising” that had been extracted by prison officers. After all, Liu was a new arrival confined to a solitary cell and, after the beating, was in the infirmary. He might have been the inspiration for but not the leader of the strike. Moreover, as Liu had filed a formal complaint petition to the court against Section Chief Wen on the very day the hunger strike began and refused to be talked out of it, his suggestion that the officers had singled him out to protect Section Chief Wen seemed credible, as did the intimation that the beating had been the flash point for the hunger strike. Yet it is precisely at the point when Liu Aiqun seemed most convincing to his interrogators that we can see him skillfully pursuing what the CCP called the “reasonable and legal” strategy to use the regulations and principles of the system against itself. Liu not only suggested that his beating and the prisoner demonstration were a consequence of abuses and corruption by officers and guards, but also stated that he had accused them because “I thought, now is the time for revoking extraterritoriality,” and “aiming for humanitarianism, benevolence, righteousness and justice.” Claiming moral authority in the language of penal reformers, he also depicted the prison in a way calculated to provoke anxiety in his Prison Bureau investigators. “In the infirmary,” he observed, “I heard the sounds of card playing and the smell of smoke. . . . It is China’s ‘cagehead’ system. All the things for which keys are required are handled by them.” The investigation was thorough and the final official report, overseen by Director Wang Yuanzeng himself, called for improvements in management, prisoner treatment, food, and sanitation. Liu’s testimony had shaken the penal authorities more than the original demonstration; yet his attempted manipulations also incited further prison reform.60 Versions of this “reasonable and legal” or “using the enemy’s law” strategy to destabilize KMT authority were pursued by CCP prisoners in Jiangsu through a combination of complaints to judges, formal complaint petitions, smuggled-out public pleas, and short hunger strikes that were carried out as moral perfor-

A Mechanism for All Offenses mances intent on claiming for the prisoners the mantle of rightful resistance in the eyes of the newspaper-reading public. The March 30, 1933, letter in the name of “all the political prisoners of the Jiangsu No. 2 Prison” addressed and smuggled out to the National Lawyers Association and Shanghai Lawyers Union and published by leftist-liberal sympathizers in the The China Critic was the call for a hunger strike demanding that the prison uphold the law and its own regulations. Enumerating horrific prison conditions and abuses by authorities, the letter concluded with the demand that the prison “carry out its duty in compliance with the promulgated regulations of the national justice system” as “prisoners enjoy rights within the scope of the law.” The hunger strike, it stated, was for “the sanctity of the law, the guarantee of human rights” as well as for the pursuit of “social justice.”61 This view did not reflect the CCP position on law and justice, but that of the liberal legal reformers—Minister of Justice Luo Wengan, chief among them—who were striving to build a liberal judicial system within an authoritarian regime engaged in suppressing an armed insurgency. Minister Luo was under pressure from the prominent centrist and leftist liberals of the Chinese League for the Protection of Civil Rights, which, only days after the appearance of the prisoners’ letter, dispatched a delegation led by Song Qingling and Yang Xingfo to Nanjing to present Luo with demands for, among other things, improved conditions for political prisoners.62 As much as such strategies of resistance could embarrass and pressure authorities, they also unintentionally instigated reforms. For instance, a 1932 Ministry of Judicial Administration order for prison reform was issued in response to a petition from the Anhui Party Affairs special commissioner reporting on maltreatment and extortion in the Hefei County Jail, which had come to light through interrogations of eight CCP prisoners. Prison mismanagement and corruption, the petition stated, were “great obstacles to the work of eradicating the Communist Party” and undermined “the prison administration’s relation to the entire work of eliminating the Communists” by guiding them to “reform their errors and renew themselves.” Similarly, at the 1935 National Judicial Conference, Minister of Justice Wang Yongbin’s proposal to counter prison hunger strikes called for ensuring that prisoners were properly fed.63 Such reforms were not just advanced to uphold the authority of the KMT state and to deprive the CCP of useful fodder for anti-KMT propaganda; they were part of the strategy to eliminate CCP subversion in the prisons. Already in 1930, the ministry ordered the strict supervision of “counterrevolutionaries” and their separation from ordinary convicts. Penal authorities subsequently sought to disrupt CCP subterfuge and communication, even attempting to prevent the CCP from transmitting messages or propagation by entering prisons on charges

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A Mechanism for All Offenses for petty crimes. They responded to resistance by disciplining guards and officers, separating political prisoners from each other, restricting their movements, and transferring any discernable leaders to military detention facilities or to the security agencies. With the exception of the remarkable “sisterhood” communal organization of the eighty or so CCP women prisoners in the Jiangsu No. 1 Prison that managed five significant hunger strikes between 1932 and 1936, CCP-led hunger strikes and demonstrations declined markedly in the major Jiangsu prisons by the mid-1930s. Indeed, by early 1936, the authorities had virtually eliminated CCP influence in the new-style Jiangsu prisons—a result that mirrored KMT success against the CCP in Shanghai and other cities. Prisoner disturbances and demonstrations would grow again in the lead-up to the outbreak of the war in 1937, though this had less to do with the CCP than with rising mass anti-Japanese sentiment in major cities and towns.64 Even as the judicial-penal bureaucracy managed to protect the major Jiangsu prisons from CCP prisoner subversion, questions remained unresolved in many official quarters as to whether political prisoners should or could be dealt with by the prisons. Even the few held in the new-style Jiangsu prisons were incarcerated at a time when overcrowding left instruction programs, at the worst periods, barely functioning. Yet, in the terms of the prisons’ institutional ideology, there was no way to perceive political prisoners other than as “offenders” undergoing discipline and reformation. So, by 1936, prison statistics routinely included the category “political offenders,” often registering the source of their crime in the standard categories of “economic oppression” and “deluded by heterodox theories.”65 Jiangsu No. 4 Prison instructor Li Xizhong certainly regarded political prisoners as just another kind of convict to be transformed through his methods. In Li’s notes, CCP political offenders could be “greatly moved” by his guidance, led to “accept the Three Principles of the People,” and “show signs of reforming errors and reverting to being good.” Reporting on the April 1937 release of Huang Jinglin, who had served five years and four months for political offenses and robbery, Instructor Li wrote: His work has been very diligent, and all along he has been interested in studying. Besides entering the education class, he often borrowed books to read about party doctrine and religion. His conduct in affairs as a person is so different that there is no way to compare him with who he used to be. His disposition has gone from rash and impatient to mild and warm. This on its own is a sign of his reform and repentance. . . . His crime goes back to 1930 when CCP bandits were on the rampage. At the time, he was a primary school teacher and was introduced by a colleague to enter the CCP. . . . At that time, his will was weak; he habitually and blindly followed, and later

A Mechanism for All Offenses recalled those past failures with pangs of grief, and swore never again to repeat his past mistakes. Aside from his family’s six elders, there are his old parents whom he long neglected to support and serve. He intends to make an effort to carry out his duty to practice great filial piety even in poverty. Now he is to redeem his former faults so as to stop the tears that have been falling like rain.66

Certain KMT activists, however, were skeptical of such claims, believing the prisons wholly unsuited to deal with arrested CCP members. As early as 1932, Chen Gongbo and Wang Luyi’s Central Popular Movements Executive Committee called for a new approach to prison reformation programs in response to a report by instructor Wang Demao, testifying that not only had attempts to reform CCP failed, but “counterrevolutionary convicts” had made prisons and detention centers “sites of counterrevolutionary propaganda and training.”67 As the push for increasing political “training” grew in 1935, KMT activists forcefully questioned the prisons’ ability to reform political offenders. At the 1935 National Judicial Conference, Liu Yun criticized the prisons for letting prisoners “sit around bored all morning, chatting all day, their spirits not committed to anything at all,” letting them fall into “depraved actions and a depraved manner of speech that render them useless materials after release,” and only teaching some “introductory literacy” instead of reforming them with “party doctrine.” Continuing this attack initially by castigating the prisons’ eclectic mix of instruction, including “superstitious” Daoist and Buddhist themes, Zeng Sanxiang expressed alarm at how ineffective such instruction was for political prisoners. In line with similar proposals by Wu Shipeng and Huang Kai calling for party instructors to lead “thought training” and “special instruction” of political offenders, Zeng proposed that all prisons have “political instruction” departments with well-funded, well-trained, politically loyal instructors using standardized texts for uniform political lessons explained in a scientific manner in order to “arouse their national consciousness and get rid of their hostile stand-point.”68 Following up on these conference proposals, the Shanghai Political Prisoners Instruction Committee, on June 18, 1936, announced a plan for political prisoner instruction that was launched experimentally at Sun Xiong’s 2nd Special District Prison and the Jiangsu No. 2 Prison. Political prisoners, divided into small groups by education level for youths and by occupation for the older ones, were to undergo two hour-long “group training” sessions a week taught by committee members following a standard text, Compendium of Political Training. Instructors were also regularly to have “individual talks” to examine “the thoughts and reactions of each prisoner” and to examine and grade inmates

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A Mechanism for All Offenses on their “common moral character level and academic study” at the end of each three-month term. The first term, 103 political prisoners went through this training, and following examinations, one portion deemed to have “repented, reformed and renewed themselves” was released and the rest sent to special political-indoctrination institutions outside the regular civilian penal system, called self-examination institutes (fanxingyuan).69 In fact, this new scheme for political instruction in the civilian prisons was modeled entirely on the self-examination institutes. The KMT activist authors of the National Judicial Conference proposals—Liu Yun, Zeng Sanxiang, Wu Shipeng, and Huang Kai—were the directors respectively of the self-examination institutes in Jiangsu, Anhui, Shanxi, and Henan. All of them shared Director Zeng Sanxiang’s hope that their proposed reforms could render the prisons “no less than an educational organ,” and make political offenders “easily confess and repent and become successful youths, so the prison would be nothing less than a reformatory [ganhuayuan].”70 The KMT activist leaders of a new institution established to manage the CCP prisoner problem through a political indoctrination version of the mechanism of penal reformation had come to the prisons to instruct them in their perfected form of the method. THE SELF-EXAMINATION INSTITUTES (FANXINGYUAN)

Not far from where Hu Yimin had languished in the Zhejiang Army Prison in 1927, leading cadres of the Zhejiang KMT branch in Hangzhou devised and in 1928 established the first self-examination institute. Named for the NeoConfucian moral self-cultivation practice, these were to be institutions to reform the thinking of and to politically indoctrinate radical young “counterrevolutionaries.” The 260 “youths . . . led astray into error” but deemed capable of “reform and self-renewal,” initially transferred from prisons and the purge special courts to the Zhejiang Self-Examination Institute, were to undergo a program of instruction, “reflection on errors,” and exercise. Trained party cadres were to instruct “self-examinees” (fanxingren) in classrooms for up to six hours a day on party doctrine, policy, and the dangers of Communism. It was to be modeled on the “school system,” just as the new-style prisons had once claimed. In fact, the defining schema for these new institutions was the system of penal reformation. Indeed, as these institutions proliferated in 1928, those first set up in Wuchang, Changsha, Nanjing, and Guangzhou were called “reformatory” (ganhuayuan)—an institution for ganhua. This term only became less common after the Jiangsu Reformatory director and leading officers, all of whom came from the penal-judicial “circles,” raised a concern that the word “reformatory”

A Mechanism for All Offenses might cause confusion, as it had been used to describe reform schools for juvenile delinquents. Subsequently, in the summer and fall of 1929, the central government approved the existing institutions, including the special military self-examination institute set up at the end of 1928 in the Zhejiang Army Prison, and called for the construction of provincial institutes on the Zhejiang model. By late 1931, nine provincial institutes, all in or around provincial capitals or major cities, were up and running (Zhejiang, Jiangsu, Anhui, Jiangxi, Henan, Guangdong, Hubei, Shandong, Shanxi); two were being built (Hunan, Fujian); several military (Hangzhou, Beiping) and local government (Changsha, Tianjin) managed institutes had been opened; and a plan was put forth for a flagship institution—the Capital Self-Examination Institute.71 The reform and expansion of the self-examination institutes was, as had been the pattern with all modern penal institutions, spurred by repeated revelations that they had failed to live up to their ideals. The poorly managed special military self-examination institutes in Beiping (known locally and in CCP lore as Caolanzi) and Hangzhou were repeatedly rocked by prisoner hunger strikes and demonstrations, which led to the closure of the Hangzhou institution in the fall of 1930. Soon after, similar hunger strikes and demonstrations at the Zhejiang Self-Examination Institute exposed rampant disease and an appalling lack of hygiene, food, and medicine indicative of gross mismanagement.72 KMT cadres responsible for political indoctrination and Ministry of Judicial Administration officials competed to reform and rationalize the institutes. Party cadres attacked residual leftism in some institutes and religious teachings in others. The ministry circulated new instruction rules and curriculum standards based on those of the Guangdong Self-Examination Institute in the fall of 1930, while the KMT Central Training Department, just a few months later in early 1931, proclaimed their revised self-examination institute training curriculum and study materials based on those of the Zhejiang institute. Then, in August, the Central Training Department circulated a summary of a petition by the Suzhou-based Jiangsu Self-Examination Institute instructor Ni Bi, which declared most institutes to be poorly organized, mismanaged, and unable to reform inmates. The Anhui SelfExamination Institute and others like it “only squander public funds . . .,” he wrote, “and are self-examination institutes in name only.” Instructors at the Zhejiang institute taught “classes in a mechanical style”; and even in his own institute, Ni felt, he was unable to provide effective and sufficient instruction to the 137 mostly CCP inmates, ranging, as he put it, from those with “kindergarten education up to advanced graduate students” and including increasing numbers of “peasant and worker elements.” The problem, Ni held, was that, with the exception of himself, a central government appointee, all the other

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A Mechanism for All Offenses officers had been appointed by the director, who was also the chief justice of the Jiangsu High Court. Instructor Ni’s report, in short, was the opening salvo in the KMT party ideologues’ campaign to work with the Ministry of Judicial Administration on a process of standardization and centralization that would wrest the institutes from the control of provincial high courts.73 Yet, tensions remained between party cadres and judicial officials over procedures and approaches. So, as promised youth prisons had not materialized and prison crowding increased, the Ministry of Judicial Administration, in the spring of 1932, ignored the party ideologues’ insistence on separating political and common prisoners and ordered the dispatching of a number of common “youth” (ages fifteen to twenty-five) convicts to be educated in the selfexamination institutes. Within months a group of these prisoners had been admitted to the Jiangsu institute. Yet the discourse drawn upon by judicial officials to defend the policy, by characterizing “youths” as being of (in the language of the Analects of Confucius) “unsettled temperaments,” and so the offenders “most easily stained by crime” and yet also most malleable and easiest to reform, resonated with the KMT cadres’ paternalistic sense of “political tutelage.” Shared assumptions about the value and nature of reforming emotionally unstable “youths” (particularly young men of some education) facilitated a coalescence of KMT cadre and state judicial official views on the mutual ground of paternalistic generational duty. As a result, when the ministry’s first two youth prisons finally opened in Jinan in 1934 and Wuchang in 1936, they were modeled closely on the self-examination institutes. And, at the same point, the self-examination institutes became hybrid penal institutions serving the aims of party ideologues.74 This was formalized with a series of laws, regulations, policy methods, and orders culminating with the April 1933 Revised SelfExamination Institute Regulations and the Ministry of Judicial Administration’s assumption of direct control of seven leading provincial institutes—Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Jiangxi, Anhui, Shandong, Hebei, and Guangdong. But this rationalization clarified, as the KMT cadres wanted, that inmates would only be political offenders; that, satisfying the judicial officials demand for regulated procedure, these offenders had served at least a third of their sentence and showed signs of repentance and would be held for no more than five years; and that, in accordance with the wishes of both sides, instruction programs and the process for attaining “self-renewal certificates” and release would follow standard guidelines. Thus unified, the Nanjing government’s sway over the seven core institutes was substantial, and its influence spread to the eight provincially run institutes, as well.75 The reforms brought appointments of new directors, senior officers, and instructors throughout the system, some from the judicial-

A Mechanism for All Offenses penal officer ranks, but increasingly from among the KMT cadres, many of whom were Zhongtong agents. Appointed director of the provincially controlled Henan institute in mid-1933, the Zhongtong agent Huang Kai, for instance, believed in running the institute according to regulations and with instructors from the KMT Central Training Department (and trained at the Central Party Academy) to provide proper ideological indoctrination. This, in his view, was essential to the struggle with the CCP and the recovery of the “great national treasure” of misguided “progressive youths.”76 Self-examination institute directors, like Chen Yunqi at the Shandong institute in 1934, reported the same kinds of practical concerns about controlling inmates, insufficient funding, maintaining hygiene, and preventing disease that had been expressed by so many prison wardens. And, in the manner of previous penal reformers, he saw his institution as fundamentally unlike those that had come before. Not only was his Shandong institute clearly superior to the adjacent Shandong No. 1 Prison and new youth prison in the Jinan compound, but also, with respect to living conditions, discipline, work skills training, education, and such leisure activities as volleyball and listening to music on phonographs, it was like a school, not a prison. Indeed, the term “prisonification,” for the Shandong institute officers, referred to all that was to be avoided, all that their institution was not.77 This very desire to transcend the penal character of the institution in favor of educative suasion, of course, revealed these institutes to be direct heirs of “reformationism.” Yet this confidence was fueled by their political mission—the fusion of political indoctrination with moral cultivation to mobilize a generation of “youth” into saving the nation and advancing the party-state. In Instructor Ni Bi’s words, they were to make the self-examinees “awaken to realize the errors of their former thoughts. And, in addition, it is to inculcate in them party doctrine, to inspire them to self-examine the great transformation of the Three Principles of the People and form their knowledge and understanding of the society, nation, and revolution. Moreover, it is to reform their character. The aim certainly is not just the hope that after the selfexaminees get out that they will be passive and not again fall into the danger of counterrevolution, but rather that they will actively be cultivated as members of society.”78 Put another way in 1935 by the Jiangsu institute director Liu Yun, it was the study of “party doctrine” that was essential to “the efficiency of reformation [ganhua].” It would “inspire them to have pure and genuine thoughts, foster their good natured temperament, and move them to understand the errors of their former actions, and thereafter preserve the will to repent and reform,” so that the examinees would become “talents for the party-state” that would “be of much benefit to the future of the nation.”79

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A Mechanism for All Offenses It is little wonder that starting in late 1934 and then escalating rapidly in the summer of 1936, ever-greater numbers of “eligible” political prisoners in military and civilian prisons were transferred to the institutes until, at the end of 1936, the inmate population of the ministry-directed institutes had expanded dramatically to 982 male and 58 female self-examinees. Those transferred to the newly opened, in spring 1936, Capital Self-Examination Institute at Xiaozhuang on the northeastern outskirts of Nanjing entered a facility with single cells and classrooms built around a seventy-meter-long grass courtyard that immediately was pronounced the preeminent self-examination institute—the reformation institution of the future.80 Although the vocabularies employed were often new and the self-examination institutes were described as a kind of academic institution, their methods built upon the existing techniques of penal reformation. Instructors investigated inmates’ backgrounds, conduct, words, and thoughts ostensibly for “individualized” treatment and held individual counseling sessions. There were regular large assembly lectures, often termed “inspirational lectures,” at weekly “Commemoration of the Premier” assemblies and on the full schedule of KMT revolutionary and national commemoration days delivered by the director, chief instructor, visiting speakers, and occasionally by the self-examinees themselves. At the Shandong institute in 1934, most visiting lecturers were high-ranking KMT officials, including Chen Lifu. Most instruction, however, occurred in mid-size classes. Following a placement examination, the Shandong inmates were divided into three grade levels, ranging from introductory to higher middle school, subsequently spending four hours a day in classes and three hours at labor (in a six-day week). The 1934 curriculum concentrated on political indoctrination to convert Communists, and included academic subjects taught in a manner to support party doctrine, physical education, and literacy training for the lowest grade level.81 The content of instruction was highly regulated and standardized. Shu Songsheng, the thirty-one-year-old experienced KMT cadre instructor at the Shandong institute, used the prescribed party doctrine textbooks from the KMT Central Training Department and Central Propaganda Committee, teaching lessons following a scripted instructional outline starting with the “flaws of Communism, the CCP’s reckless actions, their antiscientific principles, and the crimes of its followers” and culminating with “the crisis of the Chinese nation’s international position and its relation to the salvation of the Chinese people” and the values of “traditional morality.” End-of-term examinations in politics and thought posed specific, standard essay questions, such as: “What do you think is the cause of rural bankruptcy?” and “At what stage is the Chinese revolution at present?” and “What observations do you have about the social class

A Mechanism for All Offenses of the Red bandits of the Yangzi River basin region?” The answers to these questions were not open to interpretation; there was one correct position to be written in precise language.82 At the same time, instructors relied upon the reformation method of influencing an internal emotional crisis and catharsis. Through creating bonds of respect and intimacy with the inmate, the instructor sought to induce a “reformation in feelings” from which he could proceed to “correcting the intellect” and “guidance” to proper thinking.83 Confession and repentance remained central. Yet, since the methods of reformation were combined in these institutes with modes of Leninist party training, answers to instructors in individual sessions, just as in the classroom, required thorough articulation of the party line. Such expressions of “thinking” in oral and written forms were always described as voluntary. For the instructor at the Anhui Self-Examination Institute in 1936, “voluntarism” was a standard lecture theme: “Self-examination is voluntary not forced. In voluntary self-examination, one should truly and sincerely confess; true and sincere confession is the cornerstone of self-examination work.”84 But of course there was no actual free choice without frightening repercussions; reference to “voluntarism” was merely a powerful rhetorical device to pressure active self-motivated compliance, or what might be termed “coercive voluntarism.” These techniques included not just individual “self-examination,” but, in line with KMT party and military Leninist training models, small study-group discussions conducted for their “voluntary development” by inmates under instructor supervision.85 Literate self-examinees wrote personal histories and daily “life diaries” about their thoughts and readings. Of the seventy-five inmates held at the Shandong institute in August 1934, thirty-nine were considered sufficiently literate to keep these diaries, while the rest were taught to write simple slogans with large characters. In diary excerpts from the Anhui institute in 1936, inmates recorded a few lines from a book, aphorisms and little epiphanies, and ideas about ways to examine their thoughts. Inmate Lin Qirui wrote on December 31, 1935, “I’ve done wrong, ah! My evil crimes are sincerely as tall as a mountain and as deep as the sea.” It was the sort of statement—a “sign of repentance”—that would prompt an instructor’s individual counseling session to manipulate emotions, encourage acceptance of “faults” in a retelling of the inmate’s past, and urge progress toward coming “voluntarily” to “correct thoughts.”86 At the Anhui institute, inmates, under the supervision of instructors, prepared “work plans” shortly after their arrival, to set out reform goals, specific commitments to a continual process of thought and conduct improvement, and a schedule of plans to achieve in the institute and after release. Inmate Miao Yunxiang’s work plan stated a determination to strive to eliminate Communist

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A Mechanism for All Offenses influence within himself and around him, to assist and provide intelligence to local authorities, to educate his children sincerely, and to start a lithography workshop.87 Educated inmates also had to research in institute libraries and write at least one lengthy essay on KMT ideology, policy, philosophy, or current affairs prior to their release. These self-examination institute “graduation theses,” as the writer Lu Xun derisively dubbed them, were, in keeping with the voluntarist myth, often published in supposedly “self-examinee-managed” journals— publications that were used as instruction material. In 1936, the Anhui institute journal included inmate essays on everything from Wu Zhihui’s antimaterialist philosophy and comparisons between Chinese “spiritual” civilization and Western “materialist” civilization to arguments for the “partification of education” and indictments of the “crimes of the Communist Party.”88 Concerns about the effectiveness of their methods, as at every institution of penal reformation, were not uncommon among self-examination institute officers. Instructor Wang at the Anhui institute worried that the daily diary writing was “losing meaning, and some fill it out once a week, some copy others.” Some inmates, he reported, were “pessimists,” who shirked their “self-examination” and had a bad influence on others. Officers at the Shandong institute reported difficulties in trying to win over “members of the Third Parties” with anti-CCP themes. And they expressed concerns that mismanagement of “self-examinee voluntary associations” could “easily spread and nourish corrupt practices even to the point of presenting an opportunity for the revival of former counterrevolutionary organizations.”89 Even when outright resistance was unwise, there were subtle ways for inmates to be uncooperative, through foot dragging, dazing off, surreptitiously trying to read or write something unrelated to the lessons, and with mockery and humor at the authorities’ expense. Dark irony is the tone of the report “In the Self-Examination Institute,” contributed by an author with the alias Jin Baiyong to the May 1936 One Day in China reportage collection about his experience in the Jiangsu institute in Suzhou. Jin described one instructor, Mr. Hei, as “good looking” with “a harelip, a bird-face and camel eyes,” “a spirit from standard broadcast radio,” and “a simple brain and a crude disposition.” The instructor Mr. Bai was “an incredible person” who had “also cultivated a simple brain.” But the institute director was, in Jin’s description, “emotionally unstable,” who with “clever and sinister stratagems and a false heart” was “good at exaggerated and mesmerizing speeches” and manipulating the prisoners’ emotions.90 Satire after the fact, however, was about the limit of possible resistance against the centrally directed self-examination institutes. Organized CCP resistance and secret activities in these institutes by the mid-1930s were exceedingly

A Mechanism for All Offenses rare. The October 31, 1936, discovery by Shaanxi Self-Examination Institute guards of pieces of paper with CCP slogans written in Chinese characters and a coded Romanization in the pocket of inmate Gong Yunji, which brought a swift suppression of a nascent CCP organization, is striking for being so unusual. CCP memoirs describe just the subtlest “resistance” of minor noncompliance in these institutes. When on her transfer to the Capital Self-Examination Institute, Guo Ganglin, the formidable former millworker and leader of the remarkably militant CCP women at the Jiangsu No. 1 Prison, attempted to resist instruction, she was immediately removed to a dark solitary-confinement punishment cell and the attempt by her “sister comrades” to boycott classes was quickly suppressed. CCP memoirs show the model Capital Self-Examination Institute directed by the Beijing University–educated KMT legal scholar and Central Training Department secretary Liao Weifan to have been highly organized and to have maintained strict discipline and surveillance in all areas, including lavatories. Realizing in practice what more than two decades before had only been a theoretical ideal for the Beijing No. 1 Prison, the Capital institute locked all inmates in individual cells at night, enforced a rule of silence outside of instruction sessions, carried out random strip searches, and removed any inmate guilty of an infraction for a period of total isolation. Recalling the tight control the institute exerted over self-examinees without resorting to violence during his time as an inmate, between May and November 1937, Wang Fanxi dubbed these techniques “scientific methods.” It was indeed a regime closer to the theoretical Foucaultian vision of total control than anything that had come before. Strikingly, the rigorous instruction program, which included diary and essay writing, was led by the twice-imprisoned, former double agent Bao Junfu. In 1936–37, Bao stood each Monday morning at 9:00 a.m. alongside Director Liao before the gathered inmates at the weekly assembly to commemorate the premier. Men on one side, women on the other, all stood to sing the KMT anthems along with a phonograph record and to perform the regular rituals of the party-state. There, leading the program of conversion at the new model reformative institute, just as at so many others, was an internal security agent of Zhongtong.91 CCP prisoners in the Central Self-Examination Institute were not only largely obedient, they were anxious about being subjected to a program, as one memoirist phrased it, to “brainwash and transform minds.”92 The even more pervasive fear among CCP prisoners, one much manipulated by an expert security agent like Bao Junfu, was that in trying to survive the institutes, they would be suspected by their comrades inside and outside the institution to have “turned traitor” for having written an essay in an institute journal or signed the public “confession

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A Mechanism for All Offenses statements” and “anti-Communist” declarations required for release. CCP inmate Chen Tan recalled thinking, “If I went to the self-examination institute and things went wrong, it would ruin my political life.” In fact, many political and actual lives were destroyed in this way. The CCP’s clandestine party discipline “Dog Beating” squads assassinated known traitors. And later, in the 1940s rectification campaigns and 1960s Cultural Revolution, CCP cadres accused of having “turned traitor” in the institutes of the 1930s were hounded, jailed, and brutalized.93 For some radical youths fervently devoted to their beliefs from, as they saw it, the depths of their sincere ethical minds, the coercive voluntarist process of diary writing, confessions, and public anti-CCP statements was profoundly disturbing. The psychological manipulations and pressures the institutes exerted on inmates, not least of all the notion that survival might require a betrayal of conscience through a feigned conversion, felt, as former inmate Xia Zhixu recalled, like “spiritual torment.”94 Yet a remarkable “United AntiCommunist Declaration” signed by Tan Keping and thirty-four of his fellow Shandong Self-Examination Institute inmates prior to their release in the summer of 1934 indicates how these coerced voluntarist statements, not unlike the account of prisoner Chen Zhixi, could include points meaningful to both the institute authorities and the inmates. It began: We are hot-blooded youths, and all are youths who want to seek the glorious way out for our nation and race. But because our knowledge was superficial and we did not understand the current situation and because we were not cautious in making friends and were seduced by people, we eventually took the path of error and entered the abyss of evil crime! [This brought] mortification to the nation and society and worries in the hearts of our parents and relatives! This is our greatest disgrace and greatest sorrow. . . . Our hearts were pure and our motives were proper. Where we were wrong was in not clearly recognizing the needs of the nation and in not grasping the true center of the revolution. Only through reaching for what was beyond our grasp did we embark on the path of falsehood; we were blindly following [others] and being used by them!

The declaration went on to express their repentance, recognition of the “errors of Communism and the correctness of the Three Principles of the People,” a litany of criticisms of Communism, Marx, and Soviet “red imperialism,” and praise for Sun Yat-sen and KMT doctrine. The prisoners had admitted their crimes and faults and regurgitated the main lessons they had been taught, and yet, leaning heavily on the discourse about unsettled youths, had vigorously

A Mechanism for All Offenses defended their moral integrity and motives. Even more striking, just prior to the standard concluding oath promising they would be law-abiding citizens and uphold the Three Principles of the People, were the lines: “We know that if we forget the essentially strong ‘bamboo carrying pole’ that is ‘nationalism,’ and emptily talk of the time of internationalism, then internationalism will never come, and will never succeed!”95 The idea was not at all outside the very wide boundaries set by Sun Yat-sen’s writings, though, at this point, it certainly resided far out on the KMT’s left wing. In this context, it made a claim for the ultimate value of the internationalist revolutionary vision—still the key distinguishing difference between CCP and KMT revolutionaries. Even when repenting and reciting the party line as required, it remained possible for the “reformed” to express certain ideas particularly meaningful to themselves. Tan Keping was a model inmate—the only one appointed to a staff position at the institute. As with the new prisons, the self-examination institutes measured their success in reformed inmates and so similarly developed an institutionally established belief in such conversions.96 Institute inmates, indeed, were to progress along set stages toward release. This began with compiling and assessing information about who were veteran CCP members trained in Moscow or new recruits, party intellectuals or workers and peasants, non-CCP Marxists or other regime opponents, nonaligned journalists, scholars, and students, and their educational and economic levels. At the Shandong institute in 1934 (in the seventh term) most self-examinees were men in their twenties from eastern Shandong; there were only three women. The greatest number were categorized as students mostly in middle and normal schools, schoolteacher graduates usually of normal schools, and peasant-farmers considered uneducated but “comfortably off.” There were also a few listed as merchants, peddlers, soldiers, as well as a tax collector and a secretary of a local militia. Although much was noted about the difficulty of instructing such a diverse inmate body, the authorities reported that nearly all inmates were obedient and of “good disposition.” The end-of-term marks showed a range of levels in the progressive process of reform that generally supported optimism. For “moral character,” twenty-nine were “sincere,” twenty-three “nearly sincere,” eighteen “hypocritical” and only five “cold-hearted.” For “belief in the Three Principles of the People,” thirtyseven were “believing,” sixteen “half believing-half-doubting,” and twenty-two “not believing.” The majority of “non-believers” were newcomers. But the report expressed confidence that most inmates would be reformed. After all, since 1932, they had only sent three inmates back to the courts after being “unable to reform them.”97

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A Mechanism for All Offenses The Henan institute director and Zhongtong officer Huang Kai felt that a major failure of the institutes had been their inability to provide government jobs for all who “reformed.” Still, the institutes attempted to continue not just the surveillance, but the reinforcement of the indoctrination process after release. First, as with parolees, they required a guarantor and usually a bond put up by that individual or business. Then, given an official “certificate of repentance” with their vital information, KMT symbols, and an image of Sun Yat-sen, freed self-examinees were sent out into the world. However, for a set time they were supposed to report back to the institute at regular intervals on their address, workplace, involvement with the KMT, activities in social organizations, living conditions, family relations, and personal conduct and character. The hope was for extensive supervision, but, as the records of the Shandong institute show, the reporting system was insufficiently enforced. Some releasees stopped reporting in without consequence, and little of what others wrote could be verified.98 Still, the resulting records offer some sense of the fate of former inmates: thirteen of the ninety-three released between November 1932 and August 1934 were employed in government jobs ranging from low-level clerkships in village, county, military, and court offices right on up to positions in the Education Administration, the Office for Receiving Students who Studied in Russia, the party bureaucracy, and even in the CCP suppression work of the Shandong KMT Special Services Unit and at the institute itself. Ten of these were noted to exhibit “strong” political activism for the KMT, and many of these were in close contact and were frequent visitors to the institute. Beyond these cultivated party activists were another group, about half of the releasees, who had returned to jobs as school administrators and teachers or back to farming, and, though not politically engaged with the KMT, regularly reported in to the institute and received positive assessments. They were deemed to be pacified, settled “peacefully at home,” working for the family or local community, and so inoculated against Communism. In a letter from just such a releasee published in the Anhui institute’s Self-Examination Monthly, Dr. Hu Zhinong wrote, “Since I determined my life’s occupation, which is to plan and establish a hospital, and have already just set it up and have begun making diagnoses, my daily income is quite sufficient to make ends meet.” Another thirty-five releasees from the Shandong institute, however, had not reported in regularly, and thirteen had ceased communicating with the institute well before the end of their supervision period and may well have returned to CCP ranks. There was also evidence of the trauma of the experience for some; ten had returned home to recover from serious illnesses, and nine remained unemployed many months after release.99

A Mechanism for All Offenses In 1934, Lu Xun wrote of those released from these “special prisons” concerned with “the matter of thought”: “Occasionally one meets one of the good people who have completed their studies and been released; but it seems as if, for the most part, they are despondent. I fear they exhausted themselves in selfexamination and on their graduation theses. Their prospects are on the hopeless side of things.”100 Lu Xun might have had in mind the young non-CCP former self-examination institute inmate from the north who mailed a handwritten manuscript to the editors of the National Literary Weekly in Shanghai on November 10, 1933, signing it “M at the bus-stop.” Relating his three months of eating stale blackened dumplings and cornbread amid swarms of flies and irontruncheon-wielding guards earlier that year, he is critical of the pompous, hypocritical manner of the instructor—the “youth in Western clothes with a southern accent”—and the institute’s aim of “binding people’s thoughts.” Yet he is as little interested in resisting as he is in reforming; his tone is one of sorrowful bemusement, fatigued irony, troubled confusion. The KMT slogans on the wall strike him as odd; he is more interested in the inmate graffiti; some scrawlings are defiant cries against injustice, others are crude humor and expressions of homesickness. He notices the beauty of the flowers in the courtyard even as he conveys the profound strangeness, uneasiness, and extreme boredom of the constant waiting in the eerie enforced silence of the controlled environment: “Not a speck of dust moves, not a sound is heard, as each person rests in their own room. This place is not really of this world, rather it seems to be located on the moon.” Even after his release, the heavy weight of disquiet remains with him.101 He had been made “despondent,” in Lu Xun’s words—a traumatized figure. Regardless of whether conversions had succeeded in the eyes of authorities, these sophisticated institutions of introversion to “save,” reform, and mobilize idealistic young people for the party-state, ironically, drove some into passive, social, and political withdrawal.102 Some cases led to further unintended consequences. The discovery of Communist slogans pasted on a wall near the Yi Garden in the town of Jiangyin, Jiangsu, in late 1933 led the police to arrest a twenty-threeyear-old teacher at the Chenghan Primary School known as Wang Shouyun. Processed at police court, then before county authorities, and finally convicted of propagating Communism after a lengthy series of trials and appeals before the provincial high court in nearby Suzhou, he was sentenced to two and half years of penal servitude that became a commitment to a term at the Jiangsu Self-Examination Institute just inside Suzhou’s Panmen water-gate. He struggled against the system every step of the way, refusing to obey orders and to attend classes, and went on his own individual hunger strike. Like many young political prisoners, he had the support and concern of his family and neighbors

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A Mechanism for All Offenses from his home, in his case, Lu Family Bridge village just outside of Jiangyin, where he was know by the name Sun Tan. Institute instructors, like those of the modern prisons, often sought to use family members and the family and community bond to pressure wayward sons into “confession” and reform. And, for their part, family members, especially the wives, mothers, and sisters, filed most of the petitions in the mid-1930s requesting guarantor releases for political prisoners on the basis of “false accusation.”103 In this case, the family and local community put the pressure on the institute and judicial authorities. For them, Sun Tan was the eldest son of an established family, a celebrated 1928 graduate of the Wuxi Higher Middle School, and a respected young teacher and intellectual. Through the local press, particularly the Jiangyin newspaper The Great Sound, they conveyed their view that Sun was a teacher who “managed affairs diligently and generally believed in nationalism” and that if he was “suffering from mental illness,” as officials were suggesting, it had resulted from bullying by CCP prisoners and a letter from his fiancée calling off their engagement—both consequences of his unjust imprisonment. The Jiangsu Self-Examination Institute, on June 22, 1934, transferred him across town to the Jiangsu No. 3 Branch Prison, though he continued to refuse food and drink (for up to four days), as well as to wail, curse, and strike out at guards. Following a medical examination on July 1, he was diagnosed with “mental illness” and sent to Fuyin Hospital on July 7 for treatment. Not long after, he was given a medical guarantor release and permitted to return to the Lu Family Bridge village home of his parents, three younger sisters, and two younger brothers to recover from his illness. Treated with homeopathic medicines and encouraged to rest, he showed signs of recovery until his mother became ill and he suffered a relapse. Then, on the “very hot and abnormal” night of September 5, Sun Tan took a rope and hanged himself to death while his family slept. His death sparked an outcry and investigations by the family, the county government, and the local newspaper. But in the end Sun’s death certificate merely read “emaciated and frail in a manner commonly analogous to mental illness.”104 No one resisted the self-examination institutes—the most rationalized, perfected institutions of penal reformation—with the unremitting fury of Sun Tan. For the authorities, this could only be madness. Nor could the CCP allow for such lack of discipline; Sun did not become a martyr of the revolution. Even Sun’s family and neighbors accepted the diagnosis and never questioned that the trauma might be a product of the institution and its mechanisms. Rather, their anger, impressively mobilized in the press, petitions, and demands for investigation, accused authorities of injustice. The problem was not with the system, in their view, but with the moral authority of the officials.

A Mechanism for All Offenses THE EPIPHANY OF THE IMPRISONED WARDEN

Although not involved with the self-examination institutes, Hu Yimin, in 1930– 31, led the construction and became the first warden of the only major military penal institution to rival them at the time—the Central Military Prison. This massive prison located just outside Nanjing’s external Jiangdong Gate was the Ministry of Military Administration’s attempt to create a modern icon of a prison to erase the memory of the disastrous No. 1 Army Prison. Like all previous model prisons, this thousand-inmate capacity facility, with its moat, surrounding wall topped with barbed wire, iron-barred cells, workshops, and instruction halls, was to be the most advanced institution of discipline and control. Although the inmate population included army deserters, violent gangsters, and bandits, it primarily reflected the prison’s role in supporting the KMT’s war on drugs and political opponents. The largest proportion of the inmates were political prisoners. And, unlike nearly all other military prisons, the prison was committed to the reformation of its inmates. It was a representative institution for Jiang Jieshi’s government, one that frequently hosted visits by foreign and domestic dignitaries.105 Although the Central Military Prison was not without problems, a variety of sources, including CCP memoirs, testify to the effectiveness of the reformist prison administration Hu Yimin established. Its organization, food, facilities, and conditions surpassed all other military prisons and most civilian prisons. Order was maintained with systematic techniques of control, the nearly constant electric lighting of cells and wards, and regular and surprise cell inspections. Discipline was strictly enforced with the slightest rule infractions swiftly punished with loss of workshop jobs, removal to the miseries of the South Ward “prison within the prison,” placement in heavy leg-irons, or consignment to a dark solitary-confinement cell. The prison administration cultivated inmate informants, inserted undercover agents posing as prisoners, and manipulated conflicts between CCP factions and between CCP and other inmate groups. Serious CCP resistance and organization was impossible. Incipient CCP efforts at organization led by Li Zun and later Zhang A’Cheng were quickly betrayed and crushed. Between 1933 and 1937, the incarcerated Communists Li Yimin and Tao Zhu could only recall one minor organized hunger strike. Communication was so strictly controlled that the Communists Chen Tan and Zhang Kezeng only learned that the CCP center had relocated to Shaanxi after their release in the summer of 1937. Hu Yimin had created a prison regime that eliminated the Communist disruptions that had thrown other military prisons into turmoil and shaken major civilian prisons; and he did it with the first military prison thoroughly committed to a program of work and instructional reformation. Most

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A Mechanism for All Offenses political prisoners worked for pay in the eight prison workshops, in the rice threshing plant, at growing vegetables, and at service jobs in the kitchen, library, and barbershop. They attended instruction sessions led by an Education Office staff of five and by visiting Buddhist and Christian preachers in the assembly hall, classrooms, and wards. A contemptuous CCP memoirist recalled these as “dog fart instructions”; but similar sources show the lessons required at least feigned respectful attention and that worries about the influence of this KMT “thought work” led some CCP prisoners to risk urgent covert “study sessions” on the wards or at bathing to refute what had been taught.106 Hu Yimin’s Central Military Prison, like the post-1932 self-examination institutes and Sun Xiong’s Jiangsu Shanghai 2nd Special District Prison, was an institutional response to the challenges posed to the regime of penal reformation and state order. Enlisted not just in the KMT’s plans to order the major urban centers and in support of the ever-escalating campaigns to eradicate the drug problem and suppress the urban Communists, the modern prisons in the core area of KMT power were destabilized, undermined, and nearly destroyed by overcrowding. Yet the appalling human suffering resulting from these institutional failures never shook the confidence of KMT leaders or penal authorities in prisons and penal reformation; nor did most of their political opponents, those in the press and social critics who criticized KMT authorities (with the exception of Lu Xun) or the civic organizations that stepped in to aid failing prisons, ever question the system; most often, they reinforced it. Hence, crisis upon crisis precipitated only the continual, inexorable reform and expansion of these institutions. And the ideal of incarcerative reformation intertwined with Leninist indoctrination methods was extended and reproduced in new institutions specifically designated to reform drug and political offenders. Under the KMT, institutional reformation became more vital to the existential purposes of the state than ever before, as it was deployed in the first great state social-political transformative campaigns of the mid-twentieth century. Along with initiatives to develop party and military training, a “partified” education system, children’s and youth organizations, social order and public hygiene campaigns, and a system of mass propaganda through print publication and the “electrified education” of radio, loudspeaker broadcasting systems, and films, the reformed and new institutions of incarcerative reformation were central to the emerging KMT state drive toward mass national-social transformation through remaking the thinking and conduct of the citizenry. As with other such prewar KMT initiatives, the most effective new prisons and self-examination institutes were elite vanguard institutions, few in number and limited in impact. Still, they constituted powerful new instruments of control and introversion for the

A Mechanism for All Offenses modern Chinese state—key elements of the growing apparatus of state security that by the mid-1930s was successfully suppressing CCP and other internal opposition in the urban centers.107 There remained, however, even among those constructing the apparatus, considerable tension and ambivalence regarding who should be subjected to the forces of internal state security and in what manner. A central prejudice inherent to the creation of the self-examination institutes was that they were designed to save “excellent youths”—meaning well-educated young men. Institute instructors, educated young radical inmates, the Wuxi family and community that decried the treatment of Sun Tan, the prisoner/warden Hu Yimin, the academic Yan Jingyue, the writer Lu Xun, and the liberal intellectuals of the Chinese League for the Protection of Civil Rights shared the presumption that young educated elites ought to be spared from experiencing the blunt force of state security. Understandings about what constituted unacceptable measures varied, as did assumptions about who were upstanding “excellent youths,” as such views were often formed in relation to community affiliations. Returning to Yenching University in June 1935 after earning a Ph.D. in sociology at the University of Chicago and spending a semester a piece at the London School of Economics and in Moscow, Yan Jingyue, who remained a socially progressive liberal critic of the KMT, was appalled by the crackdown on his upstanding Yenching students sincerely remonstrating to save the nation in the December 9th Movement demonstrations for resistance against Japan. Considering the state security campaign of intimidation directed at his students, liberal intellectual colleagues, and himself to be an unforgivable transgression by state authorities, he decamped in 1936 to the Shanghai International Settlement. There, Yan became the first Chinese deputy warden at the massive Ward Road Jail. He would rather work for a foreign imperialist institution than live under the KMT.108 Even within Jiang Jieshi’s model military prison in the capital, Warden Hu Yimin and some of his senior officers were sympathetic with those they saw as talented, morally upright youths, especially if they hailed from their home areas or at least Zhejiang and Jiangsu. Lower-class guards at the Central Military Prison could be disrespectful of educated CCP inmates, mocking them: “You division commanders, brigade commanders, university students have come here, fart it! I make barely 12-kuai a month, and I can be in charge of you.”109 It was rarely so with educated officers. Notably, the prison’s otherwise severe education director, Major Shen Bingquan, along with his staff of instructors treated well-educated, well-behaved “talented youth” political prisoners, most of whom came from southern Jiangsu or were Shen’s Zhejiang co-provincials, with respect and leniency. Those Major Shen thought of as the finest talents, including,

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A Mechanism for All Offenses among others, the National Central University students Yang Jinhao and Wang Chubao, the editor Pan Zinian, the writer and translator Luo Shiyi, and the antiStalinist Marxist theorist Zheng Chaolin, received the best cells and privileges and were assigned light clerical work in the Education Office, where, when not assisting Shen with writing literacy training texts and translating foreign codes and regulations, they were free to conduct their own scholarship, even on banned leftist topics. A former radical “educated youth” and founder of the CCP branch in his native Fuyang County imprisoned in the 1927 purge, Major Shen had turned against the CCP and taken a leading role in a KMT institution devoted to disciplining and converting young Communists. This aim, by all accounts, he pursued rigorously, but not at the expense of abandoning his respect for welleducated young men of good backgrounds working diligently with sincere, moral conviction to enlighten culture and save the nation.110 Warden Hu Yimin’s similar lenience toward young educated political prisoners, especially his co-provincials, again got him in trouble. In July 1934, Hu was summoned to Jiang Jieshi’s field headquarters in Nanchang, where the furious national leader accused him of being too lenient with CCP prisoners, inappropriately releasing some, and even letting classified information fall into their hands. Hu was imprisoned again, this time in the VIP ward of the Nanchang Detention Center. Suddenly everything—his career, his property, his family, the trappings of his affluent official lifestyle—was in jeopardy. Prison construction had made Hu wealthy and respected. He had acquired automobiles and several villas and “foreign-style houses” in addition to his Nanjing mansion at Qichang Lane in the Sipailou District. He had ample enough space and resources to support a wife, a concubine, and a mistress. He traveled frequently and did favors for Jiang and other senior leaders, making the most of a period when, through the inveigling of Jiang and his senior security officials, he became a liaison representing the northwestern general Yang Hucheng. General Yang had arranged for Hu to take a second concubine in Xi’an, an attractive, talented “college student,” Ms. He (later known as Xiang Yingxin), who, like Hu’s eldest daughter, was in her late teens. Hu had much time to reflect on the many possible reasons for his imprisonment, regretting his involvement in Jiang’s intrigues and acknowledging his sympathy for “patriotic youth,” especially one pretty young woman student inmate from his home province. But Hu firmly believed he had never been disloyal.111 A little over six months later, in early February 1935, a new prisoner arrived on the ward—the rural Jiangxi CCP leader Fang Zhimin. Allowed many comforts and much mobility, Hu Yimin regularly visited Fang in his simple studylike cell, one sitting on the iron bed, the other on the bamboo stool by the

A Mechanism for All Offenses black lacquer desk with its thick books and ink box, passing hours drinking tea, reading each other’s writings, and conversing. Hu had been asked by the authorities to encourage Fang to repent and join the KMT, but their conversations took a different tilt. Over more than six months, Hu came to be deeply impressed by Fang, his constant diligent writing and reading, his vision of and commitment to rural reform and China’s revolution, and the upright sincerity of his character. Like Hu, Fang had come from a rural farming community to become an educated, committed revolutionary to save China. Shortly before his execution in early August 1935, Fang entrusted a large portion of his handwritten manuscripts to Hu, asking him to deliver them to Lu Xun. The manuscripts included Fang’s essay “Beloved China,” a stirring refutation of the accusation that the CCP chose class and internationalism above the nation, which depicted China as a mother in distress, for whom all of her children should rise in defense. A month after Fang’s execution, Hu was released and first retreated with Xiang Yingxin to Hangzhou to recover. Hu mourned Fang, writing a lamentation poem describing Fang having, like the ancient Lu state hero Wang Yi, made of himself “a national sacrifice” that caused all of nature to weep, “having encountered a gentleman so unduly and easily distinguished.” But only after Lu Xun’s death and amid the National Salvation Movement furor in November 1936 did Hu venture to Shanghai, delivering Fang’s manuscript to Hu Ziying, the wife of the liberal-leftist National Salvation Association leader Zhang Naiqi. Hu Yimin had not been converted to Communism by Fang, and he again accepted duties entrusted to him by Jiang Jieshi, most notably the building of the Hankou Military Prison. Yet even as he continued to construct new institutions of state discipline, Hu had lost faith in Jiang Jieshi and his version of the KMT, fully accepting Fang Zhimin’s view that Jiang had failed the revolution and was “neither benevolent nor righteous [buren buyi].” The instruments of state authority that Hu helped build ought, he thought, to be in the hands of someone with the moral authority to rule.112

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THE INDISPENSABLE REGIME: THOUGHT REFORM IN WARTIME, 1937–1945

It was freezing cold as most of the 774 inmates, including 61 political prisoners, at the Hebei No. 4 Prison in Baoding tried to sleep under filthy, worn blankets on the night of December 22–23, 1936. With the prison furnaces shut down for the night to save on coal expenses, all but 13 of the 51 officers and guards had departed to sleep in the warmth of their homes. The remaining detachment led by thirty-year-old Auxiliary Head Guard Liu Yuxin was mostly unarmed and concentrating on keeping warm. And Rear Ward Guard Wang Keren had left his post without permission. Security was minimal at a moment when most prisons, especially those housing political prisoners, had, along with military, security, and policing units, been ordered to high alert; the Central Military Prison, for instance, had been in full lockdown, with all inmates confined to cells, for ten days. The nation was in the grip of a dramatic political crisis precipitated by the young militarist leader Zhang Xueliang and General Yang Hucheng’s seizure of Jiang Jieshi in Xi’an on December 12—an event later known as the Xi’an Incident. Amid ongoing frontier fighting in Inner Mongolia between Chinese forces and the Japanese Kantogun troops pushing out from their client state of Manchukuo, Zhang and Yang in consultation with CCP leaders, sought to force Jiang to cease attacks on the Communist base in northern Shaanxi and join a national alliance to resist the Japanese. This followed on the massive National Salvation Movement urban demonstrations for national unity to resist Japanese imperialist encroachment in northern China, especially in the sensitive frontier of conflict in northeastern Hebei between Beiping and the sea, about two hundred kilometers north of the Baoding prison.1

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The Indispensable Regime Shortly after 3:00 a.m., four armed men, Jia Qihua, Liu Yuwen, Li Zhenquan, and a shadowy fourth figure, entered the prison through a tunnel dug with the aid of their inside-confederate, Guard Wang Keren, which surfaced in the prison vegetable garden. Rapidly moving with tactical efficiency, they cut the prison’s telephone wires, seized some thirty guns from the armory, and rounded up Head Guard Liu Yuxin, Master Guard Zhao Xingwu, and most of the other guards. A brief violent struggle broke out in the darkness as guards Liu and Zhao resisted giving up the prison keys, which were nonetheless soon wrested from them. Then, just after 4:00 a.m., Jia, Liu, and Li began unlocking wards and cells. At this point, Head Guard Liu broke free and ran to rouse Warden Ma Shixiong, after which he hid in one of the latrines. Awoken by the sounds of prisoners spilling out of their cells into the yards, Section Chief Zhou Kuiyuan rushed to the scene. Dimly perceiving through the shadows several armed men in civilian clothes slapping Master Guard Zhao around in a corridor, Zhou dashed to his office and grabbed for the telephone receiver. The line was dead. Suddenly several freed convicts came after him. Zhou managed to elude them, ran off, and soon found Master Guard Li. Realizing that all guns and guards had been seized and control of the prison had been lost, Zhou and Li climbed over the western inner wall and rushed out through a corner gate and along the narrow streets of the old city to raise the alarm at the Public Security Bureau and city gates’ guard posts. With prisoners now unlocking the rest of their fellow inmates, the four armed interlopers, a prisoner, and Guard Wang Keren seized Warden Ma. To his astonishment, as he later told investigators, Warden Ma was neither physically harmed nor even roughly treated. Rather, Guard Wang Keren justified his involvement, telling Ma, “Guards should not sell out their lives for a little bit of money.” And to him and all around, the leaders of the uprising shouted: “Now rise up in support of Xi’an! Release prisoners to be supplementary soldiers and unite with the Fifty-third Army!” From where he hid amid the stench and flies of the latrine, Head Guard Liu Yuxin heard the freed prisoners yelling at each other not to act wildly and beat anyone. Then they began to shout out in unison, “Rise in support of Xi’an!” In relatively orderly formations, the prisoners marched shouting this slogan and also “Nationalists and Communists cooperate” to the front gate and opened it. There before them were a multitude of armed troops training rifles on them. Public Security and special forces units and detachments from the Fifty-third Army, the Twenty-ninth Army, and provincial forces had the prison surrounded. Ignoring shouted orders from the troops to return to their cells, the prisoners stood their ground, shouting slogans, and then marched straight toward the soldiers they pledged to support, making

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The Indispensable Regime three attempts to push past them to take their demonstration into the streets of Baoding. The soldiers brought up a machine gun and, firing warning shots with rifles and pistols over the prisoners’ heads, now advanced, pushing the convicts back into the prison. Shots continued to be fired as a chaotic melee ensued. Finally, by 9:00 a.m., the last group of resisting prisoners holed up in the prison’s watchtower had surrendered; the “uprising” had been suppressed and nearly all inmates returned to their cells. Incredibly, as the subsequent investigation reports reveal, even though over a thousand rounds of ammunition had been fired, only one prisoner, Zhao Chunhua, had been shot and killed, and only a few others injured. The forces sent to suppress the uprising had shown remarkable restraint. The worst injury at their hands occurred when Public Security officers had stumbled upon Head Guard Liu Yuxin still hiding in the darkness of the latrine and had mistakenly beaten him up. But the prisoners too had been inordinately restrained for an uprising. Six guards had sustained some injuries; there was minor damage to the buildings, and four rifles and eight handguns were unaccounted for. Almost nothing else was missing, except one crucial set of documents, the prisonername lists. Most remarkably, over several hours of darkness and confusion with all the prisoners out of their cells and wards, the main gate open, a side gate open, and a tunnel in the vegetable garden, only 27 of the 774 inmates actually escaped. The security officials carrying out the swift, merciless response to the “uprising” gave no quarter for such restraint. The outside instigators, Jia Qihua, Liu Yuwen, and Li Zhenquan and Guard Wang Keren were apprehended and, along with 12 inmates, executed by firing squad at the prison at 11:00 a.m. the next day. Severe punishments were given to 14 other participants; 26 of the 27 escapees (thief Xie Shoubao was the only one to get away) were swiftly tracked down, and 11 of these were executed. Administrative punishments for negligence were handed down to Warden Ma, Head Guard Liu, and several other officers and guards, assigning them the blame. Yet no official statement was made on the issue most troubling to the security officials and so obvious to all involved. That is, that this was a planned, organized, and disciplined political demonstration—“a patriotic prison rising,” in the words of the interrogated—which had unified political and common prisoners with outside activists, a guard supporter, and even won the admiration of the warden and officers behind the most emotionally powerful mass political sentiment prevalent in cities and towns of the day: national unity for resistance against Japan. The relative caution displayed by the armed forces sent in to suppress the event suggests they perceived it as such a political demonstration. On December 25, the day after rifle shots rang out ending the lives of Jia Qihua, Liu Yuwen, Li

The Indispensable Regime Zhenquan, Wang Keren and eleven other leaders of this unheralded prison demonstration for national unity and patriotic resistance, Jiang Jieshi was released by his captors, having agreed to commit himself to this very purpose.2 Rumblings of the politics of patriotic resistance to Japan had surfaced in some of the political activism in prisons as early as the late 1931 Japanese occupation of the northeastern Manchurian provinces. This was awkward and troubling for prison officials who were often themselves upset about Japanese encroachments, which had also resulted in the loss of more than ten new-style prisons. Not a few instructors had sought to inspire anti-Japanese patriotic sentiments in inmates. It was as distasteful for them as it was for many charged with similar policing and censorship initiatives outside the prisons to enforce orders prohibiting “inflammatory” information about Japanese military incursions circulating in the prisons. But as the National Salvation Movement, with its heralded slogan “It is better to go to jail than to sell out the nation,” gained momentum in the fall of 1936, the simmering anti-Japanese sentiment in the prisons rose to full boil, galvanizing growing numbers of prisoners and even guards.3 It was not just imprisoned CCP members who sought to mobilize this patriotic upsurge, especially since with the CCP’s mid-1936 call for an antiJapanese “united front” in line with Soviet anti-Fascist policy and plans to bring experienced cadres to their guerrilla bases in preparation for the coming war, many imprisoned CCP cadres, with party approval, were issuing “AntiCommunist Statements” by the fall of 1936 and getting released. All kinds of prisoners in all sorts of places were inspired to solidarity and to collective political action in the name of anti-Japanese patriotism. Even far from the front lines in Jiangsu, formal inmate petitions, “out of patriotic feeling” signed in the name of all prisoners and requesting an amnesty—at this time of “the nation’s extreme difficulty” and concerning “the very existence of the race”—so they could join the military to fight the Japanese, were filed at the end of November 1936 at the Nantong No. 1 Detention Center, at the Zhuyin County Jail in December, and in June 1937 in the name of the seven hundred prisoners of the Taixing County Jail, attached Detention Center and Drug Offender Detention Center. In January 1937, over a hundred political and military prisoners at the Jiangsu Military Prison, unified by the call for patriotic anti-Japanese resistance, launched one of the biggest hunger strikes in years. And although a bit confused by a coded message about the onset of the “united front,” phrased as “oldest brother and second brother have been reconciled,” CCP inmates at the prison responded to news of the July Lugou Bridge Incident and renewed fighting in Hebei with a one-day hunger strike, demanding that all their rations be sent to the troops at the front and that they be released to join the battle.4 The theme

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The Indispensable Regime of patriotic resistance against Japan was, in Jiangsu as in Hebei and other provinces in this period, starting to generate the mass political movement destabilizing of prison authority that the CCP had never been able to sustain before. It was threatening to shift moral authority in the form of a virtuous patriotic stance to the prisoners and away from the increasingly compromised wardens, officers, and instructors who sought to reform them. When all-out fighting erupted in the Chinese-governed districts of Shanghai on August 13, and when Japanese aerial bombing began in and around the city and before long struck Suzhou and Nanjing, as well, the KMT authorities finally began to respond to the crescendo of prisoner petitions, hunger strikes, and demonstrations for amnesty release for resistance. CCP leaders Zhou Enlai, Bo Gu, and Ye Jianying, negotiating the details of the “united front” alliance in Nanjing, demanded that all political prisoners be immediately released. On August 17, the Jiangsu Military Prison in Suzhou began to release political prisoners in significant numbers. The next day, Zhou Enlai and Ye Jianying were permitted to visit the Capital Self-Examination Institute, where Zhou spoke on the “united front” for several hours. Increasing numbers of prisoners were released throughout the three-month Battle of Shanghai, even as negotiations, petitioning, and prisoner activism continued, with some hunger strikes called to request additional time to build air-raid shelters at Nanjing prisons that had been hit by Japanese bombs. One group of Central Military Prison inmates was released to dig defensive trenches around Nanjing. Other Nanjing prisoners were transported up the Yangzi River to a temporary prison site in He County, Anhui, only to be released en masse in late October. By the time the Imperial Japanese Central China Area Army under General Matsui Iwane and Prince Asaka marched into the capital on December 13 and unleashed their horrifying two-month paroxysm of murder, rape, arson, and larceny—the infamous Nanjing Massacre—the major civilian and military prisons and selfexamination institutes of the Lower Yangzi region stood empty. Jiang Jieshi’s KMT government, retreating first to Wuhan and then, by the fall of 1938, farther up the Yangzi River to Chongqing, had in the first six months of all-out war with Japan left behind, along with much of the rest of its infrastructure of state authority, its core institutions of penal reformation.5 Initially, there was disarray in the leading ranks of penal reformers, with some joining the KMT retreat and others seeking safety where they could. Though still trusted with important duties by the KMT leadership, Hu Yimin had so abandoned hope in Jiang that he made the momentous decision “not to follow the path to Sichuan.” But his second concubine, Xiang Yingxin, who had been seduced by spy-chief Dai Li into working as an agent for Juntong (the Military Affairs Commission

The Indispensable Regime Bureau of Investigation and Statistics), did join the retreat, eventually marrying Dai’s deputy Mao Renfeng in Chongqing and entering into popular lore as an emblematic unscrupulous femme fatale of a degenerate era. Hu Yimin, meanwhile, set off on a protracted sojourn, first to his native village in Zhejiang and later to other corners of the country. But finally in 1943 he chose to return to the comforts of his mansion and other properties in Nanjing to live under Japanese occupation and the Wang Jingwei–led client government.6 For Yan Jingyue, the criminologist turned deputy warden at the International Settlement’s Ward Road Jail, there was no leaving Shanghai. Surviving the fighting that had raged all around and damaged his Hongkou District prison and, for a time, emptied it of all prisoners, Yan stayed on in the treaty-portprotected central Shanghai “solitary island” neutral zone within Japaneseoccupied eastern China and continued his work, building his juvenile-reform program into a full juvenile-offender reformatory within the British-administered prison. Working with Buddhist social activist Zhao Puchu, he was able to release most of his juvenile inmates into the safety of the Buddhist Children’s Education Center. Until the outbreak of the wider Asia-Pacific War on December 8, 1941, his regular route to work crossed the Japanese-guarded Garden Bridge, even as, within the International Settlement, he lived the life of an independent, liberal-progressive intellectual. He continued to lecture to Soochow University Law School students and also to the displaced “youths” at the Social Science Institute. First on his own and then later together with his intellectual partner and, from mid-1941, his wife, the sociologist scholar of women’s and children’s issues, Lei Jieqiong, Yan joined in many projects and gatherings of progressive intellectuals and social activists. There was the Tuesday Evening Dinner Party Association gathering for lectures and discussions at the Baxianqiao YMCA with Zhao Puchu, the social-Gospel YMCA leader Wu Yaozong, Lu Xun’s widow Xu Guangping, and other intellectual, cultural, and social-religious activist luminaries, including some secret CCP members. Yan and Lei also joined the Friday Dinner Party Association frequented by business leaders, and the Saturday Dinner Party Association hosted by Sun Sun Department Store Director Xiao Zongjun and known for openly including members of the CCP underground. The discussion themes were socially progressive, patriotically anti-Japanese, critical of Jiang Jieshi, and receptive to the promise of the remote Yan’an-based Communists. This all proceeded amid the worn fabric of Shanghai bourgeois sociability in a place and time tenuously protected by the last stand of the Western imperialism that intellectuals like Yan had long politically opposed and yet so often depended upon for protection. Yan’s situation required nearly as many troubling, enervating compromises as

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The Indispensable Regime Hu’s. Neither man could serve the nation in this war as they wished; both instead put their energies into local, yet highly symbolic projects in service of society.7 Wartime Shanghai was more challenging still for Warden Sun Xiong, who stayed at his post at the helm of the 2nd Special District Prison in the Shanghai French Concession through the fighting around the city and after the Nationalist Army’s retreat. Though fatigued and unwell, Sun completed his magnum opus on criminology, calling for a great central-state-directed social transformation involving the establishment of massive state-supported industries; enormous public-works projects; a national health plan; as well as population control and eugenics programs. He also advocated controls on speech, the press, prostitution, dancing, movies, theater, songs, literature, and luxury consumer articles; the “rationalizing” of literature and entertainment to inculcate youths with “the new sacred spirit of ‘labor production”’; and mass education programs to “make new people” and “train citizens” according to Sun Yat-sen and Jiang Jieshi’s injunctions to “construct the mentality” of the people on a moral basis.8 The world of his daily life, however, was distant from utopia. Following exposés in the Shanghai newspapers in 1938, which reported widespread gambling and morphine use among his inmates, Warden Sun came under official investigation for negligence and corruption. By April 1939, he was suffering from heart and kidney disease in his bed at his residence at No. 8 Youyi Lane, just a few blocks from his prison. Here he passed away, aged forty-eight, on December 14. His old friend and colleague, Shao Zhenji, who had taken over the leadership of the prison during Sun’s illness, was named acting warden, directing the prison until February 1940. Shao departed the scene just prior to the summer 1940 shift to pro-Vichy leadership in the French Concession, which soon saw to it that major government institutions corresponded to the Japanese and Wang Jingwei’s Nanjing-based KMT collaborationist regime line. Before the fall of “solitary island” Shanghai to the Japanese at the end of 1941, the instruction program at the 2nd Special District Prison under Warden Huang Yaqiang and Instructor Wang Jiaji, though scrupulously maintaining Warden Sun and Shao Zhenji’s techniques of reformation, taught themes to correct the “mistaken mentality of our people” and in support of “Chairman Wang” and his “peace” nationalism and against the “white and red imperialism.” At the same time, the Nanjing government’s Ministry of Judicial Administration posthumously condemned Sun Xiong, the most celebrated warden of the 1930s, for mismanagement.9 Along with the weakening of prewar prison-reform leadership, the war brought devastating physical destruction of many prisons. In greater Shanghai, the Jiangsu No. 2 Prison at Caohejing and the massive brand-new facility at

The Indispensable Regime Beixinjing in the western suburbs were damaged beyond repair. A similar fate befell the Shandong Youth Prison and the adjacent Shandong Self-Examination Institute and No. 1 Prison in Jinan and the Hubei Youth Prison in Wuhan. Over the eight years of total war, numerous prisons were bombed, shelled, misused, and allowed to deteriorate. A postwar government survey estimated that 40 percent of all prisons and jails in unoccupied China had suffered destruction from aerial bombing. In the Japanese occupied zones, 30 percent had been largely or entirely destroyed, 50 percent had been seriously damaged, and the remaining 20 percent sustained minor damage and loss of equipment.10 The survey suggested that the devastation of the Chinese prison system could all be blamed on the Japanese. It was not that simple, and not just because wartime destruction was not only the handiwork of Japanese forces. Destruction was not the only consequence of war. What the postwar ministry survey of damage deliberately obfuscated was that, like a phoenix rising out of the ashes, projects to sustain and develop institutions of penal reformation began again during the war with a new generation of leaders motivated by the imperatives of war. No wartime regime could be without prisons and the methods of penal reformation. All sides, Jiang Jieshi’s KMT, the Chinese client governments of the Japanese occupation, and Mao Zedong’s CCP, considered the mechanism of reformation indispensable, and so they advanced agendas for re-educating and molding the thinking not just of criminal offenders and political opponents, but of a broad range of people as a central part of their drive to mobilize their wartime populations. RECONSTRUCTION UNDER THE WANG JINGWEI COLLABORATIONIST GOVERNMENT

There were some alarming problems reported in the major Jiangsu prisons in the early 1940s. In October 1940, the Wuxi Peaceful National Salvation Promotion Society sent a telegram to the Ministry of Judicial Administration in Nanjing accusing Warden Chen Xiangming of Wuxi’s Jiangsu No. 5 Prison of corruption, dereliction of duty, cruelly pressing inmates into forced labor, and the brutal murders of the convicts Song Tianshun and Ma A’san. Warden Chen, the telegram charged, had embezzled prison funds by skimming from ration budgets, leaving inmates underfed and many dying of illness, and by falsely overreporting the numbers of guards and medical officers and pocketing the extra salaries. The beating deaths of Song and Ma had, the telegram noted, “inspired public sympathy; the whole prison proclaimed this an injustice and the newspapers swiftly reported the public opinion.” They pointed out that

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The Indispensable Regime lawyers were looking into the case, and they later sent along a clipping of the local newspaper report. In response, the ministry quickly dispatched official Shao Yunwen to investigate. Shao soon confidentially reported that the prison was unhygienic, provided inmates with inferior quality rice and generally poor nourishment, and had had many cases of beriberi and far too many deaths from illness (at least one hundred) between July and September. The suspicious death of Song Tianshun, he noted, required further investigation.11 In April 1942, similar allegations against the Jiangsu No. 4 Prison warden, Fang Zhenfu, and a demand for an investigation was sent to the ministry by a group of the prison’s guards led by Qian Guozhen. Accusing Warden Fang not only of “withholding grain rations for personal gain,” laziness, mismanagement, and sexual impropriety, the guards claimed he worked in cahoots with the Nantong District Court chief inspector, Zhu Shuping, to take bribes from convicts’ families in exchange for medical releases or sentence reductions, even for serious felons like the morphine dealer Wu Guoping.12 Very little about the forms of corruption alleged differed from prewar cases. And, with the exception of the role of the Wang government socialmobilizational organization, the Peaceful National Salvation Promotion Society, in the Wuxi case, the role of the various players was much as before. Nothing particularly even marked these events as occurring in wartime and under Japanese occupation. In fact, a consistent feature of much intrabureaucratic communication and, more broadly, a common conceit of the Japanese proxy states established in north and central-eastern China after 1937 was the effort to maintain a sense of seamless state institutional continuity with their prewar predecessors. These collaborationist governments pursued the aura of legitimacy through the projection of normalcy and autonomy from the Japanese occupiers in most administrative matters. This bureaucratic perpetuation of institutional structures was a significant impetus to the wartime reconstruction of the prison system. In Beijing, where so many of the leaders and officials of the initial Wang Kemin government were former Beiyang regime bureaucrats (including major legal-judicial reform figures like Dong Kang), the modern prisons were led by officials with northern China prison service records dating to the 1910s and 1920s who sought to continue the penal reform traditions they associated with the early years of the Beijing No. 1 Prison.13 Although the transition was less smooth in the Lower Yangzi region as the Japanese tried out puppet governments under such unpromising figures as Fu Xiao’an and then Liang Hongzhi, the establishment of the Nanjing Nationalist government under the nationally renowned left-wing KMT leader Wang Jingwei on March 30, 1940— in theory, the sole national government of China—initially brought increasing

The Indispensable Regime bureaucratic stability and regularity. With the Wang government Ministry of Judicial Administration supervision over the modern prisons of much of central and eastern China, the archival files, particularly up to 1943, show regular record keeping and reporting and orderly inspections, with formulaic, generally positive concluding assessments much as before the war. The same sorts of problems, not just of corruption, but also with securing sufficient rations, supplies, and funding and dealing with the lack of prison workshop jobs and profits, and the dangers of crowding and recidivism were reported and still triggered reformist responses. There was significant prison construction and expansion of facilities in these years. The postwar survey of damage had entirely overlooked how the prison system had been maintained and enlarged during the war.14 Carrying on with programs of reformation was considered integral to upholding the system as a whole, and the Reformation Section (ganhuamen) of the ministry’s Prison Bureau oversaw what was supposed to be the standard approach to inmate instruction and guidance. The techniques remained largely unchanged, as did much of the common perspective on approaches and challenges, though new terminologies appeared. For instance, an inspection report on instruction at the Jiangsu No. 4 Prison in Nantong in November 1941 that rather typically called for brevity and clarity of instruction and increased use of individual guidance included the notation, “Special attention should be paid to the prisoners’ thinking in order to make the evil reform and never again enter the path of wrong-doing.” The moralistic tendency remained as strong as ever, though this had now been related to the term “thinking” (sixiang), which was closely associated with political attitudes.15 Yet these prison instruction programs were even less centrally controlled instruments of party political ideology than they had been before the war. Instructors at many prisons taught primarily jiaohua moralist and Buddhist lessons. In 1940–42 at the small Anhui No. 2 Prison in Wuhu (a Yangzi River town taken by the Japanese early in the war), instruction dwelt on Buddhist themes, required reciting the Buddha’s name (nianfo), and included a sprinkling of lessons in Confucian ethics and social conduct influenced by Shao Zhenji, morality-book-style evidentiary tales of the “retribution of ghosts and spirits,” and just the most minimal time devoted to the required celebrations of the cult of Sun Yat-sen. The situation was similar at Hangzhou’s Zhejiang No. 1 Prison in 1941, where the instructor reverted almost entirely to the prison’s popular Buddhist instruction tradition, fortifying it with ample doses of morality-book stories to educate only a select group of forty inmates. The only hint of the war beyond the walls was the regular visits, two to three times a month, by preachers of the Japan-China Buddhist Association.

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The Indispensable Regime The instructors at both prisons almost never mentioned the war.16 Wardens and instructors continued to determine much of what was taught and often, as had long been the case in the prisons, made simplifying adjustments, as a 1943 Jiangsu No. 3 Prison report phrased it, “in order to economize human effort and time.”17 Especially outside Nanjing and Shanghai, they could largely ignore the Wang government ideological teachings, seeking refuge in ethics and religion and so avoiding the emotionally charged and dangerous wartime politics of loyalty. Maintaining the system of instruction for reformation in the prisons of occupied China appeared to compel officials into an awkward abnegation of politics even to the extreme of not mentioning the ongoing war. But there was, finally, no ignoring the war. The exigencies of war meant that the long-standing problem of civilian prisons being forced to accommodate inmates sent to them by and still under the control of security agencies and military forces—a problem the prewar judicial-penal bureaucracy was struggling to diminish in 1937—exploded as not just the politically suspect but prisoners of war were dispatched to the prisons. The famed last holdout Nationalist troops of the 1937 Battle of Shanghai, which had been interned by special agreement with International Settlement authorities in the “solitary island” period, became in December 1941 an especially troublesome group of POWs for the Japanese to handle. Held first at the Baoshan Airport and then at a nearby former workhouse, they were, for the sake of security, transferred to the new POW section of the Jiangsu No. 1 Prison in Nanjing. There, however, they collectively caused so much trouble they had to be dispersed to a series of other prisons. With the Japanese rural pacification campaigns in the Lower Yangzi from the late spring through the summer of 1942, the majority of new admits to Nantong’s Jiangsu No. 4 Prison had been sent by the “friendly army.” In June alone, 73 new inmates at the Jiangsu No. 3 Branch Prison in Suzhou and 131 dispatched to the Jiangsu No. 5 Prison in Wuxi had been captured by the Japanese and Wang military forces. As the heat of the summer intensified through July and August, the prisons reported that the resulting crowding was leading to high illness and death rates.18 In Shanghai after 1941, wartime prison crowding, if partly related to the incarceration of POWs and military detainees, also reflected the inconclusive efforts of Wang government authorities and the Japanese to maintain social order in this largest, most complex commercial-industrial metropolis rife with crime, vice, and instability. By 1943, the 2nd Special District Prison packed mainly with short-term petty-theft convicts (including many Russians and other foreigners) operated, in essence, a revolving door, with large numbers of recidivists released and soon readmitted often under new names. A theft and robbery

The Indispensable Regime offender surnamed Yan, paroled from the prison, returned convicted of larceny and trading in stolen goods before his original sentence had elapsed. That same month of April 1943, Madame Lin (née Wang) sentenced to three months for theft returned to the prison she had left only a few months before after serving seven months for the same type of crime.19 The situation was even more dire across town at the enormous Shanghai Prison, the International Settlement’s impressively solid and “very modern” British-built Ward Road Jail of flush toilets and electric lights, popularly known in Chinese as Tilanqiao (HandBasket Bridge) after its location. In the first year after it was seized by the Japanese, though many of its serving South Asian (mainly Sikh) and Chinese guards and staff (including Yan Jingyue) were retained, this prison had nearly double the annual inmate deaths it had on average recorded in the previous years. Placed in theory under Chinese administration (directly under the Nanjing Ministry of Judicial Administration) for the first time in its history in August 1943, in concert with the Japanese abrogation of the treaty-port system and extraterritoriality, the prison was teeming with nearly eight thousand inmates when a prisoner uprising in the early spring of 1944 finally spurred plans to reduce numbers and increase security.20 A significant part of the response to the Tilanqiao prison crisis was the April 1944 Nanjing Ministry of Judicial Administration plan to establish the Dashengguan Prisoner Farm on 532,788 square meters of arable land in an area along the Yangzi River just eight kilometers to the southwest of Nanjing. The advanced plans and detailed maps showing roads and districts with names such as “reform faults,” “awaken to consciousness,” “self-examination,” “benefit the masses,” and “profit the nation” show it to be an institution of penal reformation descended from the urban prisons and following upon the series of proposals dating to the early years of KMT rule for the alleviation of urban prison crowding through the development of large rural labor-camp prisons.21 At the same time, it was entirely consistent with a wartime revitalization throughout many parts of China of the interest in rural reconstruction, agricultural reform, and communal self-sufficiency. Situated in an area used for academic agricultural experimental programs since the early 1920s, the Dashengguan Prisoner Farm shared much with the communal agricultural reform initiatives launched around Nanjing in this period, notably that of Hu Yimin. In 1943, Hu had purchased 115 mu to the west of Xuanwu Lake, between Caohou village and Bancang village for his agricultural reform cooperative farm community named Tilling Together Farm Village (binggeng nongzhuang). In some of his later accounts, he minimized the significance of the project, describing it as not being political or having any purpose beyond growing crops

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The Indispensable Regime for food. That was clearly not the case. As some of his poetry attests, the happiest time of his life was in this “farming family,” working for rural relief. The name of the farming community had great meaning, referencing a passage in the Mencius in praise of virtuous elites “tilling the land together with the people and eating of it together” and, further, referring to Sun Yat-sen’s idealistic notions of rural reform. Inscribed on a sign at the entrance was a couplet once presented to Hu and following the calligraphy of KMT elder Yu Youren, stating “In the mind accumulate the essence of peace / by hand accomplish the work of heaven and earth.” It was a phrase that both harkened back to early KMT social revolutionary idealism and illuminated the value of “peace” that the Wang client government had made its ideological hallmark. At root, Hu’s agrarian reform vision, not unlike Gandhi’s in India, combined the value of collective, cooperative labor of all and intelligent agrarian scientific innovation with the ethical-spiritual cultivation of minds for the creation of a self-sufficient, moral social community at once peaceful, sustainable, and just. It was a place established to be an exemplary contrast to the chaos, dissolution, and widespread inequality, suffering, and poverty of wartime China; and Hu was not alone in this movement. In the same area west of Xuanwu Lake, there were similar large farm communities committed to moral authenticity on the land.22 It is not clear if the experimental Wang government prison farm camp ever became fully operational. Certainly, the Tilanqiao prison had by April 1945 sharply reduced its inmate population to under 2,300. Nonetheless, amid the general deterioration of state institutions accompanying the descent of the Japanese Empire toward defeat, Warden Shen Guanquan continued to struggle with peculiar wartime challenges. When in December 1944 the new Wang government leader (and Shanghai mayor) Chen Gongbo requested prison laborers to assist the Imperial Japanese Navy in constructing defensive works, Warden Shen dispatched 550 prisoners to the project; in time he sent more to work on construction projects on Zhoushan Island and some of the small coastal islands. Daily he was faced with a prison population predominantly consisting of young men convicted of, above all, theft, and also of robbery and drug offenses, even as hundreds of political prisoners and POWs (including some Americans and British) were dispatched to the prison. Still, in April 1945, the militarized Peace Preservation units sent in 513 new prisoners and the Japanese military delivered 360. Keeping the large inmate population healthy and alive was nearly impossible as resources dwindled. More than 400 were reported ill in April 1945; 40 died, including 25 from tuberculosis, a disease that continued to take many inmate lives through the final months of the war.23

The Indispensable Regime Despite all of this, the Chinese administrators of this major prison long in the hands of the British officials of the International Settlement strove, under the most difficult of conditions, to make Tilanqiao the new model prison in the Chinese manner. This meant having a model program of reformation instruction. In fact, the prison had had no systematic program of rehabilitative education for adult prisoners under its British officers. Since late 1936, Yan Jingyue had led a program for juvenile education that, during the “solitary island” period (1937–41) and subsequent twenty months, to July 1943, when Yan served under the Japanese administration, became a reformatory (ganhuayuan) within the prison to re-educate and rehabilitate youth offenders. With the accession of Wang government control in August 1943, first under Warden Xing Yuantang, the reformatory within a separate ward carried out its “reformation education” (ganhua jiaoyu) with an impressively large staff of two senior instructors, two head teachers, and fourteen teachers for what was a dwindling number of juvenile inmates by early 1945. But from the start of the Chinese administration, this was linked to the establishment of an Education Office, a key new feature of this ostensibly showcase prison, which was charged with the instruction of all inmates. Deliberately introduced to demonstrate the enlightened Chinese approach to penal incarceration in a former colonial prison, the Education Office and its “reformation education” purpose were retained after the war.24 WANG GOVERNMENT POLITICAL PRISONS AND INDOCTRINATION PROJECTS

In June 1942 the war was finally mentioned officially, if obliquely, by someone in authority at the Anhui No. 2 Prison in Wuhu. Chief Inspector Li Wei from the Wuhu District Court had come to the prison to tell the inmates about a new scheme for “military offender” paroles and guarantor releases that were meant (though this is not how he presented it) to alleviate prison crowding. Informing the prisoners, essentially, of a quick way to get out of prison, Li expressed sympathy for their plight: “You are all citizens of the Republic of China. Who doesn’t love the nation? But to do senseless activities such as organizing guerrilla units and that type of thing is to want to suffer senselessly.” He told them to secure these early releases, return home, work diligently, and accept their place in the world. “In all things and important things,” he urged, “do not fail to live up to the nation and the officials’ favorable treatment and concern for your good intentions. That’s all.”25 It was a feeble case, especially to be making to former guerrillas he was about to release. In light of such tepid commitments and mixed emotions of officials like Chief Inspector Li, it is little wonder the

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The Indispensable Regime Wang government prisons generally avoided discussing their government’s ideology and position on the war. It might be possible to remain patriotic and passive, but the clarion call to patriotism could not inspire passivity. Such appeals to restraint, in any case, could seem farcical amid the mass violence and mind-numbing brutality of the war. The Japanese military and their collaborators, after all, initially and repeatedly imposed their power in their occupied territories through the terrors of mass killings, rape, physical brutality, property destruction, and the physical manipulations of populations through the controlled distribution of narcotics and rice. The accounts of Japanese massacres of civilians, terror bombings, and use of chemical and biological warfare agents are as well known as the records of the mass arrests and the horrors of miserable detentions, systematic torture, and assassination carried out by the Japanese Kenpeitai, the Chinese “76 Jessfield Road” collaborationist agents, and other military and security agencies of the occupation.26 Yet, at the same time, the Japanese, in cases, used their own versions of penal reformation. Two Yenching University professors held by Japanese authorities in Beijing’s Paoju Military Prison from late 1941 into 1942 recalled methods of nonviolent disciplinary surveillance and control and attempts to exhort confession and conversion that, contrary to the common horror stories, they grudgingly described as “civilized” and “modernized” Japanese penal methods. Beyond prisons, it has been well established that the Japanese sought to pacify the conquered populations through programs of civilizing suasion through moral-ideological education—kyoka, the Japanese pronunciation of jiaohua— as they had in other parts of their empire and with some resistant populations on the home islands. Indeed, their programs of “thought war” (Japanese: shiso sen, Chinese: sixiang zhan) extended from propaganda in print, radio, and posters to education, special training courses, and targeted attempts to reform the thinking of incarcerated opponents.27 Japanese programs to win support or at least voluntary compliance in occupied China were plagued, as with other similar efforts, by ineffective implementation, limited scope of operation, inconsistency, and lack of coherence and coordination among different authorities. Still, they pursued several quite thorough such initiatives in a few major cities and notably as part of rural pacification campaigns vigorously waged from mid-1941 through 1942 in the Lower Yangzi core of the Japanese occupation regime and Wang client state. As Pan Min has shown, accompanying military sweeps by the Imperial Japanese Army and Chinese Peace Preservation units were “thought reform” and ideological kyoka/jiaohua training programs aimed at creating, in rural areas, a cadre of loyal and organized Chinese officials and social leaders within key sectors of a

The Indispensable Regime restructured society, all of whom were to contribute to indoctrinating the general population. This involved establishing special training courses lasting two weeks to three months (depending on rank and status), organized separately in each major area for county/district/township heads, baojia (mutual-aid security group) leaders, and “thought training” programs for schoolteachers, select educated “youths,” and common folk. The social intervention (as opposed to training of low-level officials) was led by political work groups, who were to set up local-level social mobilization organizations, for instance, for self-defense, youth, women, and merchants. They were also to carry out mass training and propaganda with public lectures, posters, and films meant to “cleanse brains” (Japanese: senno, Chinese: xinao)—a term that, when later used by the CCP, came to be typically translated “brainwash.” In addition, they were to supervise the former bandits and guerrillas released back into rural communities in what were termed “self-renewal households” (zixinhu). The key themes for instruction were “Chinese-Japanese friendship,” antiCommunism, the Three Principles of the People, “Wang Jingwei-ism,” proper Confucian morality, and often the social and economic reform of rural life. Some of the training sessions were mobile affairs held in open-air spaces in rural communities. Yet the training courses for rural officials, like that of the Wujin County First District, and indeed most such trainings for “youths,” required, in a manner resembling the pre-war self-examination institutes, fulltime residence for an extended period in a dormitory or compound, and a regular, highly disciplined daily schedule of rising, eating, sleeping, chores, collective physical exercise, institutional rituals and ceremonies, classes, small group discussions, and individual self-cultivation and counseling.28 Challenges abounded as they had for similar prewar initiatives, but this campaign, as clearly as any, demonstrates how the methods of indoctrination and reformation were deemed by the Japanese and their Chinese allies to be an essential means not just to “pacify” populations in addition to subduing them with armed force, but to win-over and mobilize wartime communities through transforming the thinking of local officials, certain defined social leaders and groups, and eventually the population in general. The demands of “total war,” as Wang Jingwei stated in 1942, necessitated the mobilization within society of “all material power and the power of minds.”29 The persistent generation of mass violence was accompanied by an ever-expanding drive to win over and direct loyal participants within society to support the effort. The core of the Nanjing government, a group unusually spatially and socially isolated and vulnerable, erected its own model institution for the “thought reformation” (sixiang ganhua) of the domestic enemies of its state—the

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The Indispensable Regime National Reformatory (ganhuayuan) on Taiping Road in Nanjing. Other prisons and detention centers under Wang government control would be named reformatories; but this institution for “political offenders”—mainly Chongqing agents of the Zhongtong and Juntong security agencies and Communists—under the principal security agency was the most direct continuation of the Capital Self-Examination Institute. After an initial failed attempt to put the captured Zhongtong agent and Henan Self-Examination Institute director Huang Kai in charge, the director of the institution from 1941 to 1945 was none other than the former head of instruction and deputy director at the prewar Capital Self-Examination Institute (and former CCP double agent), Major-General Bao Junfu (alias Yang Dengying). It made sense. Bao not only had the ideal experience, he was, thanks to his long education in Japan, a fluent Japanese speaker and well-known “Japan hand” (ribentong). He was also among the highest-ranking officers in the Wang Bureau of Investigation and Statistics, the preeminent security agency (and counterpart to and mortal enemy of Dai Li’s Juntong) organized under the Political Department of the powerful Military Affairs Commission—to which Bao was also eventually appointed. This was the apex of Bao Junfu’s career as a high-level official. And his National Reformatory was an elite organ of the Wang government military-security structure. The officers serving under him, such as Yang Youda, Yu Zhenzhao, Lu Lu, and Wang Sanyi, were young men in their twenties with training and experience in policing, militarized public security units, and security agencies. Theirs was a wartime state security mission to convert and recruit redeemable political enemies of the state.30 The objects of their program, officially termed “those undergoing reformation,” were mainly men and some women variously identified in the terminologies of their captors. Among the 191 inmates admitted in 1941–43, many were described simply as “Blue Shirts” (a common term for fervent pro–Jiang Jieshi paramilitary activists, most of whom were Juntong agents) from Shanghai, Nanjing, Suzhou, and Wuhan. Some were identified as members of Juntong spy-chief Dai Li’s Loyal and Patriotic National Salvation Army guerrilla force, including several accused of terrorist train-station bombings, while there were others simply listed as “illegitimate [wei]” pro-Chongqing secret agents and terrorists, some of whom had blown up a telephone service bureau. There were also several denoted as working for the CC Clique, as well as sundry “illegitimate” party members, “mobile regiment” southern Jiangsu guerrillas, Anhui provincial troops, local officials, and even a Changshu education inspector and an Anhui county primary schoolteacher serving the Chongqing government. There were also several inmates described generally as members of anti-

The Indispensable Regime Japanese youth groups, those who had offended the “friendly nation” (Japan), and “anti-Japanese elements.” There were a few also generically listed as “political offender,” “reactionary element,” “careless in making friends,” and a group transferred in from a “summer research course” evidently gone awry during the rural pacification campaigns. Some inmates were charged with such criminal offenses in the guerrilla war zones as banditry, gun smuggling, disturbing social order, and misrepresentation for blackmail. Then there were a significant number of CCP guerrillas and secret agents mostly captured in Shanghai, Jiangsu, and Anhui, with a few also picked up in Zhejiang and Hubei. The records list some simply as Communist Party members or intelligence agents, though there was also a “Red bandit chief ” involved in espionage, and the Eighth Route Army Captain Wang Tao, who had been recruiting youth in Hankou in 1943 for an underground branch of the CCP’s Anti-Japanese Resistance University and eventual passage to the main campus in Yan’an. Most CCP inmates were New Fourth Army guerrillas, including a major captured in plain clothes, an officer in charge of sentry posts, a spy investigating Nanjing government army garrisons in southwestern Jiangsu, a supply clerk, a cook, a teacher for children and adult illiterates, and local militia members. Quite a few were listed as civilians supplying information or materials to the New Fourth Army.31 These sorts of people, not only those most obviously involved in combat and violent subterfuge, but also those support staff, noncombatants, and civilians suspected of having minor roles in the resistance or of contributing to the social chaos of the day, represented the range of figures the Japanese and Nanjing forces commonly hunted down, tortured, and killed. But this group of inmates was offered a different fate. Something about not just their previous roles but their attitudes and comportment had marked them as redeemable, capable of “a shift in thought,” as it was phrased, and so useful to the cause in the eyes of Bao Junfu and his security agency officers. The program of discipline, education, and counseling was accompanied with periodic evaluation of individual progress. Some were noted to be “still regarded as honest,” “knowledge immature, but words still sound,” “attitude changing better than before,” and to have a “sincere” attitude, “excellent” or “still good” achievements, and, best of all, “thoughts pure and honest.” A star pupil was the Nanjing Three Principles of the People Youth Corps Regiment leader Liu Le, who was judged to “understand the significance of the peace movement.” Instructors wrote for the female New Fourth Army intelligence officer Hu Bing, who entered the reformatory January 12, 1942, after being captured in the “Jiangsu Experimental District,” that they “still see sincerity,” though “the offender’s thoughts are unstable.” Some received such negative evaluations as

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The Indispensable Regime “knowledge immature, doesn’t understand politics,” “have not seen his sincerity,” “not speaking his mind,” “avoids speaking the truth,” “has not seen the truth,” and, most damningly, “thoughts not regarded as pure and honest.” In a few cases, the instructors jotted down “having long been sick, his spirit is extremely despondent,” and “has mental illness; what he says is irrational.” For the Shanghai “Blue Shirt” Liu Fuchun, who had arrived a month after Hu Bing, the instructor noted, “his talk repeatedly has the appearance of mental illness.” Still in this file produced in late 1943, most evaluations were positive, and the majority of these inmates were approved for guarantor releases—even when their overall evaluations were not particularly good.32 As with earlier nonpolitical institutions of reformation, this wartime political reformatory had to demonstrate its value by producing the “reformed”—who, at this point, were sent out hopefully mobilized to support or at least convinced not to resist the Wang government struggle for China. CHONGQING KMT PENAL REFORMATION IN PRISONS AND LABOR CAMPS

As the Battle of Shanghai erupted over a thousand kilometers to the southeast in August 1937, the instructor at the Shaanxi No. 3 Prison in the arid, loessdust swept northern Great Wall border town of Yulin spoke of “Japanese bombs and planes . . . killing our race” and the invasion of Beijing and Tianjin, calling on inmates to train their bodies to prepare to go to the front lines to resist the enemy. The message was meant as much for the contingent of political prisoners, notably the twenty-three “youths” (ages seventeen to thirty-four) mostly with ties to the CCP Shaan-Gan-Ning Base Area just to the south, as it was for the common convicts. The bellicose anti-Japanese nationalist fervor that had infused so many prisoners and disturbed so many prisons in the previous months could now be harnessed for the programs of penal reformation. Political prisoners like Hao Detang and the eleven others in his study group were now told of the significance of the July Lugou Bridge Incident outside Beijing, which was marked as the start of the full-scale war. They were taught not only that the Three Principles of the People were “save-the-nation-ism,” but also a popular ancient Buddhist story, “The Foolish Old Man Who Moved the Mountain,” reinterpreted, much as it would be several years later by Mao Zedong in Yan’an, to be a parable for the triumph of the human will in great endeavors.33 The next month the Ministry of Military Administration, working with the Ministry of Judicial Administration, prepared a “provisional wartime” policy for transferring prisoners into “military labor service”—just as the prewar

The Indispensable Regime prisoner demonstrators had requested. The military labor service Reformation Regiments (ganhua dui), through their service and “loyalty to the party-state,” were to “atone for their crimes and renew themselves.”34 As Jiang’s government retreated upriver to Wuhan, the Hubei No. 1 Prison (Wuchang) and Hubei No. 2 Prison (Hankou) instructors, at the end of 1937 and early months of 1938, primarily preached and taught songs of resistance to Japan between the interruptions of Japanese air raids. They lectured inmates that military service for men and nursing service for women were the duties of all citizens to save the nation in wartime. All, even convicts, had to be disciplined and follow orders to protect the nation. Instructors unabashedly exhorted convicts to reform and win release so they could go and “kill the enemy.” Even as jiaohua moralist, Buddhist, and civics lessons continued to be taught and instructors in certain prisons ignored themes of wartime patriotism and KMT doctrine, a notable development in many prisons under Jiang Jieshi’s wartime state, in stark contrast to those under the collaborationist governments, was their promotion of the call to patriotic military service and military support service in the national war of resistance as a vital inspirational motive for undergoing the process of reformation. The urgency of war mobilization had, nearly overnight, injected a new vigor into the rehabilitative system.35 With the loss of the major cities of the north, east, and south of China, and the middle-Yangzi region, as well as their withdrawal to the wartime capital in Chongqing, the KMT government retained control of only 34 of the 104 newstyle prisons and, in Sichuan, was based in a province with few reformed modern prisons. Yet, even under difficult wartime conditions, the Ministry of Judicial Administration in Chongqing soon pursued initiatives to expand, reform, and modernize the prison system particularly in Sichuan, but also in other areas of unoccupied China. A second wave of plans for prison construction and reform (particularly of hygiene and prisoner labor) came in 1943–44. Although such plans proved difficult to advance in these remote interior regions by a hard-pressed, often troubled Chongqing administration, there was a dissemination of the ideals of penal reformation in the towns and cities of the western regions and to some hinterland areas least touched by modern penal reform. The pragmatic wartime extension of county detention centers in Sichuan, notably, emphasized both providing inmates with regular work and reformative instruction. And when troubling information surfaced about the failures of wardens to pursue rehabilitation, the ministry ordered a reform and thorough implementation of basic education and moral instruction programs in all prisons in June 1942.36

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The Indispensable Regime Reports from the county jails in Sichuan in 1940 and from the six major prisons of Shaanxi in 1941 show a range of penal institutions attempting to conform to requirements for maintaining instruction and counseling and drawing upon the accretion of mostly “ministry approved” moral, religious (mainly “cause and effect retribution” and Buddhist stories and admonitions), social conduct, civics, KMT doctrine, and New Life Movement teachings that had become the common basis for prison moral education and citizenry training. Several of the Shaanxi prisons set periodic examinations for selected prisoners on party doctrine, civics, national language, and mathematics, which, described as part of “reformation education” (ganhua jiaoyu), were a means both to encourage inmate study and to evaluate prison education programs. As ever, certain prisons, the Shaanxi No. 1 in Xi’an and the Shaanxi No. 5 in Fengxiang, carried out more-thorough, energetic programs than others. The Shaanxi No. 5, for instance, innovated monthly “citizens meetings” (with accompanying ceremonies) for discussion of the war situation and international affairs along with party doctrine aimed at preparing inmates for “service to society and the nation.”37 Largely ignoring the Communist issue even in the period when the “united front” alliance between Chongqing and nearby Yan’an had disintegrated, the Shaanxi No. 1, No. 2, No. 3, and No. 5 Prisons most actively propagated the message of supporting the KMT war effort, the leadership of Jiang Jieshi, and training and reforming to earn release to go and “save the nation” by serving on the front lines of the national anti-Japanese war effort. Postwar government assessments indicate that the standing order for all prisons to retain a military instructor, provide all prisoners with military training, and promote special wartime “paroles,” involving the swearing of a formal oath affirming reform and loyalty to the nation, the securing of a guarantor who could post a bond and then transfer into the military, and the related, less complicated means of securing a guarantor release for military labor service, had never been universally and adequately implemented. Still, many prisons, like those in Shaanxi, directed much of their reformation program to these goals and carried out such early releases often just described as “transfer to serve compulsory military service.” It was an arrangement with clear institutional financial and management benefits well known to the ministry, as petty criminals were processed out of prison and onto the front lines as swiftly as possible. For instance, the considerable number of early releases into “military labor service” from the Sichuan prisons and jails in 1941–42 were, in part, intended to reduce serious problems of crowding and inadequate food ration supplies. An arrest for petty crime in unoccupied China often eventually meant a trip to the miseries of the front lines of the war.38 On the November 3, 1941, eve of his

The Indispensable Regime “transfer to compulsory military service,” Shaanxi No. 5 Prison robbery convict Yin Yuanzi was counseled by the instructor, who was also listed as the director of military training, about avoiding the moral failings that had led him to crime and the importance of strengthening himself to “kill the enemy at the front.”39 Similarly, many prisons promoted to their inmates wartime state economic mobilization slogans calling for production to save the nation, development of industry, economizing, and self-sufficiency, while simultaneously associating such themes with their own measures intent on preserving the prison’s institutional viability amid conditions of often-severe scarcity. Fundamental problems of housing, feeding, and maintaining the basic health of inmates in the prisons of cities and large towns dealing with chronic shortages, aerial bombing, and spiraling inflation could not be relieved solely by transferring some prisoners to military service. Many convicts were dispersed to rural jails and detention centers, but serious concerns arose about the lack of work opportunities, appalling hygiene, and nutrition standards and the resulting epidemics and high death rates in these places. And how could it be justified, some felt, in this wartime struggle for daily subsistence, that these often young male convicts could be left to lie about and be so unproductive? Hence, the Jiangxi No. 2 Prison launched a program to send prisoner work gangs into rural areas to do farm labor in the busy seasons for the families of soldiers off fighting on the front lines. This was, at once, a patriotic plan that supported the military and national food production and a means of moving inmates out of the crowded prison and into some productive and, ideally, healthy outdoor work. The Ministry of Judicial Administration circulated an order urging all provinces to follow suit.40 Similarly combined motives informed by wartime interests in economic self-sufficiency and low-cost collective agricultural production, not unlike those inspiring the Wang government’s Dashengguan prison farm plan and similar initiatives in CCP-controlled districts, led to the establishment of two prison labor camps for common convicts in 1941. In Sichuan, provincial court authorities drew upon the prewar ministry plans for the construction of “border area” prison labor camps developed in response to the extreme crowding of the drug-suppression crises to establish the Pingwu County Outdoor Labor Service Prison. The fourteenhundred-mu location in a “barren district,” as it was officially described, was in the rugged alpine forests, rushing mountain streams and rivers, and plunging valleys, sparsely populated mainly by ethnic Tibetans in the soaring north Sichuan Min mountains bordering Gansu. A project designated for convicts meeting the criteria of a series of policies for “transferring” them to undertake “land reclamation” and so also relieving “wartime stresses on convict labor and

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The Indispensable Regime production,” this first KMT state rural labor camp mainly put inmates to work not in agriculture, but on felling primeval forests for lumber. The same year, the Guizhou No. 1 Prison in Guiyang and the Provincial High Court, facing similar wartime pressures on limited resources and inmate crowding, built the Pingba County Outdoor Labor Prison on “barren land” in an area of river valley and hills with notable populations of Miao and Puyi (Bouyei) peoples about sixty kilometers southwest of Guiyang which, in effect, became the first largescale prison farm in China.41 These KMT prototypes of the rural and internal and external border area labor camps, which would proliferate after 1949, reprised various high ideals of correction through rural labor that had been discussed by earlier Chinese and foreign penal reformers. And as prisons, they both maintained programs for instruction for reformation. Nonetheless, there was finally not much effort to disguise the fact that these first experiments with the rustication of the prison were part of a search for low-cost ways not just to make prisoners “productive,” but above all to create simple, economically self-sufficient prison communities—as had never been feasible in the urban prisons. Indeed, the situation grew so desperate by March 1944 that the Ministry of Judicial Administration reported that their supplemental funds for prisoner rations would no longer be sufficient to meet the minimal requirements of the prison system. They ordered all prisons immediately to have all inmates begin taking part in growing vegetables for themselves anywhere in and around the prisons and to have groups of prisoners organized to go outside the prisons for “gathering and cutting,” that is, gleaning and foraging for food. Anything they grew or gathered, they could keep—as “a reward”—to eat themselves. This was an order that could only have been responding to one condition—starvation.42 CHONGQING KMT POLITICAL PRISONS AND INDOCTRINATION PROJECTS

The labor camp did not have an unpleasant appearance. This was the impression the renowned Chinese- and English-language essayist and public intellectual Lin Yutang formed when he visited the Northwestern Youth Labor Camp outside Xi’an near the Xiguan Airport at the end of 1943. After a threeyear absence from his native land, Lin had traveled from New York to report (mainly to the American public) on America’s wartime ally, the “free China” led by Jiang Jieshi in Chongqing, and its struggle not just against the Japanese invaders, but against a revived Communist insurgency. With its three hundred acres of drill grounds, vegetable fields, gardens with rockeries and flowers, clean

The Indispensable Regime classroom and dormitory buildings with courtyards, “social-reading rooms” named for Sun Yat-sen with displays of inmate writing and art, this place looked to Lin more like a military academy than a prison camp. The more than a thousand “students,” as the authorities called them, were undergoing “training” comprised of classes on the Three Principles of the People, military drill, and labor in the fields and gardens. Lin addressed an assembly of “students” in their cotton-padded gray uniforms and met with a select group that spoke to him, in the presence of their guards, of their hatred for the CCP. This was no labor camp for common convicts like those in Pingba and Pingwu, but rather, an institution of rehabilitative incarceration for political offenders like the selfexamination institutes and reformatories. It was established not just for any political opponent of Chongqing, but primarily for young CCP members and those influenced by the CCP headquarters farther north at Yan’an. Although the camp authorities stressed the severity of their punishments, Lin was also taken to see small group discussion sessions in which inmates had to speak up. And he witnessed “confession assemblies” held on the exercise field, at which inmates “volunteered” to confess, repent, and commit to renewing themselves before the instructors and their peers. There were, Lin was informed, “students” at all stages of “conversion.” And yet, Lin Yutang incisively identified the fundamental conundrum for all penal thought reform programs, writing, “The test of sincerity was necessarily difficult to make, since they would express only agreement with Kuomintang ideology, in order to be released.”43 What Lin had failed to grasp, however, was that this labor camp was, in fact, one of a series of special political prisons under the control of the military’s Juntong security agency and its secretive and much feared leader, Dai Li. This was hardly surprising, since the institutional identities of these political prisons were secret and obscured by front official affiliations and the use of official and secret or “internal” names that often gave the impression that these institutions belonged to the wartime proliferation of military training courses. For instance, this Xi’an labor camp had been established in 1940, officially, by the Special Training Unit of the Fourth Brigade of the Wartime Cadre Training Corp. The Juntong political prisons were also part of larger complexes or adjacent to areas with special training courses for secret agents, demolition experts, and military police.44 For many Chinese raised on post-1949 PRC books and films about such wartime and late 1940s civil-war-era political prisons, particularly the Xifeng and Shangrao “concentration camps” and Bai Mansion outside Chongqing run by Dai Li’s Juntong, it is these special political prisons that have shaped the dominant image of KMT prisons as sites of barbarous cruelty and misery. The

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The Indispensable Regime harrowing picture of political imprisonment in the Shangrao “concentration camp” in northeastern Jiangxi Province owed its origin, above all, to an account entitled “The Story of Truthfulness,” by the inmate and CCP writer Feng Xuefeng. It was the basis for his screenplay for the 1951 film Shangrao Concentration Camp and a key source for magazine articles, books, and cartoon renderings celebrating the struggles, sacrifices, and martyrdom of young Communists in Shangrao. The earliest wartime accounts by Feng and others, with their grim but far less dramatic versions than the later propaganda treatments, describe terrible conditions, hunger, illness, mistreatment, and violence, which were, undoubtedly, common to the experience of this and so many other prison labor camps during and after the war. Yet there was more to the Shangrao story than most viewers of the 1951 film knew. In fact, five different camps had been hastily constructed in the rural districts south of the town of Shangrao in order to detain mostly CCP and leftist youth captured in the wake of the January 1941 Southern Anhui Incident when a large KMT guerrilla force ambushed a major part of the CCP guerrilla New Fourth Army and so sparked openly acknowledged military conflict, again, between KMT and CCP forces amid the broader war with Japan. Officially under the Third War Zone Command and directed by a Juntong officer, these camps, each with their own purposes, underwent name and organizational changes even within just the year and a half of their existence before a Japanese military advance forced their abandonment and relocation to Fujian. None of them were formally named “concentration camps”—a pejorative appellation assigned them by critics to suggest a moral and institutional equivalence with Nazi German concentration camps. Rather, Feng Xuefeng, in April 1941, had entered an institution officially termed the Special Training Course, or texunban for short. He and his fellow inmates were called “students” (xueyuan), like those Lin Yutang had met outside Xi’an; they were also to undergo “training” (xunlian) to confess, reject the CCP, join the KMT or else face removal to hard labor or worse. Feng had been dispatched with the retreat to the Jianyang County, Fujian, site in June 1942 and received a medical release before the end of that year.45 Juntong, which, as Frederic Wakeman has shown, expanded enormously along with other security agencies during the war, engaged in secret campaigns of violence and terror, involving extralegal execution and detention, assassination, systematic torture, terroristic bombing, and intimidation. And the key detention sites under their control not just near Xi’an and Shangrao, but also the Yanglangba Prison camp at Xifeng just north of Guiyang in Guizhou Province, the Zhazidong Prison, Wanglongmen Prison, and Bai Mansion Detention Center all around Chongqing, and their detention centers in Xi’an,

The Indispensable Regime Lanzhou, and Zhou Village of Jiangshan, Zhejiang, all had deservedly fearsome reputations. Yet, at the same time, sections of some of these prisons and prison camps were designed for political reformation for inmates called “students” or “trainees” (xiuyangren), who were put through a scheduled “training” of instruction, military drill, and labor. Juntong’s own Justice Section under Shen Weihan internally discussed Xifeng as “the university,” Zhazidong as “the middle school,” and Wanglongmen as “the primary school.” This was not just some twisted, sardonic code. Like Bao Junfu’s Nanjing Reformatory, these Chongqing KMT security agency institutions also were committed to the reform or “turning” of potentially useful political prisoners (mainly CCP) through not just threats, psychological pressure, and inducements of salaries and positions, but also through indoctrinating instruction and guidance.46 For Chongqing security agencies, as for those of the Wang government, the wartime strategy supported expanded and intensified deployment of both violence and terror and penal reformation or thought reform methods against their enemies. The KMT’s system of political imprisonment had, in many respects, changed with the wartime experience. Most of the leading self-examination institutes had been emptied and lost in the early stages of the war. By January 1938, even the Chongqing Self-Examination Institute, one of the provincial outliers of the former system, had been vacated and transformed into a military hospital. That year only the Hunan Self-Examination Institute continued to report in to the Ministry of Judicial Administration.47 The new system was not only operated mainly outside the formal judicial bureaucracy by military security agencies and military forces, but was mostly organized with military designated “training brigades,” “training units,” and “training courses.” “Training” (xunlian) and “teaching and guiding” (xundao) became the key terms for the reformative process in a way that retained aspects of ganhua but shifted the focus, in theory, to instructors providing precise orders and ideological positions and demanding disciplined compliance in a militarized setting. This was not just a phenomenon of some sections of the well-known Juntong detention centers and prison camps, but rather one evident by 1941–43 in a proliferation of more than twenty political prison “training” brigades, labor camps, and their affiliated branch organizations mainly in KMT military-controlled towns and rural areas. Most of these concentrated not on “collaborators” (whose political commitment to their cause was generally regarded as tenuous), but on captured CCP and young leftists and left-liberal sympathizers who could, like many who had joined security agencies before them, be won over to the KMT cause or at least be inoculated against supporting the CCP.

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The Indispensable Regime Hubei Province, where the Japanese and collaborators controlled the tri-city urban center of Wuhan and other major towns mainly along the Yangzi River and where the KMT and CCP were active in peripheral areas, offers instructive examples. In January 1941, the Sixth War Zone Wartime Youth Instruction Brigade was established by the war-zone commander and Hubei government chairman, General Chen Cheng, at Fang Family Dyke Village near his headquarters in Enshi, amid the mountainous southwestern area of the province home to many Tujia and Miao communities near the Hunan and Sichuan borders. Placed a few months later under the direction of the Hubei Expeditionary Police Brigade commander and Juntong officer Ling Zhaokan, this was part of the post–Southern Anhui Incident drive to round up and incarcerate CCP guerrillas and their supporters and carry out a series of organizational, educational, and propaganda initiatives to counter CCP influence in the central Yangzi basin. Restructured and renamed the Wartime Youth Instruction Brigade directly under Chongqing’s Youth Instruction General Group in 1943, this prison camp put about eight hundred CCP and other young political prisoners through its “disciplinary instruction” (guanxun) program before it was closed in June 1946. The mixture of classes on KMT doctrine and criticizing the CCP, individual guidance (including by former Communists), lectures by regionally prominent KMT officials, collective singing, essay writing (some for publication), and “thought investigations” (sixiang kaocha) to assess progress all continued earlier practices that the CCP inmates recognized as “reformation education” (ganhua jiaoyu) meant to shake their faith in and betray the Communist Party. A similar political prison camp, the Henan-Hubei Branch Wartime Youth Instruction Brigade was opened in late 1942 by the Fifth War Zone Command in Guanghua County (near Laohekou) along the upper Han River near the Henan border. The more than five hundred “students” imprisoned there prior to its closure in October 1945 undertook two terms of labor and political study, with classes divided by educational level.48 There were, however, regional variations to this proliferation of rural political prison camps, and Juntong and military forces were not always leading the way. Communists arrested in Jiangxi from 1942 were most often sent to a political prison camp known as the Jiangxi Youth Residential Instruction Center established earlier by the provincial KMT leader Xiong Shihui and located near Ma Family Islet Village just south of the Taihe County seat location of the KMT’s wartime Jiangxi government. At the same time, the wartime reforms begun in mid-1940 by Jiang Jieshi’s eldest son, the then-thirty-year-old Jiang Jingguo (Chiang Ching-kuo), in the formerly CCP-controlled areas of southern Jiangxi, developed incarcerative reformation for common convicts as part of a

The Indispensable Regime highly politicized social reform agenda. Drawing upon his knowledge and personal experience of Soviet Russian methods and combining them with his sense of modern KMT Confucianism, the younger Jiang had renamed a key detention center a “convict education center,” reorganizing it with programs for instruction and labor to prepare inmates for parole. By the second half of 1942, it held 193 inmates. In 1943, Jiang renamed the prisons for common convicts, drug offenders, and prostitutes swept up in his rural social order campaigns “new people’s schools” (xinren xuexiao)—institutions that were to create “new people” through education, especially the political and ethical lessons known as “inspirational education.” These prisons were intended to represent an ideal humanitarian benevolence for the modern age, even allowing prisoners, for instance, to live with their families or spouses during their incarceration. Along with these penal institutions, Jiang established such similarly styled rehabilitative residential institutions as a “vagrants education center” and a workhouse-like “great compassion and universal love center” (guangci bo’ai yuan). As Jiang expressed it in 1943, his special prisons and workhouses were for “making bad people into good people, useless people into useful people, the dead into the living.” If these institutions and programs, he held, “could save the life of one person, then we ought to save the life of that one person; if we are able to educate one person, then we ought to educate that one person.”49 As with so many proponents of penal reformation and the broader social transformative regime of conversion, Jiang Jingguo presented his reforms as revolutionary innovations inhering in a moral vision supporting a comprehensive agenda of social welfare relief and social-political and cultural transformation. Thus, he not only established an education center for poor children, an orphanage, a nursery, homes for the elderly, a factory for the unemployed, and training brigades to work on land reclamation and infrastructure construction projects, but also public canteens, gruel kitchens, and schools. These reforms were to be led, on the Leninist model, by disciplined “cadres” thoroughly trained in part through processes of “self-examination” (fanxing) and “self-criticism.” These “comrades” would lead the transformation of the disorderly, corrupt old society and make a “new southern Jiangxi” and a “new China” through the formation of party-led local social organizations and all kinds of “training of the masses” for village baojia chiefs, workers, soldiers, merchants, and women. Yet even as Jiang Jingguo stressed experimental, innovative governance—which no one would have dared suggest to him resembled Japanese and Wang government or CCP methods—he presented his initiatives as thoroughly consistent with his father’s ideals of remaking China. The younger Jiang was certainly not the only notable KMT figure to have claimed the reformative ideal as his

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The Indispensable Regime own. When leading the Jiangsu government before the war, Chen Guofu had considered the “method of reformation” (ganhua fangfa) an essential part of his campaigns against “superstition,” radicalism, drugs, and prostitution, and for social order, public hygiene, and rural development.50 Jiang Jieshi’s own grand articulation of his like-minded theories appeared in his 1943 book China’s Destiny. With the aid of his ghostwriter, the scholar Tao Xisheng, Jiang had written about how the transformation of communities and revival of the Chinese nation-state, rendered weak, decadent, and disunited by foreign aggression and influence, would begin, as in The Great Learning– modeled late imperial jiaohua mode, with the moral cultivation of the individual and then the family.51 But even before the war, the means for implementing this had been associated within the KMT with modern educative institutions, including prisons, and methods of party propaganda dissemination, indoctrination, and military training mostly influenced by Soviet Russian examples. The wartime dispersal of common prisons and labor camps and an array of military and security-agency-run political prison camps with education and labor “training” programs throughout the interior and often rural regions of unoccupied China claimed by the KMT was part of the striking increase of wartime propaganda, social education, and reform campaigns and initiatives and, most successfully, “training” programs for various sectors of society deemed vital to leading the transformation and mobilization of society and forging loyalty to the party-state. Many thousands involved in military and security-service training experienced programs of instructional indoctrination and small group discussion of doctrinal texts that often required self-criticism as well. As Julia Strauss has demonstrated, these training (xunlian) programs were central to the wartime KMT state institutional development.52 Wartime attempts to pursue total mobilization of the populace, although always constrained by limited resources and technologies, continually drove projects for the indoctrination and reforming of the minds of the populace. By the later years of the war, the conflict for hearts and minds, for most Chinese authorities involved, evidently was little concerned with their compatriot allies of the Japanese invaders. The battle for hearts and minds was largely to be contested between Jiang’s KMT and Mao’s CCP party-states. WARTIME COMMUNIST PENAL THOUGHT REFORM

He had clearly written many versions of his self-examination diary (fanxing biji), a combination of self-criticism, personal history, and confession, before it reached its final form in February 1943. We do not know his name or that of any others in his account; all had been removed by the editors to protect identities

The Indispensable Regime in case the documents were captured by the enemy, as in fact they were. We only know that he was a twenty-four-year-old CCP cadre, deemed an intellectual by educational background, living and working in the hinterland North China plain rural villages and county towns scattered around the provincial borders of southern Hebei, northern Henan, and western Shandong—the CCP’s Ji-Lu-Yu Base Area. In the previous roughly six-month period of his selfexploratory writing as part of the CCP’s “Rectification Campaign,” this weakest and least coherent of the CCP’s wartime behind-the-lines guerrilla bases, as David Goodman and Dagfinn Gatu have shown, was in a miserable, chaotic state. By 1942, Japanese military “mopping up” forays had exacted costly casualties on CCP forces and villagers, further damaged a rural economy edging in places toward famine, and had significantly shrunk the areas the CCP attempted to govern. CCP officials had not helped matters with some of their unwelcome intrusions into rural society and their own internal political conflicts and purges. There had been a spate of desertions from the ranks; desperation seemed only to fuel brutality among party members and toward others.53 And yet, this CCP cadre, accused of political problems, had been given the opportunity to repent and reform. According to his narrative, he was born in a North China county town in 1918 to a relatively well-off family of an unranked late Qing first-degree holder who, living off more than twenty mu of land and the rent of several houses, was a notable “landlord” in CCP terms. Yet the death of his father when he was seven, and wrangling and lawsuits among relatives, over several years, left his immediate family bankrupt just as he began his high school in Beiping. There, in 1934, he became a “progressive youth,” influenced by students he met at Beijing University, and “accepted Communism.” Before the end of that year, he had been arrested for his political activities and was imprisoned for two years. He resisted interrogation, torture, and offers of money, and had come to learn, only through the experience of the collective life, communal struggles, and study with his fellow imprisoned Communists, to overcome his weaknesses. Like Chen Zhixi’s prisoner account, this CCP cadre told a life story that was a self-critical tale of ups and downs, a process of progress and frustration, on a quest to expose his own failings, change, and remake himself from within. He had come to recognize, as most were supposed to at this level of “rectification,” that his deeper, internal problem was “individualism” and “hero-ism.” Even after becoming a Communist, he realized that deep in his mind was still the “petty bourgeois privacy concept of the individualist consciousness.” Amid his CCP comrades in prison, he had begun to break down his class-originated consciousness, which sounded very much like an internal moral failing of the

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The Indispensable Regime sort that Chen Zhixi sought to expunge. In his words, he had overcome his “selfish and self-interested, excessively timid individualism”; but this, he finally realized after his release, was still not a “reform of the internal nature.” The resulting external faults manifested were many: He cared too much about “individual feelings”; he lacked total commitment, and could show off and seek the limelight. Having been sent, early in the war, to serve as an undercover agent working with Green Gang thugs and National Salvation Association activists, he now admitted questioning the party center’s policy of cooperating with these groups. And, he confessed, when on his own and lacking party guidance, he had acted contrary to party policy and had fined and beaten “Chinese traitors [hanjian].” He conceded, moreover, that when the Rectification Campaign had begun, he had secretly felt reluctant to take part. Only through deep selfreflection, committing to exposing his thoughts and reforming and to taking the correct attitude of earnestness, sincerity, and lack of concern for his personal achievements and reputation did he begin to make progress. From this, he could finally understand the great value and authority of Marxism-Leninism, Comrade Mao Zedong, the party, and the ideological and policy positions of the party that he recited at length. Ultimately, he had acknowledged the need for his own self-abnegation before and sacrifice for the party and its purposes, for whatever benefited the party would benefit all.54 This cadre was a model for what the CCP termed “thought reform” (sixiang gaizao), very much as Jia Liaotou in 1913 and Chen Zhixi in 1929 had been for penal reformation. His personal account had been included among a set of model Rectification Campaign self-criticism autobiographies that had been compiled in a booklet to be used as political study materials for other cadres. He was an example of the CCP’s belief in reforming wayward cadres—as was also their stated belief about political opponents, “enemies” in their terms, and common criminals. And yet in this base area in this period, terror and violent punishments were often directed at all of these categories of problematic elements. There were reports of unwarranted imprisonment, torture, and killings, including the executions, some by burial alive, of some 200 “traitors,” “enemy agents,” and “deserters” in the summer and early fall of 1941; in 1943, 580 convicts had been executed in the base area, two-thirds of whom had been judged “collaborators.” Much of the violence followed upon and was related to devastating Japanese military incursions.55 Trying to be good Leninists, CCP leaders had, since their earliest rural Soviet governments of the 1930s, believed both in party programs of reformative indoctrination of wayward comrades and offenders of various kinds and the instruments of terror and punitive violence. Only their versions, they held, were

The Indispensable Regime legitimate and just, and certainly nothing like what their opponents did. In this spirit, the early CCP leader Yun Daiying mocked the idea of prison reform in 1929 and called upon his fellow revolutionaries to “rise up and smash all prisons.”56 Yet already by mid-1932 in the Jiangxi Soviet Base Area, the CCP not only administered their own jails and detention centers with terminologies and methods stemming from earlier modern Chinese prison reform, they established labor reformatories (laodong ganhuayuan) for common convicts. Although overtly emulating the Soviet Union’s labor-reform system and, like it, often devolving into or operating alongside units that carried out little more than punitive hard labor, these reformatories were intended to realize the ideal of “reformationism” (ganhuazhuyi)—the same term used by the advocates of the modern prisons since the early 1920s. “Reformationism” through education with “the Communist spirit and labor discipline,” along with the death penalty, were supposed to be the core punishments in a system that was different from all others in rejecting cruel corporal punishment and humiliation. With this familiar statement of difference, as in provisions for these reformatories to produce products for government offices, and with caveats for dealing with “suppressing counterrevolutionaries,” the early CCP-led guerrilla governments were evidently not as exceptional as they claimed to be. They had fully accepted “reformationism” as a normative modern principle and system.57 As the CCP built up its core northwestern wartime base—the Shaan-GanNing Base Area centered on Yan’an—and other wartime guerrilla bases in the late 1930s to early 1940s, they began to develop the version of the system of penal reformation they had made their own, like so many governments before them. They set forth regulations for county jail management, parole, and guarantor release. Officially, 966 people had been incarcerated in the Shaan-Gan-Ning Base Area in 1938, and 302 of these were judged to have reformed and so were released before the end of the year. Base Area Chairman Lin Boqu in 1939 stated that punishment should conform with the principles of education and reform and not violence and revenge. In the guerrilla Jin-Cha-Ji (ShanxiChahar-Hebei) Base Area established at the beginning of 1938 in the northern Taihang Mountains, common convicts were also to undergo education and “productive labor,” which was simultaneously to offer work-skills training, instill industriousness, “improve their character,” and provide them the opportunity for a healthy, happy life. Even under these primitive wartime guerrilla conditions, the “profit” gained from convict labor in farming, lumberjacking, firewood collection, mining, construction, and handicrafts was designated, as in so many urban prisons before, to pay for prisoner rations and other costs of incarceration. Special provisions offered reduced sentences to prisoners sent to work

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The Indispensable Regime in coal mines. Frank Dikötter, indeed, sees the origin of the post-1949 “reformthrough-labor” camp system in the local, mobile penal labor camps with (ostensible) education aims pragmatically set up by the CCP amid the fluid multisided rural guerrilla warfare in Shandong during the last four years of the war. Like the KMT in the Sichuan and Shaanxi prisons, the CCP also linked penal reform with military mobilization, already sufficiently “re-educating” through labor and indoctrination, for instance, some two thousand common convicts by June 1939 in Jin-Cha-Ji who were “permitted to volunteer” to join the military— the CCP’s Eighth Route Army.58 At the same time, the CCP authorities, like the other governments, also relied heavily on the sanction of execution, both in its overt procedural (if not strictly “legal”) and extraprocedural covert forms. Wartime special political tribunals and political-struggle-campaign mass trials, as Patricia Griffin has shown, often led to summary executions.59 And incarceration under CCP authorities could also be extralegal, extraprocedural, and arbitrary and result in experiences of abuse and suffering under corruption and mismanagement. There had been, according to a March 1944 Judicial Work Report, serious problems in CCP-administered county jails in 1943.60 Yet, as with all penal reformers preceding them since the end of the Qing Empire, CCP leaders and judicial officials presented their rehabilitative penal system as uniquely progressive and humanitarian. When speaking of prisons, a 1942 Jin-Cha-Ji report observed, “People immediately think of those ominous hells on earth full of exploitation and swindling; however the prisons under the Border Area Resist Japan Democratic Government are genuinely schools that make people become good through reformation education [ganhua jiaoyu].”61 At first, the CCP had continued to use the term “reformatory” (ganhuayuan), along with county jails and units called “labor production centers” (laodong shengchansuo), for certain key prisons, though the infamy, from their perspective, of the Wang government political prison reformatories rendered the term problematic. In 1940, they came up with a new, untainted sounding term for their preeminent institutions of rehabilitative incarceration: “selfrenewal work-skills education centers” (zixin xueyisuo). The main reformatory in Jin-Cha-Ji simply changed its name to Self-Renewal Work-Skills Education Center in the spring of 1941. But this institution was, according to official reports, something different. It was “a school for offenders” that would strengthen their “national consciousness,” increase their “level of awareness,” cultivate their “skills in production” and “labor habits” to make them “perfect citizens,” who would take part in “construction and serve in the war of resistance.” The “students” (xueyuan), taught in classes differentiated by age and education level

The Indispensable Regime in three-month terms, were to undergo an educational thought reform program emphasizing literacy, hygiene, and political instruction and otherwise engage in productive labor. There were assemblies and small group discussions. Examinations were set at the end of each term, work evaluated, and merit points assessed, though the reform program was also to be individualized—“suited to the needs of each student”—and so involve individual assessments of their “study” and “thought.” Through this process, each “student” was guided along a progressive system of rewards, reduced sentences on toward early release. The Jin-Cha-Ji authorities admitted that with only two reading classes a week literacy training had not been that successful and that “problems” and “mistakes” in the first six months of running their self-renewal work-skills education center had led to those in charge being punished and a thorough reform of the institution in January 1942. Reproducing the same reform logic used by all prison reformers, the CCP officials reported how reforms of their penal institutions improved organization, hygiene, and ration supplies so that, even with the standard two meals a day (as in most Chinese prisons), there were “few pale and thin convicts”—a fact that supposedly had favorably impressed the local gentry. The self-renewal work-skills education center was the model institution—“a microcosm of reformation education”—that could make inmates, even those thoroughly trained by “the enemy,” “deeply moved” and “confess,” and gradually earn the marks in the grading system necessary for release. Although some tiny number of the reformed, the Jin-Cha-Ji officials observed, may have had “ulterior motives,” most were thought to be sincere and many considered trusted converts. Of two hundred released in 1942, an impressive ninety-four were given positions in the government or military. The CCP intended to make good use of converts. And if they could not serve the revolutionary state in these ways, the “students” could, as in a Yan’an area self-renewal work-skills education center, learn to mine coal, plant crops, pick tea, and weave cloth—all of which brought financial gain to the base-area government.62 In effect, much of the wartime CCP regime of penal rehabilitation was, even in its efforts to signal its uniqueness in institutional practice and nomenclature, an obvious outgrowth of the broader modern Chinese penal reform. Indeed, its institutions in numerous aspects startlingly resembled many earlier and contemporaneous penal institutions of other governments. In the wartime years when the CCP built itself up from a weak guerrilla insurgency into a major competitor state controlling vast swathes of territory with a massive population, the self-professed distinctive Chinese Communist penal system retained much of the earlier formed ganhua mechanism of instructed and individually guided internal emotional awakening combined with basic literacy training

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The Indispensable Regime and labor. Much of their system was still infused with moralism and was combined with political indoctrination in a matter resembling what the KMT had done in their key political prisons. Mao Zedong, as Chen Yung-fa has noted, made a point during the 1942 Rectification Campaign that CCP penal reformative institutions ought to avoid any seeming emulation of KMT political prisons—ostensibly meaning they should avoid abuses and torture. What was, no doubt clear to some, was the equally awkward similarity in the ideals and forms of their rehabilitative regimes.63 There were nonetheless some notable practices particular to the CCP’s wartime penal reformation system. Although, as we have noted, there are examples of some similar precedents, the wartime CCP penal institutions made periodic, almost always evening inmate “study discussion meetings” (xuexi taolun hui) and “life self-criticism meetings” (shenghuo jiantao hui)—modeled on Leninist party organizational methods—common institutional practices central to their rehabilitation programs. The CCP cadres in charge were to engage inmates in “the collective life,” eating and living alongside of them in a shared experience of labor, political education, and reform, which gave the appearance of a kind of equality and shared pursuit of the political truth. The use of newspapers as study materials suggested an objective source of information available and open to the interpretation of all, when of course such party newspapers were in fact propaganda publications with a single party line. These methods, moreover, demanded inmate participation, which, if similar in some respects to the coercive voluntarism of the KMT self-examination institutes, took further the structured empowering of prisoners to take an active role in managing their own affairs and reform activities. Inmate “commissioners” were put in charge of managing major daily routines, like meals; some CCP penal institutions in Hebei reported the establishment of inmate “repentance committees,” which assisted the reform process. The self-criticism sessions, as a matter of course, required “mutual criticism” among the inmates. But this was not really an open forum of status equals. As the Jin-Cha-Ji officials reported, “Those longer in prison lead those more newly arrived.” And these longtimers were led by the CCP cadres. This was not just a matter of using some already indoctrinated inmates to instruct the others (as had been experimented with by other regimes), but a version of the consistent CCP political organizational practice of reaching down, organizing, and marshaling agents from within a mass-level social unit to support the CCP program from below. In prison terms, this meant that the CCP did not just seek to wipe out the age-old cage-head problem in the prisons like the KMT; rather they created their own cage-heads who enforced their

The Indispensable Regime power system with them. This, according to the Jin-Cha-Ji officials, was proven successful, as it ensured good behavior, in part, because the inmate agents of the CCP reported on peers who, for instance, engaged in such common inmate commerce as smuggling goods into and within the walls. In effect, there could be no open nanyou prisoner community under the CCP organization when inmate society was thus manipulated from within. Inmate populations disciplined in this manner, CCP reports stated, had not escaped even under military attack and had even returned to prisons after being dispersed amid a military retreat. Some converts of this system, even “Chinese traitors,” had gone home to convince their family and friends to join the CCP or became underground CCP agents in KMT- or Japanese-controlled areas.64 These methods that promised so much were in wartime not just restricted to penal institutions. EXPANDING THOUGHT REFORM: THE RECTIFICATION AND SALVATION CAMPAIGNS, 1942–1944

He Fang remembered a Yan’an that was unlike any of its changing portrayals after 1949. He had arrived in the late fall of 1938, a sixteen-year-old middleschool student coming to study at the Anti-Japanese Resistance University. The dry cold spartan conditions and coarse meager food did not trouble this second son of a Shaanxi farming family nearly as much as it did many of his classmates from eastern and southern cities and towns. In his native Gao Family Village just outside the Lintong County seat to the northeast of Xi’an, he had worked in fields of cotton and corn since he was four or five and worn his mother’s homespun cloth. His illiterate parents had worked hard and saved enough until they could buy land and send him with his brother to an old-style sishu school in a neighboring village and then, due to a scourge of banditry by gangs of men known to locals as the Sword Visitors, to the safety of a new-style primary school within the walls of Lintong. Yet he had always lived simply and had known the suffering of hunger during a drought and famine in 1929. In Lintong, he had been close enough to the Huaqing Springs in December 1936 to hear the eruption of gunfire in the night that announced the onset of the Xi’an Incident. But his political enthusiasm had only blossomed the following year in the form of wartime “national salvation” patriotism when he made it, more than a decade after his fellow rural provincial Chen Zhixi, into middle school. His politicization had been guided and fanned by underground CCP teachers and administrators in the two middle schools he briefly attended in Xi’an; and this had led to his recruitment and move north to the CCP’s wartime capital. The first few years had their challenges, and Yan’an was not, for him, a perfect Communist

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The Indispensable Regime paradise. The differences between the “leaders” and the rest were spatially defined and clear. The cup of tea and pack of cigarettes on the meeting-hall table for the major leaders presiding over a big meeting—emblems to outside visitors of the CCP leadership’s ascetic, common style—were to He and his young comrades signs of luxuries beyond their reach. They carefully leaned forward just to catch a whiff of the cigarette smoke and surreptitiously maneuvered their feet, like prison inmates, to draw to themselves discarded cigarette butts, which, when combined together, could later provide the brief, rare pleasure of a shared smoke. Still, He Fang loved Yan’an because, as he recalled, it was “brimming everywhere with a free, lively, vivid, joyful atmosphere”—an enthralling vitality.65 But this all began to change in 1942. The Rectification Campaign that began in late winter to early spring 1942 was a more-intensive and pervasive form of cadre training than any previous such exercise, though there was no inkling of how widely it would spread. He Fang recalled that he and his lower-level cadre comrades had no awareness of its relation to power struggles within the CCP leadership. For them, rectification was all about “reforming thought” (gaizao sixiang). They studied, took notes on, discussed in groups, and took examinations on a set of key party doctrine texts, including those written by Mao Zedong, the security chief Kang Sheng, as well as Liu Shaoqi’s guide to the proper mentality and conduct of a good party member—On the Cultivation of a Communist. There was no diminishing of the Soviet Russian influence, as key texts included a short history of the Soviet Communist Party and writings of Stalin.66 The immediate purpose was to forge discipline, unity of thought and purpose, and to ensure loyalty amid serious wartime stresses. Huge numbers of mainly young people had gravitated toward the beacon of unsullied national resistance in Yan’an. CCP ranks and zones swelled with freethinking young intellectuals who had come from Japanese-occupied cities and KMT areas in a period when the CCP was being increasingly pressed by Japanese military thrusts and KMT embargo blockades and military confrontation. To deal with this, the Rectification Campaign, as Mark Selden has pointed out, expanded the use of thought reform on a large scale for all party members and members of other institutions and social organizations in their territories.67 Young intellectuals were not to be treated with lenience but were to be tempered and forged into cadres. The period of study, He Fang recalled, had gone on so long that he and his friends felt they were monotonously going over the same texts “a bit like a monk reciting sutras.” They quietly began reading their own books and doing their own things. This stage was abruptly broken for a brief moment when there was a call for voicing complaints and criticism of leaders that was quickly followed,

The Indispensable Regime in early April, by a shift to a focus on self-criticism, in which all party members had to write self-reflection diaries, like that of the young CCP member from the Ji-Lu-Yu Base Area, relating a personal life history and account of one’s “work” and “thoughts” that exposed personal faults and demonstrated reform and an ability to state the correct party principles. “Reflection is long-term, thought reform is long-term,” stated one of the model circulated self-reflection diaries; repeated, persistent drafts striving to reach the standard that would be approved by the study group and its leaders were essential. But the final draft had to tell a similar story about personal failure, internal transformation, self-abnegation to party organization and purpose, the authority of Marxism-Leninism, the great Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and Comrade Mao. There was much that resembled preceding and contemporaneous regimes of reformation. Indeed, “the appeal to education,” as Gao Hua has pointed out, had “an affinity that was easily accepted by people.” Still, if much like the coercive voluntarism the KMT exercised in their prewar self-examination institutes, CCP thought reform imposed even stricter discipline over the form and content of the script and demanded the lengthy recitation of CCP policies. And, far more than the KMT, the CCP revealed their Leninist colors in the organizational disciplinary activity of group self-criticism and “mutual criticism” sessions. Yet even the Soviet Russians, as Martin Whyte long ago pointed out, had never extended such methods for use beyond party organization and discipline.68 Sessions of self-criticism and mutual criticism expanded, were sustained and intensified in the summer, following the campaign against the writer Wang Shiwei. It seemed to He Fang that, at this point, they did nothing other than these campaign sessions. The tone had become severe and suspicious, and by the early fall of 1942 criticisms began to shift toward the growing concern with uncovering enemy spies in their midst.69 The period of spy hunting mania in the wartime CCP base areas has been associated with Kang Sheng and the Salvation Movement (qiangjiu yundong), following on Kang’s March 1943 speech “Save Those Who Have Lost Their Way.” For all its resonances with Christian missionary themes, the speech owed most to Kang Sheng’s training with the Soviet NKVD in the 1930s USSR amid the Stalinist purges. Yet the counterespionage aspect of rectification, which, as He Fang notes, began before 1943, was not all a consequence of paranoia. The Japanese and KMT security agencies were avidly trying to infiltrate and undermine the CCP, and amid this multisided total war there were plenty of people in wartime China hedging their bets by maintaining ties to two or more sides at once. From the CCP Traitor Elimination Bureau and Social Bureau’s mass arrests of party members and then military officers starting April 1, 1943, the Salvation Movement, led by

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The Indispensable Regime Kang Sheng, Li Kenong, and Peng Zhen (in the Party School) and backed by Mao and Liu Shaoqi, as both Gao Hua and Chen Yung-fa have shown, escalated into months of terror. There were mass accusations of disloyalty and spying on the basis of little to no evidence; arbitrary arrests and imprisonments; forced confessions; outright tortures of whipping and beatings; the “disguised tortures” of placing in heavy cuffs and irons; deprivation of food, water, toilet usage, and sleep; forced standing for long hours in cold or heat; and subjection to the terror of simulated executions. Many were in fact executed, though substantiating any final figures will have to await the opening of the CCP archives. Yet most of the great numbers arrested or undergoing group “struggles” were pressed to prove their loyalty by confessing to some egregious treason against the party, implicating others, repenting and so coming to be “saved” by the “leniency” of the party. The emblematic language of the movement was that of “reform” (gaizao), “persuading to undergo reformation” (ganhua quandao), and “reform and self-renewal” (gaiguo zixin). And, the act of self-criticism and writing autobiographical self-reflections were integral to the process. Yet many of the techniques ordered by Kang Sheng, especially for use in the political detention centers where, as in KMT areas, inmates were often publicly described as undergoing “training,” came from Soviet security agency interrogation practices. These were the dehumanizing bullying tactics mixing threats (with or without physical torture), lies and innuendo, making much of minor contradictions in different accounts, unrelenting continuous interrogation by multiple rotating interrogators—the “wheel battle” (chelunzhan) tactic—pressuring and ganging up by groups surrounding a target, demanding a confession, spitting and shouting abuse in their faces. He Fang had participated in such “helping,” as it was put, before he himself became a target subjected to hours of rotating interrogations and struggle sessions until he was utterly confused, drained, and finally uttered: “I confess.” Then for days he agonized over the details demanded of him. He would have to confess to working for a particular enemy group and reveal his “contact.” He, like most of his comrades, knew little about the different KMT groups—Juntong, Zhongtong, CC Clique, Blue Shirts—he was accused of being part of, and so he just tried to pick one that sounded the least bad. Cadres of rural origin, he recalled, were the most confused. One who had confessed to being an agent of the CC Clique later confided that he did not even know that “CC” were foreign letters. He Fang finally gave up a “contact” by picking the name of someone that was furthest from his circle of friends and comrades—a soldier, as it turned out, he had had a brief interaction with in another district. Later he felt much guilt.70 With the intensification of the campaign in the summer of 1943 and as it dragged out in some areas into 1944, the pathological paranoia transformed into

The Indispensable Regime organized daily collective activity resulted in ludicrously high numbers of selfconfessed spies. Whole classes of students, entire faculties of teachers, units in the party, military and social organizations had pronounced themselves enemy agents. Mass assemblies, as Peter Seybolt has written, shouted out in unison, “The Chinese Communist Party is our mother! We raise our hands and pledge repentance and renewal!”71 The methods Kang Sheng and his allies honed following Soviet secret police tactics were, in many respects, unlike previous techniques of reformation. They were not a gradual process of internal conversion through which an individual emotionally and then rationally came to change his outlook. Rather they set out, through their extreme interrogation tactics and organized bullying, to crush the individual with excruciating physical and psychological distress that would leave the person in a state of total abjection and fear from which the only release, other than death, could come through breaking before the accusations and making a false confession. This was a demand not just to accept and mouth stark simplifications and the party line, but to commit in word and daily practice to irrationality for the sake of demonstrating unquestioning loyalty. This extreme disciplinary approach came under CCP leadership criticism by the fall of 1943, and prohibitions were announced against torture, the “disguised tortures,” and the pressuring interrogation methods.72 Nonetheless, out of the wartime crucible, the CCP concepts and methods of thought reform became intertwined with these tactics of the Salvation Movement, so that in subsequent years and into the 1950s the mode of disciplinary interrogation for “confession” and “renewal” and the mode of guiding internal conversion both were continually deployed separately and together. The extreme demands of multisided total war for domination of China that required state-directed organization of mass violence on an unprecedented scale had given cause, first, to the dissemination of the institutional system of incarcerative rehabilitation widely throughout the land and produced its rusticated version in the rural labor camp. Through disaggregation under pressure and a geographical and institutional thinning, doing more with less, the mechanisms spilled and spread far beyond their urban origins. And simultaneously, war led the competing militarized states to regard the mechanisms of reformation, whether described as “training,” “re-education,” or “thought reform,” as indispensable means both to converting some of their enemies and for mobilizing social units and the minds of populations behind them. The regime of conversion was not, as often proclaimed, an alternative to mass violence. Rather, as a means to mass mobilization and a vital emblem of the humanitarian purposes of authority that justified both violence against and seemingly benevolent educative responses to looming existential threats, it assisted in enabling mass violence. And so it in turn grew in

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The Indispensable Regime relation to the expanding wartime state capacities. Yan’an may have seemed aberrant in the extremes of the Salvation Movement, but its irrationalities were only an intensification of the peculiar irrationalities demanded by all wartime states. As its survival depended more than all others on complete, thorough mass mobilization, the CCP guerrilla state was only the most extreme wartime Chinese state.73 In the moment, there was little time to reflect on this. He Fang, like so many of his surviving comrades, learned the necessity of complete loyalty and spent much of 1944 demonstrating it in collective rural labor and so supporting the war and rural revolution.74

7

REVOLUTIONARY THOUGHT REFORM: THE COMMUNIST VERSION, 1946–1956

Not long after the end of the war, Hu Yimin was back in prison—a prisoner for the fourth time. This time it was at Nanjing’s Tiger Bridge Prison, the former Jiangsu No. 1, renamed the Capital Prison, where he had briefly been warden nineteen years before. He had been brought before the special sessions of the Capital High Court led by the legal-penology scholar Chief Justice Zhao Chen, and was sentenced to ten years for collaborating with the enemy. This misfortune, he felt, as he had with his previous jailings, had come of malicious accusations. It was not about justice; it was political and personal. Zhao Chen had been a long-standing foe, especially after Hu had once accused him of corruption. And Jiang Jieshi would only see Hu’s decision not to follow him to Chongqing as disloyalty. There was, moreover, much that was difficult for Hu to explain, especially since his life in wartime Nanjing was not as simple as his agrarian reform project suggested. He owned other properties, including a textile factory in Jinhua, not far from his native village in Zhejiang, and, he argued, the complications of wartime transactions and remittances of funds, involving exchanges between copper, silver, and various coinage and paper currency, had resulted in deals that made it appear he had taken payments from “the enemy.” In fact, whether Hu ever actively worked for the Japanese or the Wang government is unclear. He always denied the accusations. Yet Hu’s prison poetry collection from the time reveals the camaraderie he had with many of the high-ranking collaborator nanyou (friends in adversity) with whom he served time in prison in the late 1940s and his admiration for the Wang government leaders. He was closest to Jiang Kanghu, the precocious Qing scholar-official turned early socialist, émigré professor in North America

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Revolutionary Thought Reform and finally minister of the Wang government’s Examination Yuan, who from the winter of 1947 lived in the cell opposite. Hu wrote poems for and transcribed poems by his fellow inmate, the senior Wang government leader Zhou Fohai, who died of illness in the prison in February 1948. Though he took no note of the former director of the Wang National Reformatory, Bao Junfu, who was somewhere in the prison, Hu requested a preface for his unpublished poetry collection from his ward-mate Zhou Zuoren, the celebrated writer and brother of Lu Xun and Beijing University professor and senior administrator under the occupation. He praised Su Qing, the famed Shanghai female writer accused of collaboration and extolled the already dead and soon-to-be-executed top collaborationist leaders Wang Jingwei, Wang Kemin, Chen Gongbo, and Ding Mocun. With a sad tone of nostalgia and futility, Hu wrote a cry of injustice in the dark in the name of history’s losers and the failed revolution and nation they had, he believed, devoted their lives to realize, finally, through the ultimate moral sacrifice of their wartime compromises. It was a dark time of political injustice, immorality, and chaos, he held: “Those who commit crimes of theft and enticement ought to be punished, and yet those who usurp a country, on the contrary, are called princes. . . . Why is it that violence is admired,” he wrote, “even as peace is treasured?” Something was terribly wrong with China, and the teeming postwar prisons seemed to prove the point. “There are no guarantees for human rights,” one poem read, “there is only arbitrarily sending people to prison.”1 The prisons surely did reflect the chaos and instability that followed the great war, which had left so much destruction, suffering, and exhaustion; so little to celebrate, so much unresolved. Tens of millions had lost their lives, vast populations had been displaced, transportation networks and many cities and towns lay in ruins, and rural areas were left to the chaos of banditry and ongoing civil conflict. Even as the matter of dealing with “collaborators” presented a painful complication to hopes for postwar unity, the fighting between CCP and KMT forces, which had smoldered on in the months after the war, burst into a conflagration in the spring of 1946.2 The highest ranking “Chinese traitors” were held, along with Hu Yimin, at Nanjing’s Tiger Bridge Prison and Suzhou’s Lion’s Mouth Prison, with a notable group, including its former warden Shen Guanquan, and a number of high profile Japanese “war criminals,” in Shanghai’s Tilanqiao prison. However, the more-common “collaborator” inmates were mid-ranking officials of the former regime and commercially successful “economic collaborators.” The intensity of prosecutions varied by region. Hebei, followed by Guangdong and Zhejiang accounted for the greatest number of the 5,768 “traitors” convicted in 1946. In the former Wang capital of

Revolutionary Thought Reform Nanjing, there were more imprisoned “collaborators” (301) that year than there were in the rest of Jiangsu Province (289).3 These only constituted a small fraction of the exploding postwar prison population that officially, by the end of 1946, had already reached 161,675—more than tripling the official prewar record in 1936 of 49,303. The typical convict was still a young man in his twenties and thirties convicted of theft or robbery, though, reflecting the commonplace violence of the era, injury-assault had statistically become the second most common standard criminal offense for convicts. Significant numbers of prisoners had also been convicted on special antibanditry ordinances (8,139 in 1946) and, especially, provisional drug-suppression regulations (16,565 in 1946). Of those drug offender inmates, 65 percent were in prisons in Sichuan, Hebei, Guangdong, Jiangsu, and the municipalities of Shanghai and Nanjing. By 1948, Shanghai’s Tilanqiao prison was again seriously overcrowded with mainly theft and drug offenders. Its predicament was not unique, as the national prison system population reached 220,000 inmates that year, more due to the staggering 58,398 admitted in the category of “Special Offenses” than to the also increasing numbers of common convicts. The result was crowded prisons and county detention centers alike struggling with the problems of inmate drug use, gambling, cage-head gangs, escapes, and uprisings. At the same time, there was a proliferation of inmate petitions and hunger strikes in support of the anti-KMT government movements for peace and supporting war-zone refugees led by CCP and leftist student-activist political prisoners. Political prisoner populations expanded rapidly in accord with events in particular areas. For instance, in Taiwan, brought under KMT rule after fifty years as a Japanese colony, the Taibei Prison in 1948, in the wake of the 1947 February 28 Incident, was in part seriously overcrowded with inmates convicted of “rebellion.”4 Relentlessly relying on incarceration as a principal means for dealing with the enormous postwar social and political problems, state authorities pushed mass incarceration to its furthest extent yet, threatening again to overwhelm the prisons. Inside and outside prisons walls, the cascading problems of the late 1940s felt overwhelming to many, who looked for some alternative source of inspiration or meaning. Religious preachers, notably Buddhists, continued to find converts in prison. The reformist Buddhist monk Taixu preached at the Jiangsu No. 1 Prison when Hu Yimin was an inmate. Long a skeptic of religion, Hu was initially taken aback by the common din of inmates chanting the Buddha’s name. Although he eventually became interested in a kind of Buddhist outlook and internal cultivation after receiving letters of guidance from the lay devotee Xia Lianju, Hu considered the Buddhist and Christian religious enthusiasms of most of his

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Revolutionary Thought Reform fellow inmates to be little more than escapism.5 What China needed, he felt, was active engagement by upright leaders capable of implementing thorough governmental reforms. Even in his current predicament, former warden Hu devoted much of his time in prison to thinking, writing, and talking (mainly with Jiang Kanghu) about the problems of social disorder, crime, and the necessity of penal reform. The prison system of the day, he held, was corrupt and mismanaged, so food rations were minimal and terribly coarse, hygiene and medical care were lacking, and prisoners were not provided enough work and exercise. “Education and reformation [ganhua],” he concluded, “exist in name only.” The resulting cost of this failure to the nation was significant. “We see the evidence today,” Hu wrote, “in the offenders who return to prison almost immediately after their release.” What was needed was thorough legal and penal reform based on learning from the “European and American rule of law countries” and the prison administration methods of “eastern and western Europe.” These should accord, Hu noted, with “moral humanitarianism,” should “emphasize reformation,” and so ensure that convicts were “silently and imperceptibly transformed through being moved, and so repent and reform.”6 Hu Yimin remained, in his most private writings and conversations, deeply committed to the ideals of penal reformation and its significance to saving China. Zhou Zuoren, in the preface he wrote for Hu, judged Hu “both a pragmatist and an idealist, who very much respects integrity and is fond of critical discussion.” But, Zhou continued, Hu’s efforts were ultimately futile because implementation was always the fundamental problem and that depended on people mired in a historically originated culture—“an invisible force”—of bureaucratism and familism and personal relationships that inevitably obstructed good governance. A great cultural reform and transforming of minds on a mass scale would be the only remedy.7 Neither Hu nor Zhou, the tones of melancholy and bitterness in their writing notwithstanding, betrayed any sense of futility to their situation. In one way or another, they hoped to serve China again. Meanwhile, the visions they articulated were ones very much alive outside the prison walls, inexorably being carried forth amid the postwar chaos on a number of fronts. To begin with, the Ministry of Judicial Administration pressed on with penal reform along policy principles committed to a moralizing “reformation education” (ganhua jiaoyu). A raft of new penal rules, regulations, and policies, many originally drafted in Chongqing in 1944 and promulgated in January 1946, came into effect in June 1947 and were followed by ongoing reforms into 1948. The reform language again heralded a new, innovative system, though the emphasis on the “progressive stage system,” improving management, labor, and education largely repackaged prewar themes. The model urban prison, as it had been under

Revolutionary Thought Reform the Wang government, was to be Tilanqiao, the Shanghai Prison and its attached reformatory, which was, like the Capital Prison in Nanjing, under the direct control of the ministry. A special training course for several hundred new wardens was established at the Central Police Officers School. One April 1947 policy proposal called for a “scientification of the prisons,” starting with Shanghai, and the construction of a massive new underground national prison complex in the hills near Nanjing. Among the special new prisons in operation by early 1948 were three for juvenile offenders in Wuchang (Hubei), Xinzhu (Taiwan), and Chahar. Already in 1946, the third common-convict rural labor camp (along with Pingwu and Pingba) or Outdoor Labor Service Prison, as it was termed, had been established on five thousand mu of land designated for reclamation near Xiaduzhen in Xuancheng County in southeastern Anhui. Forty thousand mu of uncultivated land in Pingzhen, Guizhou, and the former site of a state-managed farm at Yizhang, Hunan, were planned as similar new labor camps. Indeed, as late as September 1948, the Prison Bureau brought Julian H. Alco from the California State Prison System to advise them on modernizing reforms, particularly with respect to “prison labor for productive enterprises, including road building.”8 Although the basic design of the programs of reformation remained unchanged, the postwar ministry, seeking to remain au courant with global trends, placed increased emphasis on medical, physical, and psychological examinations of inmates and on treating those with “weak intellect” with various modern educative methods such as film showings. Yet coupled with this was a persistent focus on moral instruction by prison instructors and talks by openly welcomed religious preachers.9 Writing in his training diary at the ZhenjiangJiangsu No. 2 Prison in November 1947, officer-trainee Chen Deji reproduced the latest version of the creed of penal reformation: “As criminals lack a moral mentality and knowledge, the prison has established a transformation through education (jiaohua) department to cultivate their morals and knowledge through moral instruction and education . . . that is to mold their disposition which is also a matter of reformation through commiserating with and admonishing them so as to bring them to awareness.”10 Teaching KMT political doctrine was also supposed to be important, though in prisons as different as the Liaoning No. 1 and Shanghai’s Tilanqiao, group and individual instructions tended to center on moral reform and even practical concerns about employment far more than political lessons. The Tilanqiao instructors, in any case, were busier than ever with an escalating number of individual “punishment instructions” in the increasingly crowded prison.11 Familiar patterns played out in new conditions. The rising spiral of crime, prosecutions, and incarcerations soon triggered a spate of special early release

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Revolutionary Thought Reform “clearing out” initiatives—reductions in presentencing detentions, paroles, guarantor releases, releases for “external service,” amnesties (including the 1946 amnesty release of 73,960 convicts!)—and a push for expanding the prison system. Crowding in urban prisons was the main spur to establishing the Xuancheng labor camp and the other planned rural labor camps for common convicts. As inflation ran rampant and state resources were directed elsewhere amid the Civil War, officials claimed that rural prison camps and the prison farms affiliated with urban prisons would be able to feed and clothe their own inmates. By late 1947, however, lack of funds and the disruption of war began to be advanced as explanations for why expansion and basic standards could, increasingly, not be maintained. Many prisons in the northeastern Manchurian provinces as well as in Hebei and Shandong were designated as “not yet demobilized” or not functioning due to warfare, which in cases meant they were already under CCP control.12 As conditions of widespread disorder converged with the escalation of warfare between the massive KMT and CCP military forces, both sides sought to extend plans to “reform” political opponents and those believed to be causing disorder, and yet both, in increasingly desperate conditions, also carried out mass detention and summary executions on an ever-expanding scale. Attempting, for instance, to assert control in postwar Jiangsu, especially north of the Yangzi River, troubled by rampant banditry, a proliferation of firearms, unchecked drug use and sales, and ongoing CCP guerrilla insurgency, all of which provoked a refugee crisis, the KMT began a social reformative campaign in 1946 to accompany their military “pacification” drive. They combined propaganda, registering firearms and drug users, and planning the construction of drug-suppression centers and new detention centers for bandits, robbers, and “Chinese traitors.” These detention centers were to provide inmates training (xunlian) that would feature “inspiration talks” so offenders would “feel repentant and renew themselves.” At the same time, responding to the CCP insurgency, the Political Department of the Jiangsu Peace Preservation Command launched a program of mass-scale rural “political lecture hall talks,” inspirational lectures, literacy programs, and small group discussion and individual counseling programs, in all involving hundreds of thousands of people. It was a plan for reformation on a societal scale, evocative of penal reformation practices and similar to the wartime initiatives of Jiang Jingguo and the Japanese and the Wang regime. And in the manner of the CCP, it was to be scaled up to a mass movement. In addition, in September–October 1946, they established a series of new political prison reformatories (“reforming through instruction centers” ganxunsuo) for the reform and “return to rectitude” of captured

Revolutionary Thought Reform Communists described as “trainees” and “those who have surrendered for selfrenewal.” By the end of 1946, the largest southern Jiangsu political reformatory was at Zhenjiang with 400 inmates, with smaller facilities in Wu County (Suzhou) (189), Wuxi (166), and only about 30 inmates apiece in Changshu and Jiading. Six northern Jiangsu counties had such reformatories with small numbers of inmates in Taixing, Yangzhong, and Xinghua, 115 at Xiao County, 300 at Rugao County, and an astonishing 10,000 held in Gaoyou.13 These Jiangsu initiatives were distinct from the late 1940s KMT military and security agency political prisons, which, like the Bai Mansion known to several generations in the PRC from the 1961 novel Red Crag and its 1965 film version, Eternal Life in the Flames, have been associated with torture and extralegal execution.14 The KMT forces of internal security relentlessly carried out assaults, assassinations, and summary and special tribunal executions of suspected and actual Communists, leftist-liberal intellectual, student, and worker activists, and Taiwanese-Chinese resisting KMT occupation. Among the embattled liberal intellectual political activists seeking to stand against this KMT campaign of violence and intimidation was Yan Jingyue, who wrote prolifically for the journal Democracy and joined Ma Xulun and other progressive Shanghai intellectuals in founding the Chinese Association for Promoting Democracy (CAPD). With ambitions to become an oppositionist political party, CAPD was sharply critical of the KMT and sympathetic to the CCP, which had infiltrated it with secret members. On June 23, 1946, a delegation of Shanghai peace activists, including Yan’s wife, Lei Jieqiong, and many of his CAPD associates and friends, was brutally assaulted on arrival at the Nanjing Railway Station by security agency hired thugs. Lei Jieqiong was hospitalized with her injuries. By early 1947, Yan and Lei had returned north to Yenching University, seeking refuge under the thin protective veil of American affiliation. In mid-January 1949, before the final negotiated CCP takeover of Beijing, Yan, Lei, and fellow liberal intellectual professors Fei Xiaotong and Zhang Dongsun accepted an invitation to visit CCP “liberated zones” and the new provisional headquarters at Xibaipo (Hebei), meeting Mao Zedong, Liu Shaoqi, and Zhou Enlai. Terrorized by KMT violence, many such intellectuals willingly fled into what seemed the warm embrace of the Communists.15 Yet the CCP was in the midst of managing its own troubled interplay between extending its reformative mechanisms and deploying the power of mass violence amid its rapid, highly mobile expansion, as it fought an increasingly conventional war and directed large-scale rural land-reform revolutionary campaigns. Among the CCP forces that made the extraordinary postwar march into the northeast, He Fang in 1946 directed and taught in a training school for the

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Revolutionary Thought Reform “thought reform” of recruited cadres, local officials, and government staff, teachers, students, and other “intellectuals” in Shuangcheng, just to the southwest of Harbin. Thought reform was not just for correcting serving cadres and offenders; it was a key technique of the CCP’s program of revolutionary expansion. Yet, as in previous cases, nonpenal and penal programs of reform continuously fell short of their ideals. “Reform-through-labor” (laodong gaizao), a phrase that gained currency after its use at a judicial conference in the Taihang Mountains in early 1946, was not easily managed, notably in mobile labor camps within or near war zones. And punitive violence, draped in the terminology of Marxist social revolution, remained integral to the methods of CCP punishment and “making revolution.” Mao Zedong would clarify that “eliminating” the landlord class did not mean killing them all, but rather reforming most through productive labor. Yet, as He Fang marched south from Tonghua, southeastern Jilin, past Huanren, Kuandian, and to Andong on the Yalu River at the Korean border in the winter of early 1948, he saw set out in the frozen snow-covered fields, all along the more than 150-kilometer route, uncountable numbers of coffins and cabinets (for those who could no longer find coffins) of the victims of CCP land-reform violence awaiting late-spring burial. On reaching Andong, he found that “leftist excesses,” in CCP parlance, were rampant in the counterrevolutionary suppression campaign being prosecuted with the same extreme methods of the Yan’an Salvation Movement. Indiscriminate punitive violence was not limited to the northeast war zone. Internal CCP Northwest Bureau reports from 1948 criticized excessive “on the spot” executions, especially in the second half of 1947, carried out by CCP military, guerrillas, armed-worker units, and “mass organizations.” More than half of the executions, they concluded, had been, by their own callous standards, “mistaken.”16 There was little time to reflect, however, as the CCP dramatically gained the upper hand militarily in large-scale mobile warfare toward the end of 1948, surrounding the last holdout northern cities and advancing rapidly southward. In Shanghai in 1948, the prisons were hard pressed, as they became the dumping grounds for the mass roundups accompanying the final desperate KMT attempts to retain a grip on power. Of the 4,058 inmates held at Tilanqiao prison at the end of 1948, 898 were categorized as military offenders and 2,888 were held under “special” regulations and orders, mainly for drug offenses, robbery, treason, and other political offenses, as well as corruption and offenses against the emergency banking laws and prohibitions on gold sales. The authorities tried to slow the tide of unfavorable information, even imprisoning those who set up private radio and telegraph communication; but they were not even able to limit the bad news about prison corruption and abuses in the Shanghai newspapers.

Revolutionary Thought Reform Crowding and related illness and death rates worsened, as by early 1948 Tilanqiao prison desperately sought funds just to feed the inmates. On August 24, Chen Yuansheng, the criminal Houdini serving a life sentence for stealing gold bars from the vault of the Central Bank in Shanghai, managed, along with two fellow convicts, to escape from this supposedly most secure of China’s prisons. However, it did not even rate among the astonishing twenty-five major “mass jail breaks” of the year, including the flight in one night of 38 inmates from the once-Buddhist jail of Zhejiang’s Dinghai County.17 Then, in early December, large numbers of prisoners, including convicted “traitors,” began to receive early releases from Shanghai prisons. The trickle of paroles, releases to labor service, and especially guarantor releases grew into a torrent of 1,129 in the first three weeks of 1949, especially after the ceremonial resignation of Jiang Jieshi. On January 23 during a particularly cold Nanjing winter, Hu Yimin was released, provided an amnesty, as were many political prisoners and “collaborators,” including Bao Junfu. It seemed like 1937 all over again as the prisons of Shanghai and Jiangsu and other areas began to empty ahead of the arrival of the conquering army. Not all wanted to leave the security of the walls for the chaos beyond. Informed of her early release in Suzhou, the sixty-one-year-old widow and drug offender Madame Wang (née Li) cried loudly, begging the judge to let her stay in prison: “The price of rice outside is too high; after release, as I have no relatives or kin, it will be hard to live, and I will surely starve to death.”18 When the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) crossed the Yangzi River and took Nanjing on April 23, Hu Yimin and his friend Chen Mingshu were part of the Peace Preservation Committee that went forth to welcome them and facilitate an orderly transition of authority. At Tilanqiao in Shanghai, the eighteen-year veteran Shandongese head guard Zhao Yingsheng, who, along with 28 of the 610 guards and officers, was secretly CCP, worked with the last KMT warden appointed on April 25, Wang Muzheng, to secure the safety of the remaining political prisoners and a peaceful transfer of the prison to Communist control.19 Meanwhile, just southwest of Nanjing, Warden Bo Xiyu of the Xuancheng labor camp, hearing of the failed last-ditch negotiations and of the PLA crossing of the Yangzi River, released all prisoners on April 22 and, with ten officers and guards, gathered up firearms and a case of key documents and fled south toward Huizhou prefectural town (Shexian) just a day before the PLA reached Xuancheng. They walked for six days only to learn that Huizhou had fallen. Then, finding the route east to Hangzhou blocked, they began a long, meandering trek west and south through Jiangxi into Hunan with the PLA driving south just behind them.20

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Revolutionary Thought Reform Quite a few prison officers and officials made it with retreating KMT forces to Taiwan, leaving behind more than 120 modern prisons and branch prisons and nearly 600 modernized detention centers.21 And in the continuing Republic of China on Taiwan, the system of penal reformation that was developed on the mainland, its basic organizational formulas and moralistic commitment to instruction and reform, was grafted into the prisons built by the former Japanese colonial authorities. This was already evident as the major prisons of Taibei, Gaoxiong, Xinzhu, Yilan, Hulianggang, Jiayi, and Tainan continued to send regular reports, often filled out on the back of leftover Japanese colonial document forms, to the mainland right up to September 1949. In these prisons, instructors delivered lessons filled with Christian preaching on “Jesus’ Gospel reformation” (zhenli ganhua), some Buddhist teachings, and instruction in “national language” more than political lessons. They kept up an active schedule of guiding the imprisoned farmers, fisherman, woodcutters, peddlers, and indigenous slash-and-burn farmers, who due to theft motivated by gambling debts or impoverishment and often the use of prohibited forest resources, had run afoul of the law. Instructors usually spoke specifically in counseling sessions about the suffering of the male inmate’s family, about his children, but mainly about his wife and mother. “In prison I myself suffer, while the family’s losses are very great,” stated the lumberman theft convict Huang Yuede on September 5, 1949, telling his Yilan Prison instructor exactly what he was supposed to say. Commonly the final words an instructor spoke to inmates on the eve of their release were: “From now on, do not forget the great significance of repentance and self-renewal.”22 THE NEW BEGINNING: COMMUNIST PENAL REFORMATION AND REFORM-THROUGH-LABOR

Martial music sounded out from Shanghai’s Tilanqiao prison, renamed the People’s Court Prison, on the afternoon of March 21, 1950. Dressed in simple cotton garb with backpacks, 2,515 inmates—two battalions of 2,155 men (including a youth corps of 220), and 360 women in their own regiment— assembled like soldiers under cloudy skies on the soaked ground of the largest prison yard. These “self-renewalees” (zixinren), most of whom were theft and drug offenders, had been preparing for this moment for weeks. Evening after evening, since March 17, Vice Warden Mao Rongguang, the thirty-threeyear-old Shaanxi native experienced in CCP political training since the early 1940s, had been holding “celebration meetings” for the designated prisoners. Some ten months before, Vice Warden Mao had led the takeover of the prison,

Revolutionary Thought Reform and at the late September meeting to celebrate its reorganization had told the three hundred assembled officials and representatives: “The former prison was in the service of reactionary rule, so in the eyes of the average people it was a ‘hell on earth,’ and ‘a sea of endless suffering.’ The prisons of today are nothing like those before. We want to use them to safeguard the benefits of the vast numbers of the people, suppress the reactionaries, and reform [gaizao] common criminals, to make them a ‘person’ of the new society. So, from now on, the essential spirit of the people’s prison is to accord with the policies of the People’s Government, stress reformation education [ganhua jiaoyu], earnestly open up the offenders’ thoughts, and raise their labor spirit.” The next speaker continued with words recalling those of officials from decades before: “The new prison reforms the soul. It is a factory that bleaches the body clean; it is a factory and a school.”23 Amid the alternating heavy downpours and light rain following Vice Warden Mao’s talk at the third “celebration meeting” on March 19, the first detachment inmate representative, Xu Daocao, rose to speak, telling his assembled fellow inmates, “The old society made us degenerate, but the new society makes us tread on the road to a new life. We pledge absolutely not to escape, and that we will certainly complete our duty of production construction.” On March 21, Warden Wu Zhongqi addressed the assembled prisoners, congratulating them on being selected to the first group of more than four thousand to be sent to carry out “land reclamation and production” in northern Jiangsu. Warden Wu called upon the inmates to carry out “diligent production,” “to reform thought through labor,” and “to keep minds on study!” The prisoners, according to news reports, shouted back similar enthusiastic slogans, especially when Warden Wu noted their family members would soon be allowed to follow them. Then, with the youth regiment leading the way, the assembled prisoners raised high their green and red pennants and banners reading “Construct the new countryside,” “We are walking on the bright road to the future,” “Use labor to create our own heaven and earth,” and “Dongtai is our paradise.” The military band played as the prisoners accompanied by fortyeight officers and guards marched out of the prison west down Chaoyang Road, past the Tilanqiao Public Security Station, onto Dongchangzhi Road, left down Gongping Road to the first wharf of the China Merchants Steam Company. The youth brigade shouted out, repeatedly, “Ten thousand years for Chairman Mao!” It was to be a new beginning for all. They boarded the transport barges, which soon headed into open water, steaming down the Huangpu River, taking the first large group of prisoners from Shanghai on the six-day journey to northern Jiangsu, sent to “reform-through-labor” in a place called “New People Village.”24

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Revolutionary Thought Reform New People Village, as an hour-long propaganda documentary named for it and directed later that year by the thirty-year-old Yan’an-trained woman film editor from Henan, Gao Weijin, made clear, was neither a single village nor one meant solely for convicts. The film showed Marshal Chen Yi’s Shanghai government planning the rural reform primarily of urban vagrants, and also, as it was shouted out by the strident young woman narrator, “the blind, deaf, dumb, and crippled,” and all “parasites of the old society.” Shanghai, like much of urban China, as Frederic Wakeman has shown, was undergoing in the months since its “liberation” the ultimate “clean up”—a thorough social ordering of the streets of the great metropolis, which many had long dreamed of but no previous regime had ever come close to realizing. A rounding up of spies and high-ranking former KMT and Wang government officials, led initially by Hu Junhe, a former convicted “collaborator” and agent of both the Wang government and KMT Zhongtong security agencies, was part of it. But most of the focus was on petty criminals—pickpockets, small-time thieves, petty drug dealers and users, street prostitutes, petty charlatans—and great numbers of homeless street-people. CCP Public Security police and Civil Affairs cadres had been incarcerating people for months through methods of registration and hasty tribunals that were little more than interrogations followed by assignments to processing.25 The prisons, jails, and detention centers were soon teeming, and even the establishment of reformatories and suburban prison camps did not slow the pressure on officials to find some place to send all the new prisoners. In the wake of the worst KMT aerial bombing of the city on February 6, 1950, which knocked out electricity and water systems with, as it was presumed, the assistance of spies with radios on the ground, a joint group of officials from the CCP’s East China Bureau and Shanghai Committee traveled to northern Jiangsu to meet with the Subei People’s government. Soon, they had secured for Shanghai two hundred thousand mu of “barren land” in the flat, poor, saline-alkali-saturated marshlands at the northeastern fringes of Dongtai County (later part of Taibei County) in a place known as Four Forked River (Sichahe). This was in a coastal area of long-standing CCP activity that had held out the longest during the 1946–47 KMT drive to retake northern Jiangsu. It was familiar to the former senior military officer Huang Xuzhou in command of this Shanghai Municipal Land Reclamation Area Labor Production Administration and his fellow New Fourth Army veterans involved in this project and Shanghai policing and penal administration, who had also served under Marshal Chen Yi. The 7,597 men and women, those from the prisons along with the “vagrants,” disabled, and orphaned children from the city Civil

Revolutionary Thought Reform Affairs Bureau reformatories (jiaoyangsuo) who departed in March and April, were transported by boat to Zhenjiang (and sometimes Nanjing), then downriver into the Grand Canal at Yangzhou, north to Gaoyou, and east to Xinghua. There they waited until May, when they were moved north into temporary housing in Xinfengzhen and Dazhongzhen, and finally, in June, into the bleak area of Four Forked River that was presented in propaganda as New People Village.26 By the end of 1950 and months of grueling physical labor with simple hand tools to dredge rivers and dig irrigation canals to desalinate and improve the soil, plant grains and cotton, and build structures, there were four New People Villages in the area. Structured like military barracks-camps, they provided small-family-unit housing, dormitories for singles built by the inmates themselves to accommodate about ten thousand people, along with canteens, workshops, a clinic, and schools for children. All was organized around daily work and thought reform lessons and political study. As the film New People Village proclaimed, the plan was to expand this project of turning “parasites of the old society into useful people of the new society” through education and the labor that would simultaneously “reform people and . . . transform nature.” All of the historical failures of the past and the resulting ethical failings of selfishness, greed, prurient interest, pettiness, dishonesty, and physical failings too of these criminals, prostitutes, and beggars would be rectified by “caring,” morally upright, parental party cadres who would provide clothing, health care, productive labor, and guidance through lessons, small group discussions involving telling one’s life history and confessing one’s past, and individual counseling that would bring people to the correct awareness. This was to be an emotional awakening to the realization that the Communist Party cared for them like no one else. On this model of creating “a happy and warm big family” in a mass collective rural life of labor, the plan was eventually to develop a “New People City” expressly not for the idealized multigenerational Chinese family of the past, but for atomized nuclear families and individuals whose deference and love would be directed to the single benevolent authority—the party embodied in its representatives and deitylike highest leaders, above all, Mao Zedong. This was, in effect, the clearest initial modular blueprint for the communities that, within a decade, would radically transform most of rural China into agricultural collectives and then people’s communes. It was also Shanghai’s first major satellite rural prison labor camp, which by August 1952, having expanded to more than twenty community units in four contiguous districts working 680,000 mu of reclaimed land, was turned over from Shanghai’s Civil Affairs Bureau to its Public Security Bureau (PSB). For generations of convicts

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Revolutionary Thought Reform sent here, to what became known as the “Shanghai Farm,” it was Shanghai’s original “reform-through-labor camp” (laogai). As Janet Chen has shown, these hastily assembled New People Villages were, from the start, so disastrously mismanaged and presented such miserable conditions that hundreds of inmates fled what some dubbed this “Subei water prison.” One of the earliest Shanghai prisoners to report experiencing a northern Jiangsu prison camp, one near Zhongbuzhen on Wugong Lake north of Xinghua in the early 1950s, testified to the International Commission against Concentration Camp Practices in Brussels about spending two hours daily in “study” and fourteen hours working on transporting earth to reclaim ponds and to build dykes and irrigation canals. A typical punishment for small infractions was being forced to stand for long periods in uncomfortable conditions; beatings by guards were not uncommon. Undernourished on the two daily meals of coarse rice and wild greens, prisoners were often ill; beriberi was common, leaving many limping along as they labored.27 Throughout China the CCP’s swift moves to establish military-political control, neutralize dangerous political foes, and remove the urban underclass and the lowest, most vulnerable level of purveyors of street vices made for an unbridled consummation of long-standing ideals of state social and political ordering of urban space. This quickly filled the existing prisons and detention centers and led to the growth of mobile and rural prison camps. Crime was redefined as a class problem—a consequence of history—and criminals as being outside of and against “the people.” Controlling visible crime and making a point of bringing down notorious criminals like the martial artist wall-climbing burglars and murderers Duan Yunpeng in Beijing and Tianjin and Li Shengwu (called “Swallow Li San” after the famed 1920s burglar) in Jinan were key to early PRC urban policing.28 Soon after the late January 1949 CCP seizure of Beijing, the homeless, beggars, petty thieves, demobilized military men, and deserters began to be detained, with some one thousand organized into a mobile labor unit and dispatched in late May under the supervision of 103 “honorable” PLA soldiers, to “reform” themselves and work on Yellow River dyke reconstruction in Hexi County, Shandong. Nonetheless, Wei Xiangru, a young military veteran in the unit assigned to take control of, reorganize, and retrain the Beijing police, recalled that the city that first year of “liberation” was disorderly, crime-ridden, and dangerous. Outfitted in his baggy homespun gray uniform and cloth shoes, his long-barreled “box gun” Mauser pistol at his side, Wei trundled through the night along the rough hutong alleys in the back of a tricycle rickshaw peddled by an old Beijinger to another robbery crime scene, never quite sure of the local

Revolutionary Thought Reform policemen under his command or what lingering spies and saboteurs might have in store. There was a systematic program to have former senior officials, military, security agency, and police officers register with the new authorities, after which, first several hundred and by October over one thousand were called in to undergo “compulsory collective training” through “disciplinary instruction” (guanxun)—the same term used by wartime KMT prison camps—in what came to be called the Pure River (Qinghe) Training Brigade. The name was chosen to symbolize that these former enemies were soon to be washed clean. They were held initially at the Paoju Military Prison inside the northeastern city walls, where the KMT and Japanese had also held political prisoners. Lu Fenglai, one of the brigade’s seventeen staff cadres, at the time a twenty-three-year-old intelligence officer who, like others in his unit, had worked undercover in Beijing just prior to the “liberation,” later recalled hearing the crying, shouting, and hysterical laughing from these “trainees” when they realized they would not soon be retrained for government posts but rather had been tricked, as they saw it, into long-term imprisonment. From this point, attempts to induce confessions, encourage reporting on each other, and the weekly political lectures by the senior training officer and former CCP East Hebei Intelligence Committee Director An Lin seemed ineffective, as these former military and security agency officers closed ranks and maintained their own disciplined hierarchies. When ordered to choose “small group” discussion leaders, they invariably put forward their former commanders. Paoju Prison had not proved a conducive environment for the reform of the now more than two thousand “special agent elements . . . concentrated for disciplinary instruction.” And there were another three thousand registered as “self-renewal elements” still to be dealt with. In addition, word had come down from the Beijing Party Committee that such “spies and reactionaries” should not be allowed to shirk productive labor and “eat idlers’ rice” in prison.29 Commander An Lin, with the approval of Beijing Mayor Nie Rongzhen, set out to find a suitable rural prison-camp location for these political prisoners, quickly settling on a stretch of “barren” salt flats along the Greater Third Branch River northeast of Tianjin in the Chadian District of southern Ninghe County. One account suggests the area was well known already for having been the site of a Japanese military detention camp, again put to use in the late 1940s by the troops of General Fu Zuoyi. In the bitter cold of December 27, 1949, Commander An and 45 cadres and guards arrived at the site with the first detachment of 25 inmates from the Paoju Prison brigade to establish what more than a month later was officially titled the Beijing Municipal Locally Administered State

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Revolutionary Thought Reform Qinghe Farm. Once a regular grain provision allotment from the Beijing government had been secured and a sufficient number of reed-mat shelters built, the remaining 1,950 prisoners from Paoju were roped together and transferred over in railcars to Chadian Station and marched to the site in February and March 1950. Cadres, armed guards, and prisoners lived cheek by jowl in the meager shelter of the reed-mat sheds in the first hard winter and spring of building the prison farm camp and beginning the drainage and land reclamation. With minimal rations of sorghum steamed bread and gruel and long hours of hard physical labor that left their bodies aching, hands and feet blistered, many of the prisoners, the cadres felt, shirked work by feigning illness and lingering at defecation. There was apparently little appreciation for the fact that illness and extreme constipation were the common experience of malnourished prisoners. One inmate was caught writing a letter of complaint, charging the cadres with only carrying out harsh punitive labor to make them suffer instead of providing the promised instruction. Prisoners attempted hunger strikes and other open resistance. In March, two escape plots were uncovered by inmate informers, including a planned violent uprising led by the former Xing’an Juntong station chief Major-General Feng Lanting and his mates. The prison farm cadres and guards, who, with the exception of the leading intelligence officers like An Lin and Lu Fenglai, were mostly semiliterate and illiterate military veterans from the rural poor assigned to Beijing Public Security, had little sympathy for the formerly powerful, well-off urbanite “class enemies” in their charge. But at the June Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) meeting, Mao Zedong had spoken of “reforming . . . enemies” and making “new people” of them. “Lenient” reformative education for “counterrevolutionaries” was the watchword of the First National Judicial Conference in July and August. Already on July 12 at the Qinghe farm, the first of a series of mass judgment meetings was held, though even the few educated cadres had little knowledge of the proper procedures, to say nothing of law and legal process. Still, following approvals by the Military Court in Beijing, 440 prisoners were given formal sentences of between six months to five years. In effect, the prosecution, judgment, and the fate of the offenders in the process of penal reform through labor and thought reform had been delegated to the young cadres of the prison camp.30 The Qinghe prison farm has been called the first reform-through-labor camp established in China after 1949. It was made the model institution of its kind in the reports and speeches of Public Security Minister Luo Ruiqing, in the press, and in discussions with foreigners and was promoted for emulation throughout the country.31 Initially, the idea was that the new Communist military and civilian

Revolutionary Thought Reform authorities taking control in various localities could establish such camps “in local areas” according to circumstances. This was backed by central government leaders who generally admired the Soviet Russian “labor reform” prison system for its capacity to deal with the unproductive and uncooperative and set them to work on major transportation and construction infrastructure projects.32 In theory, revolutionary politics had been placed in command of law and order. But the practice of these sweeping detentions, transportations, and proliferation of rural prison camps was a form of state authority unleashed and unrestrained in its diffusion yet concentrated and disciplined in its pursuit of the grand imperative to reconstruct, as it was seen, a society rent asunder by war and rotted by an array of corrupt, repressive historical forces. A November 1952 Ministry of the Interior report on urban social relief and welfare from 1949 to July 1952 related, with the hyperbolic enthusiasm of such early PRC documents, that not only had the government repatriated large numbers of prisoners of war, demobilized troops, stragglers, and refugees back to their rural homes to “engage in production,” but more than 240,000 “vagrants” and more than 8,000 prostitutes had been sent to “carry out reform-through-labor” and “thought reform” in various labor camps and reformatories. In addition, 110,000 physically disabled along with the elderly and children (mainly orphans) on their own had been “resettled for training.” This meant they were placed in institutionally organized rural communities for production and training that closely resembled the penal labor camps. All of this institutional expansion had been possible, the report claimed, not just due to government investment, but also through the idealized principle, redolent of the Yan’an period, of making full use of existing materials in the local area. Based on the innovative pragmatism and economizing frugality of the wartime guerrilla state, the idea simultaneously legitimized the expropriation of any necessary resources in the area. In the end, the investment would pay dividends, supposedly, not just because the “unemployed parasites” were removed, reformed, and made productive, but because their productive labor would directly contribute to the construction and wealth of the party nation-state. The report named Shanghai, Nanjing, and Suzhou as models for having swept up “vagrants” and sent them to work on mobile construction and road-building brigades, brickworks, and in the reclamation of uncultivated land for agriculture in what were termed “production training centers” and “production training enterprises.” Urban “consumers” were transformed into “producers” for the nation, not just within these institutions, but as a result of being fundamentally transformed into “new people” by them. “There are many,” the report stated, “who after having undergone reform-through-labor get married, settle down and support themselves through production.”33

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Revolutionary Thought Reform The other main initial impetus to labor-camp development came with, as in the case of the Qinghe prison farm, the incarceration of former regime officials and those immediately deemed threats to the new state, that is, political prisoners. From early 1949 to June 1950, the new authorities had already arrested twenty-eight thousand “spies and saboteurs”—a category that designated primarily urban political opponents who were increasingly transported to rural labor camps. These were distinct from the nearly one million “armed bandits”— primarily regime opponents in rural areas—that the Beijing government reported its security and military forces had “eliminated” between April 1949 and August 1950. Then there were also the targets of the Land Reform Campaign, who were dealt with “on site” in their rural locality and who also in some cases were dispatched for a term in a labor camp.34 Even before the establishment of the Qinghe camp, moreover, the PLA had held large numbers of captured KMT military in POW camps, retraining centers, and mobile labor brigades that were largely designed on the same labor and thought reform indoctrination model as the labor camps. Many former KMT enlisted men, noncommissioned officers, and low-ranking officers were soon remobilized into the PLA and found themselves fighting the last pockets of KMT resistance and anti-CCP guerrillas in the southwest and as “volunteers” on the battlefields of the Korean War. But many officers were held in military camps, notably the series of military-run prison camps in the former Shaanxi revolutionary heartland between Yan’an and Bao’an, which initially housed over thirty thousand former KMT military officers. A military labor-camp system evolved distinct from those managed by Civil Affairs Bureaus, Public Security Bureaus, or local party authorities.35 There were also military and security agency–run political training schools, brigades, and classes, continuing wartime terminologies, some specially designated for the thought reform of suspect CCP military officers and cadres and others for high-level former regime officials. In late February 1950, a little over a month after he and four colleagues had responded to the calls of the new authorities and gone to a police station in Chengdu to fill out a “confession registration form,” the former KMT propaganda chief in Sichuan, Li Baiying, was “asked” by local cadres to enter a “political training class” (zhengxunban) in order “to be renewed.” Held initially in dormitories with some two hundred fellow former KMT officials directed to study CCP political doctrine, to write “self-examination autobiographies” (fanxing zizhuan), and to engage in mutual criticism and discussion sessions, Li had spent nearly a year in this process, even housed within a wing of a prison, before it dawned on him that he was not being retrained for a government job but rather was to spend many years incarcerated as a political prisoner.36

Revolutionary Thought Reform The apparently successful reform of KMT military officers offered a notable model, as Mao suggested in his 1949 speech “On the People’s Democratic Dictatorship,” for “letting” the “reactionaries” live and “reform themselves through labor and become new people.” But the CCP view of dealing with categories of people defined as in fundamental opposition to the party-state and its historical mission, that is, “reactionaries” and “counterrevolutionaries,” continued always to combine the two approaches of “lenience,” indicating the opportunity to reform through labor and instruction, and “suppression,” meaning the uses of coercive force and punishment. Mao is often characterized as having a strategic taste for seemingly contradictory approaches to governance and politics; but he was not the only one. In fact, there was an officially approved spectrum of overlapping techniques of control through registration, limiting movement, supervision, incarceration, forced labor, instruction and guided methods of reformation of thought, pressured “struggle sessions,” and the threat of and use of execution that, with the exception of the struggle sessions, had all in one form or another been on the menu of state sanctions and controls developed by predecessor regimes. The CCP state had already exercised these methods on an unprecedented scale in their first year in power when their October 1950 entrance into the Korean War compounded their intensifying sense of insecurity spurred by ongoing and in some cases resurgent resistance to their new order in various parts of the country. Large numbers of cadres had been reported injured and killed as the party attempted to strengthen its hold on southern and western regions in 1950. With internal instability viewed in relation to what appeared to be an ever more perilous international environment hurtling inevitably toward wider war and possible KMT and American invasion, the CCP launched a great repression of actual and perceived political opponents that dwarfed their earlier efforts. What began with an official shift to increased “suppression” in relation to “leniency” had by December 1950 become the first stages of a major nationwide campaign to “suppress counterrevolutionaries” that would sweep across the land through 1951–52.37 In the former KMT capital of Nanjing, where the rounding up of spies, secret KMT, beggars, petty thieves, wandering Buddhist monks and Daoists, low-level prostitutes, local toughs, drug dealers, and “vagrants” had been ongoing since 1949, the national campaign to suppress “counterrevolutionaries” was launched by Public Security on January 23, 1951. More than 4,000 had been registered by the fifth day and soon 300 who had not done so were arrested, including the former Wang government reformatory director Bao Junfu, who had been discovered eking out a living hawking cigarettes in the streets. On February 17, at Mao Zedong’s direction, Public Security Minister Luo Ruiqing arrived to inspect the campaign, sharply criticizing the Nanjing authorities and

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Revolutionary Thought Reform calling their efforts “a typical case of being completely too gentle with counterrevolutionaries.” This precipitated the registration of 18,600 “members of reactionary parties and groups and spy elements” by March and five massive “public trial assemblies” involving thousands of participants and broadcast on new loudspeaker systems in every major neighborhood of the city; 29 people were summarily executed. Then on April 10 the whole city came to a halt for the largest, most dramatic mass event staged at the Great Hall of the People and led by Party Secretary and Mayor Ke Qingshi. When the meeting finally ended at 1:00 a.m., the order went out to a special Public Security unit: “Attack on all fronts!” By morning, they had arrested 1,204 “counterrevolutionary elements,” 23 of whom were quickly executed. More arrests followed, with another 1,217 rounded up on April 27. Without any time to investigate or deliberate these cases, the People’s Court on April 29, with the approval of the city’s Military Commission and Mayor Ke and claiming to be reflecting the strong feelings of “the masses,” sentenced 376 of these people to death; they were immediately taken in a procession to an area outside the northern Zhongyang Gate and shot. The rest packed the Tiger Bridge Prison and the detention centers at Qing Village and Sheepskin Lane. The arrests continued, and by the end of May some 7,000 had been imprisoned and 763 executed. Even as the initial movement began to subside over the summer, it was often combined with the ongoing Resist America and Aid Korea Campaign and land reform in suburban areas, which by September had, on its own, resulted in the arrest of 449 “landlords” and the execution of 124. In the subsequent more than two years through 1953, Public Security continued to arrest “counterrevolutionaries,” “reactionaries,” and “bad elements,” including those singled out in the Anti-Secret Society, and the Three Anti and Five Anti Campaigns. Meanwhile, thousands of prostitutes and drug users were rounded up and sent to hastily established reformatories. Between May 1949 and December 1951, Public Security had detained more than thirty-thousand drug offenders in Nanjing. Amid all of this, Bao Junfu remarkably escaped what initially seemed certain execution. High-level CCP members, Chen Geng above all, interceded rather mysteriously for him. After more than a year in prison, Bao was released into “control” supervision, seemingly saved by the personal bonds and perhaps secrets of the clandestine urban espionage wars of twenty years before.38 In cities and towns throughout China, these were the years of processions of jeeps and open-back trucks carrying hastily condemned political offenders, with narrow-board placards wedged down their backs and held in place by their bound wrists, announcing their crimes or category—“counterrevolutionary,” or “reactionary.” They drove through crowds and waving banners to mass public

Revolutionary Thought Reform condemnation rallies and on to peripheral execution grounds. There, the condemned would kneel on the ground, usually together in a line, until the order was given, whereupon they were shot at close range in the back of the head.39 Although the story of this great suppression will only finally be told when the relevant government archives are opened to scholarly examination, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that incarceration rates exploded from the end of 1950 through 1953 with arrests of what were primarily political prisoners. In some provinces and municipalities, “counterrevolutionaries” accounted for more than 40 percent of all arrests up until 1955, and that category only represented a portion of those that could be considered political cases. In Shanghai, whereas approximately 12,000 “spies” and “gangsters” had been arrested from the CCP takeover to October 1950, the subsequent late 1950 through 1953 political campaigns resulted in the arrests of 54,678 people. Former officials were common targets. Among those arrested in 1951–53 in Shanghai were the first wartime “collaborator” warden of the 2nd Special District Prison, Huang Yaqiang; the last Wang government warden of Tilanqiao prison, Shen Guanquan; his postwar successor at Tilanqiao, Xu Diping; the last KMT warden who had peacefully surrendered Tilanqiao, Wang Muzeng; and the first CCP Tilanqiao warden who had sent the first prisoners to rural labor camps, Wu Zhongqi. The great suppression swept up all kinds of people. The categories imposed on them—“counterrevolutionary,” “reactionary,” “bandit,” “evil local bully,” “spy,” “secret society chief ”—were convenient, vastly oversimplified labels for the diverse range of these figures of the “old society” who were accused of crimes against the people. Prisoner accounts report the tragic arbitrariness to the mass arrests, with many imprisoned on the basis of unsubstantiated accusations, contrived confessions exacted under pressure, or due to the most commonplace of associations with the previously condemned.40 Legal regulations and procedural codes, such as they were, not only theoretically upheld the primacy of the political revolutionary aims, but were formed in the wake of the campaigns and were typically unknown by those detained and unfamiliar to those who detained them. When Li Baiying asked the cadres in charge of his case in Sichuan when he might be tried and sentenced, they responded, “For you, the trial is not for penal sentencing. The government does not again need to manage your sentencing; it is just to even better arrange for your reform study.”41 Historians in the PRC with access to restricted archives have estimated that 3 million people were arrested nationally in 1951 alone and more than 700,000 executed as counterrevolutionaries in 1950–52. The official national prison population, which had been estimated at around 60,000 in 1949, had reached 870,000 by 1951.42 The flood of political prisoner detentions of the great suppression in the

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Revolutionary Thought Reform winter and spring of 1951, which followed on the initial social ordering “cleanup” and rounding up of former government officials and military and security officers filled prisons, jails, and detention centers and accelerated the setting up of mobile labor training and rural labor camps throughout the country. Enormous pressure built up on local governments. Public Security units were stretched thin even when they could call for additional funding for their “special” work. At the Third National Public Security Conference in May 1951, a resolution, apparently personally edited by Mao Zedong himself, called for a national program of reform-through-labor (laodong gaizao) to be realized at all five levels of government, from the center down to counties. Offenders held in “labor-reform” would relieve prison crowding, offset the costs of their incarceration through productive labor and infrastructure construction work, and be reformed in the process, in part by “suitable political, thought and cultural education.” Mao’s response the following month to a Jiangxi Provincial Party Committee report on the challenges resulting from the counterrevolutionary suppression campaign further clarified that such reform-through-labor ought to be carried out through “outdoor” work, and so mainly in rural prison camps. Even before this agenda was restated again by Public Security Minister Luo Ruiqing in September, there had been a dramatic proliferation of new prison camps in the summer that would continue throughout the year. Temples, monasteries, all manner of public buildings, private residences, farms, and undeveloped land were requisitioned. Prisoners, as had so often been the case before, constructed their own prison facilities, in this case, barracks and work sites. Everywhere low-cost, hastily established camps were developed by local party and PSB units, unleashed and backed by the central party authority.43 In Anhui Province, for instance, where already in 1949–50 prisons and labor training camps had set inmates to cigarette rolling and cotton textile weaving, there were in May 1951, at the time of the Third National Public Security Conference, 4,711 sentenced and 2,606 unsentenced prisoners distributed among 8 prisons, 58 detention centers, and 31 reform-through-labor brigades under PSB supervision. The trend toward the growth of dispersed, small-scale local-level district, municipality, and county labor camps was already in process when the support from the center led to an expansion that by August 1952 had reached 441 reform-through-labor “production units” distributed throughout the province, with 27,696 inmates working at land reclamation and cultivation, making cigarettes, cloth, pressing oil, and milling rice.44 The guideline was for every brigade of 100 prisoners to be supervised by ten armed guards and three cadres, including, in a pared-down microcosm of modern prison administration, a commander, instructor, and manager of accounts and organization. But in fact, camps were established in relation to local initiative and

Revolutionary Thought Reform conditions and often with limited numbers of PSB cadres in place. In the ninecounty district of Huaiyin in northern Jiangsu, for instance, there was in the summer of 1951 only a small reform-through-labor brigade of 25 prisoners led by two cadres set to street cleaning in Qingjiang town, and a district brigade of about 200 prisoners working under the supervision of four cadres and twenty-five guards on construction and irrigation projects and assisting local farmers at the busy planting and harvesting seasons. In September, however, two large reformthrough-labor brigades for over 800 prisoners were organized and sent to do land reclamation work in an area so forbiddingly desolate that they were quickly moved to what became a long-term establishment at Wutuhe. Even at this level, the proliferation of camps rolled out so quickly that by the end of 1951 there were 1,709 inmates in the major concentrated district labor camps, 3,079 inmates in smaller district reform-through-labor units, and 1,370 held in the county-level units. Thousands more entered the ever-expanding district system or were dispatched to other districts in 1952.45 In every major district and province, this proliferation occurred in relation to specific conditions. For instance, in Fujian from June 1951 to the end of the year, 450 reform-through-labor units were established mostly in remote mountainous areas away from the coastal front line facing Taiwan. In Yunnan, 178 reform-through-labor units—prison farms, factories, mines, and construction brigades—holding some hundred thousand prisoners, came into operation between August 1951 and the end of 1952. From 418 major prisons (including prison camps, though not camps under the military or civil affairs administrations) under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Public Security at the end of 1950, the system of major prisons and reform-through-labor camps had grown nationally to 2,452 a year later, with 1,961 of these organized at the county level. In response to the pressures of the mass arrests of the great suppression of the first half of 1951, the Beijing leadership promoted policies that empowered local party and PSB to construct on the earlier models a proliferation of labor camps and mobile brigades throughout the land. In the wartime guerrilla manner, this could only be carried out with the stretching of minimal resources, extreme frugality, the intensive working of prisoners, the expropriation of local resources, and pragmatic adaptation to local conditions. This was how China’s “gulag archipelago”—a massive, widely dispersed prison labor-camp system commonly known as the laogai (reform-through-labor) system took shape well before the formal promulgation of the national reform-through-labor regulations and methods in late August to early September 1954.46 Developed on a scale beyond anything previously attempted in China, the reform-through-labor camp system became in the 1950s, in James Seymour’s

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Revolutionary Thought Reform words, “one of the world’s largest prison systems.” Already by late 1951, there was a move toward developing large-scale camps, and from 1952 through 1954 the trend was toward consolidating and concentrating camps and making them, as penal reformers had long dreamed, self-sufficient economic units.47 A group of mobile brigades, for instance, organized mainly by New Fourth Army veterans in the early 1950s for Huai River flood-control work in northern Anhui, grew into the behemoth, 200,000-prisoner East China District Huai River Control Reform-Through-Labor Brigade. Many of the largest camps were established in the vast remote border provinces—Xinjiang, Qinghai, Gansu, Inner Mongolia, Heilongjiang—with the backing of senior CCP leaders who made arguments for border area development, much like those advanced long before 1949. In 1951, General Wang Zhen, who had led the PLA conquest of Xinjiang, initiated a program of accepting prisoners transported from the eastern provinces. By August 1952, Xinjiang had 40,288 prisoners mainly undertaking land reclamation work in a reform-through-labor system consisting of 4 branch units, 39 brigades, and 264 squadrons. Before the end of the decade, more than 100,000 prisoners had been transported to Xinjiang, where they were attached to the bingtuan (Military Production and Construction Corps)—the institution central to this region’s history of state control, development, and Han migration.48 Already by 1953, reform-through-labor camps were in operation in nearly every part of China and held 84 percent of all detained prisoners. It had become, and long remained, one of the largest, most pervasive state institutional systems, deeply enmeshed with programs of national economic, social, and political development, ensnaring hundreds of thousands of unfortunate people, many of whom did not survive.49 Just as the modern prison had been a central feature of early twentieth-century urban-based state programs of social transformation and, in various forms, had spread beyond the cities in the years of mid-century warfare, it had, in its labor-reform-camp mode in the 1950s, gone where the state projects of transformation and ordering had gone. This was not a matter of simply new systems of penality, but the rise of a pervasive governmental mechanism with a social and cultural presence that shadowed all of society in the Maoist era. REFORM-THROUGH-LABOR THOUGHT REFORM

Ku Hak-chung (in his native Cantonese, Gu Kezhong in Mandarin), an “educated youth” who had established a small business with two friends in his native city of Guangzhou after 1949, was accused during the 1952 Three Anti Campaign of withholding pay from his employees and sent to reform-throughlabor. It turned out to be a short trip, as he was dispatched to Guangzhou Public

Revolutionary Thought Reform Security’s Third Labor Reform Brigade just outside the city’s northwest corner near West Village. Soon he had donned the coarse, reddish vest with his number, 091, and had his head shaved, like all of his fellow inmates, whom he was ordered not to call, even informally, nanyou (friend in adversity), in the old “feudal” way. They were to be addressed as “team member” (duiyuan). Spending most of his days in the grueling, muscle-aching labor of ditch digging and rock breaking, Ku, along with his squadron “team members,” assembled every evening from 7:00 to 9:00 p.m. for study and instruction. He found the instructor’s concluding guiding comments, regardless of what had been discussed, to be nearly the same each evening. It was always a version of: “The old society made people into demons; the new society turns demons into people. You were all born into the old society, and were led by the old society into the abyss of evil crimes, and so were fully turned into demons. Today, under the glorious enlightenment of the Communist Party, through reform-through-labor, you all soon will be changed from demons back into people. But whether your transformation will be thorough or not depends entirely on whether you are diligent. A person with the correct labor attitude can very quickly change from a demon into a person.”50 Ku’s experience was not atypical. Although limited access to internal government documents have left the Chinese reform-through-labor system among the least thoroughly researched of the twentieth century’s prison labor-camp systems, this does not mean that its forms and methods and much about the experiences of its prisoners are unknown. Ever since the early years of the PRC, accounts have trickled out and over time have accumulated, so that prisoner memoirs and reports are far more plentiful for the period after 1949 than for any time before.51 One striking phenomenon evident in many sources is how the remarkable geographic spread and unprecedented expansion of the system maintained and was made possible by the relative uniformity of the basic, simple formula for transformation through labor and thought reform—the CCP’s version of reformation. There is impressive consistency to the core patterns evident in pre-1949 CCP prison camps, the urban jails the CCP first managed after 1949, and the subsequent small and large labor camps of the 1950s. So even as the proliferation of camps and brigades varied in relation to conditions and circumstances, the simple formula of institutional practice was uniform and could be easily reduplicated, taught to new cadres, and advanced with even the most minimal resources. Labor was central. In most prison camps, with the exception of urban prisons, which, as before 1949, often had limited workshop space, physical labor of some sort consumed the greatest number of waking hours for most inmates. Prisoners were repeatedly told that labor was essential to their “reform.” Presented with

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Revolutionary Thought Reform cheery visions of contributing to the reconstruction of society and the nation and building comfortable utopian modern industrial communities in the countryside, inmates were continually being exhorted by supervising cadres to strive ever harder in “production.” The actual aim of work programs, however, was little more than a repackaged version of the long-standing, ever-elusive prison reformer’s dream of attaining institutional financial self-sufficiency. In the middle of 1952, the Ministry of Public Security conceded that only about one-third of the penal labor camps and brigades had achieved self-sufficiency. They would need to push “production” to the limit, and yet still the only way to sustain such institutions over time, as in wartime, was consciously to structure them as extremely ascetic communities capable of surviving on a minimum of resources—meager rations, no actual uniforms or shoes provided, only the simplest of medicines, whatever tools, implements, and materials that could be made by prisoners or easily expropriated in the locality. In urban prisons and larger camps with industrial ventures, the work was, as before 1949, in low-capitalized, low-skill, labor-intensive light industry and handicrafts corresponding with local conditions. Far greater numbers in rural camps and brigades were set not just to farming, but to the digging and earth moving of land reclamation and major hydraulic and transportation infrastructure projects, which involved little or no skills training. As prisoner populations grew, especially after 1951, to massive proportions, the labor component for many amounted to little more than long hours of increasingly pointless physical drudgery meant only to keep prisoners occupied. In sum, labor was ultimately only of importance to the envisioned processes of personal transformation as a test of physical hardship, which could only be passed by maintaining the right, optimistic mental attitude toward it.52 The key to the transformation from “demon” into “new person” remained in the mind and character. In his reports and speeches in the period when the prison-camp system expanded from mid-1951 through 1952, Public Security Minister Luo Ruiqing spoke often of labor and production, but his discussions of “disciplinary education” (guanjiao), meaning political indoctrination, learned obedience, and guided inmate recognition and confession of faults and commitment to correct thought and practice, were at the core of his idea of reform. A significant reason that the Qinghe prison farm had become a model for reforming former KMT spies, Luo reported in 1952, was because he had pushed a re-education plan focusing on “recognizing faults and obeying the law.” In an August 1953 report discussing KMT inmates at the Fushun Prison, Luo made the point that “political reform and thought reform,” that is, the correct knowledge and attitude, could not be sacrificed for increased time devoted to labor in order to meet production

Revolutionary Thought Reform goals. In July 1956, he even felt he had to state explicitly, “ ‘Reform’ [gaizao] comes first, ‘production’ second.”53 Although Luo Ruiqing’s repeated emphasis on this theme implies that too many camps and brigades were not meeting his standards, prisoner accounts describe similar re-education practices usually designated for two hours in the evening in a wide range of settings in the early to mid-1950s. Accounts of prisons in Kunming, Chengdu, Beijing, Tianjin, and Shanghai and of rural (sometimes ex-urban) labor camps in Yunnan, Guangdong, Guangxi, Hunan, Hubei, Shaanxi, Shandong, and Hebei reveal similar regimens throughout the system. There were always instructional talks by camp cadres in small and mid-sized groups and at large assemblies. Prisoners were often prepared for such sessions, if literate, by reading and discussing in their small groups the simple political education pamphlets and the state-propaganda-system-produced newspapers. In certain, mainly urban, prisons, broadcasting systems were used. Inmates were often taught and led in singing revolutionary songs that reprised themes from political study. All the established methods of prison and political indoctrination were put to use.54 The key cadre in the institution was the one in charge of “disciplinary education,” for he was, in accordance with the Leninist structure, the political commissar of the unit. Midsize and large prisons and camps had a number of junior cadres leading the instruction process, which included organizing and guiding study, discussion, and criticism sessions, individual counseling, teaching songs, and lecturing prisoners on the gamut of CCP political lessons running from their version of world and Chinese history, the history of Communism, the CCP and the Chinese revolution, the main tenets of Mao Zedong Thought—especially, initially, “New Democracy” and “People’s Democratic Dictatorship”—as well as the CPPCC’s “Common Program” and each new set of policies and regulations. There were also lessons mixed in on proper hygienic conduct and the “correct attitude” to have in mind. Instructors were to follow a prescribed curriculum and take notes on the process as well. They were also to record notes of their observations and investigations of prisoners, and the results of periodic assessments of “study,” “labor,” “thought,” “actions,” “daily life,” and summarize these, much as prison instructors had done before 1949, in standard charts. All the while, they were supposed to present themselves as paragons of ascetic simplicity, sincerity of purpose, and unassailable certitude in the correctness of their belief in the party.55 It might seem that claiming such authority in front of many imprisoned former officials, well-off elites, intellectuals, students, and foreign missionaries would have posed a significant challenge to young cadres, in many cases, only themselves recently recruited to the CCP. Yet, in fact, contrary to previous models, the CCP system of reformation was designed to reverse formerly

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Revolutionary Thought Reform existing power relations as part of the mechanism of transformation, placing the young and less well-off and often minimally trained and educated in these positions, not just as a representation of social revolution, but as a tactic meant to undermine any sense of authority prisoners might have retained. Speaking as representatives of the “People’s government,” with the force of the state, its organization, and gun-toting guards behind them, the young instructor compelling obedience enacted an obliteration of any existing sense of social hierarchy distinct from the demands of the new state. Similarly, male prisoners expressed notable disquiet when they were often subjected to assessment by mid-ranking, relatively young women cadres with considerable authority. The power of the new state was often engaged by placing those seemingly once socially powerless at the forefront of disciplining the formerly socially influential.56 This process was carried forth, in part, by tactics of exacerbating “contradictions,” in other words, inciting social conflict within small discussion groups in a manner that served to isolate the recalcitrant or disobedient and mobilize most of the group against them. Just as in the Yan’an Rectification Campaign, cadres orchestrated the plan that empowered “activists” within the group, in this case inmate activists, to take the lead in carrying out “mutual criticism” and “struggle” sessions and reporting on fellow inmates. This approach not only reproduced small group political education methods used outside the penal system, it was a microcosm of the method of grassroots social revolution through empowering those most deprived and powerless under the old regime to serve as the agents of the party-state transformation and guidance of every cellular community. In the penal system context, this took a form of attempting to restructure prisoner society from within and directing it toward actively engaging in the process of reforming inmates. As noted in the previous chapter, the CCP did not try to root out cage-heads like the KMT; they replaced them with prisoner activists. Often from formerly deprived social groups, such activists assumed a role of authority within a circumscribed inmate community that inhered in material and status privileges within prison society and prospects for early release and advancement that depended heavily upon their successfully serving the aims of the cadre-instructors. This proved a low-cost, easily reproducible, and expandable method of control.57 Although the prisoner activists were ubiquitous in prison society, the main stage for their activism were the small group discussion sessions, self-criticism, mutual criticism, and “struggle” sessions that were, as in the party rectification model, the centerpiece of “disciplinary education.” Literate prisoners were required to write and rewrite their personal histories as a story of confession and awakening to a new attitude. And repetitious spoken confession continued both

Revolutionary Thought Reform in individual sessions with cadre-instructors and in self-criticism group sessions. The illusion was presented, at least initially, that such group sessions were voluntary, prisoner-organized, and open to a free exchange of ideas. Very quickly, however, it would become evident to all that the sessions were compulsory and that discussion had to follow a particular, repetitive pattern in which each group member had to play his or her assigned role in the manner of coercive voluntarism. The need to be perceived as “progressive” depended upon a confession that met the formula required and on speaking in the CCP’s specific and, for most, strange new vocabulary. It also meant actively criticizing others when they were made the object of a session and also informing on others as a means to improving one’s own situation. With every campaign sweeping the nation, all members of inmate small study groups were supposed to join in and become activists themselves. In most cases, this culminated in struggle sessions, which, very much in the mode of the Yan’an Salvation Movement, involved group pressuring extending to ganging up on and surrounding the target, incessant questioning, shouting demands for confession, and sometimes spitting, slapping, kicking, and beating with fists. In the early months of 1952, orders circulated, again in the pattern of the Salvation Movement, prohibiting such struggle-session violence. Still, instructors and prisoner activists had other sanctions at their disposal to pressure the recalcitrant through the increased physical discomforts of required standing or sitting for long periods, preventing sleep, limiting food rations, forcing unpleasant chores, and clapping the most resistant in leg-irons. Often when a prisoner was most isolated and suffering in these “struggles,” the cadre instructor would appear to counsel a way to offer the confession that would bring relief from the constant bullying and the “lenience” that promised the resolution and acceptance of reform.58 The CCP concept of reform, in theory, still shared much with its forerunners. For instance, a 1951 propaganda report on the Qinghe prison farm written for domestic and international readers described a former KMT officer inmate telling of the moment of his internal change. Surprised to be called up at an assembly session to receive an award for laboring well, he was powerfully struck, as he went forward, by what he saw in the portrait of Mao that hung above the cadres: “His serious but kindly eyes put me to shame as if they were looking into my very soul. Suddenly the face of Jiang Jieshi came across my mind. For five years that rascal fooled me into being his running-dog. I felt a wave of hatred for him so that I dared not look at Chairman Mao’s portrait again. When I was receiving the award, tears ran down my cheeks. They were tears of gratitude mingled with shame.”59 The idealized notion that internal transformation occurred in an emotionally cathartic moment born out of shame in personal

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Revolutionary Thought Reform failure and an overwhelming sense of appreciation in relation to others remained, though now the powerfully transformative feelings were not to be generated out of filial piety toward parents, but rather were to flow out of gratitude and loyalty to the Communist Party as embodied by Chairman Mao. Nonetheless, the practical significance of such self-awakening conversions from within was much reduced in the post-1949 penal re-education system. In large part, the many Yan’an Salvation Movement–style early PRC prison-camp thought reform techniques involving manipulating group dynamics, making progress at the expense of others, and denying the worth of the individual’s existing values and even rational thought (to the point of accepting absurdly false confessions) were designed not to inspire internal, emotionally cathartic change, but only to compel abject submission and loyalty. In practice, the ideal of conversions through self-realization harnessed to the aims of the state had become secondary to methods that sought to produce a thorough reconstitution of the moral landscape that would obliterate the self for the sake of the aims of the state. Even this approach to state mobilization and control, as with earlier forms, was continuously hindered by conditions of misery and suffering, which made for prisoners consumed with the struggle for survival above all else. The labor camp at West Village, where Ku Hak-chung spent a little over six months in 1952, was not nearly among those with the worst conditions. Yet Ku recalled a minimal diet of poor quality gruels with smatterings of greens, living in squalor, and laying down, often in leg-irons, dead tired after a day of hard manual labor in filthy, straw-covered bunks, falling into deep sleep to the sounds of swarms of mosquitoes descending around him. Illness was common, especially in the hot summer of 1952, and the “doctor,” with his minimal supplies, could do little for the seriously ill, one or two of which, in Ku’s unit, died each week. Forty-seven died of illness in the section during Ku’s half year there.60 Survivors of the early PRC labor camps consistently reported poor quality and insufficient rations, unhygienic conditions, overwork, nominal health care, and widespread illness and death. A medical student imprisoned first in Guangzhou in 1951 and later held in a labor camp in rural Guangdong described the chief medicines used by medical officers as castor oil, quinine tablets, some topical sulfur ointments, a few internal illness medicines, but mostly “A.P.C. pills”—the WW II cure-all for “aches, pains, complaints” developed for Allied forces, combining aspirin, the later-proven-harmful pain reliever phenacetin, and caffeine. He reported that virulent skin disease was rampant—conditions relating likely to a combination of poor hygiene, insect bites, and exacerbated by the common prisoner ailment of edema resulting from beriberi or otherwise from malnutrition. The common cases of tuberculosis were considered incurable; and there was often little to be

Revolutionary Thought Reform done for those injured in work accidents. In some places, intestinal ailments and diarrhea were deadly. “Men died each month,” the medical student reported. The food problem, he understood, was at the root of the serious health threats and remained the prisoner’s obsession: “What the prisoners hated most, and got most agitated about,” he testified, “was hunger.”61 Grim conditions were only exacerbated by instances of excessive punishments, violence, and abuse of inmates by cadres, guards, or prisoner activists. The “people’s” prisons and labor camps of the “new society,” in fact, not only exhibited all the evils of underfunded institutions of incarceration, but magnified them as the system rapidly expanded on a vast scale, leaving a bewilderingly diffuse, loosely supervised, and poorly funded network of penal institutions throughout the country. As in the past, some inmates tried to revolt or escape; others attempted suicide or lost their minds in fury or despondence. Most concentrated on survival in an environment where suffering and unnatural death had become commonplace.62 Officials at many levels, right up to Public Security Minister Luo Ruiqing, knew about what they considered failures of the system and, like penal reformers before them, they ordered further reforms. Official reports in 1951–52 discussed problems of mismanaged accounts, poor institutional organization, ineffective work styles and work programs, high illness rates among large concentrations of prisoners, and abuses by cadres and guards who cursed and beat prisoners and resorted to such inappropriate punishments as forcing inmates to stand or kneel for a long period of time and tying them up in a manner causing discomfort and pain. These problems were often officially attributed to errors made in the haste of the expansion of the system. Following a 1952 investigation in Yunnan, seventy-six reform-through-labor units were pronounced unfit to function. Still, clearly, tensions often remained that were inherent to the system, as they had been before 1949, between those officials charged with the often competing aims of security, production, and accounts, and the reform of inmates. As much as CCP cadres were often inexperienced in peacetime institutional administration, it is not surprising that the report of the Second National Reform-throughLabor Criminal Work Conference in May 1954 acknowledged ongoing “chaos” in financial management and overemphasis on “production” and again called for the reform of organizational and financial management of the camps.63 Institutional failures, in the official view, had no relation to cases of prisoner resistance and attempts to escape; those were the actions of unreformable “enemies of the people,” who deserved only severe punishment. A series of major uprisings in the Yan’an area camps in the spring of 1951, for instance, were harshly suppressed, with large numbers of participating prisoners subsequently executed.64 Although previous regimes relied also on violent sanctions

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Revolutionary Thought Reform and execution and, in cases, linked them to the system of penal reformation, the Communist state distinguished itself for its willingness to execute large numbers of people who were determined to be unredeemable. This was an expanded, generalized version of the wartime approach directed by the CCP and other regimes against political foes that in effect offered a stark choice between redemption and release or condemnation and death. Moreover, even if a prisoner had been sentenced to a specific term by a tribunal, as Ku Hakchung was informed, release depended entirely on demonstrating reform. The result of this was not just a condition of fear, but a rational culture that supported demonstrated compliance. Prisoners after 1949, like those before, concerned themselves greatly with the material minutiae necessary for living in such conditions. And the dehumanizing circumstances did not extinguish in many the capacity to express themselves, entertain themselves, and communicate with each other, necessarily in subtle but, in cases, subversive ways. For instance, the richly descriptive memoir of Shen Lixing, a young intellectual imprisoned first in Shanghai in 1955 for writing articles critical of the CCP before 1949 and later held in labor camps, adds to other accounts a detailed picture of a prison subculture of surreptitious note passing, whispering, furtive talking in the inmate’s coded lingo, and the sharing of jokes and satirical rhythmic, rhyming, punning limericks, and rumors and stories, often about sex or ghosts.65 Still, inmates, if they were to survive, carefully concealed and repressed much and learned, like prisoners in the past, how to interact and speak to authorities. Although prisoner accounts offer little evidence that anything like an idealized conversion ever occurred, inmates recognized the necessity of relating well to certain idealistic cadres who believed in conversion and sought to induce in inmates internal emotional transformations. Shen Lixing points out that cadre-instructors in Shanghai continued to emotionally manipulate prisoners to reform by discussing their family relationships, painful issues of family separation, especially divorce and deaths, and by trying to involve inmate family members as a tactic of emotional pressuring. Just when Shen was despondent on receiving news of the death of his mother, the instructor-cadre, like the instructors of the 1920s, seized the opportunity to push for an emotionally fueled change of heart, telling him, “If you want to cry, then go ahead and cry a bit, renew your spirit and do well to reform.” Shen admitted to being moved and weeping in confession, mainly when spoken to in a kindly manner by a sympathetic cadre-instructor. Moreover, he accepted the validity of the instructor’s efforts and recognized the link to the old idea of personal transformation starting from “a sense of shame” expressed in confession. However, these emotional moments did not actually engender in him any

Revolutionary Thought Reform sort of change of heart, nor were they ultimately what most influenced and led him to modify his behavior.66 Shen, like others in the prison system, made a calculated decision, based on his understanding of the rationale of the system, to work with authorities to improve his treatment and prospects for release. Survival mattered most, in his logic, and this came down to “eating.” This “eating problem,” he held, was central to everything and so “directly affects the convict’s thought reform, labor production, and health.” But eating and surviving until release depended on going along with the required “labor” and “thought reform.” And, it was clear, he held, that “thought reform,” not “labor,” was the key to “reform” and so release, because only advancing in “thought reform” would gain points and the ultimate evaluation of sufficiently “reformed.” The system was, in fact, not one of “reform-through-labor,” but “reform and labor,” hinging on progress in reform. This reform, in his view, boiled down to: “confess [jiaodai] for yourself, expose [jiefa] others.” For Shen, it was not enough just to participate by listening, confessing, and criticizing others in the four or five study sessions a week. He decided his chances would be better if he collaborated with the authorities more closely and became a prisoner activist, who led small group sessions and frequently reported on his fellow inmates to the cadres. The “little reports” (xiaobao) on others were so common that the cadres could never keep up and deal with all of them. Shen distanced himself from what he dubbed the “twofaced faction” of cynics that just “perform for the government.” Yet, the only difference between him and them would appear to be his retrospective self-justification for collaborating with his captors.67 Only some could be inmate activists like Shen Lixing; but most prisoners evidently submitted to the requirement to perform their conversion. This was most evident in the process of struggle sessions wherein most participants eventually “confessed” something, even fabrications, if only to bring an end to their ordeal. But this attitude of compliance was generalized to the whole process of reform. In Ku Hak-chung’s words, “One had no choice but to pretend to be progressive.”68 Many former inmate accounts from the early to mid-1950s testify not just to the general obedience and control achieved over most prisoners, but also to the learned performance before the cadres of enthusiasm, the “correct” positive attitude, and saying the right words (that is, to “speak as a Communist”) and “to show that you have been converted.” These attitudes, like many of the patterns of life as a prisoner, could over time become habitual in a way that could haunt the inmate after release.69 The 1950s penal thought reform did not make converts, but it was nonetheless a mechanism that supported authorities in justifying their expression of power and was, in its own endemic failure as an ideal, a method of control through coercive insinuated compliance and participation on

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Revolutionary Thought Reform the part of inmates. As Shen Lixing pointed out, even in the quiet of the clandestine inmate subculture, prisoners learned new ways to talk casually without saying any “unutterable things” that their companions could use against them. They even revised a humorous old Shanghai convict limerick guide to prison life to conclude with the line: “completely and thoroughly want to reform.”70 REFORMATION NATION: THOUGHT REFORM, 1949–1956

A scene early in the 1950 propaganda film New People Village showed some unsavory characters, described as “bad elements,” trying to escape from detention in Shanghai before they were to be transported to northern Jiangsu. Just as they finally manage to break down a gate and flee, the young woman narrator says, “Fine, go ahead. It doesn’t matter where you run. All of society is undergoing transformation and reform.”71 Escape from labor camps in the early 1950s, even with the increasing fortification of security perimeters with barbed wire and checkpoints, was not particularly difficult for those with sufficient strength, courage, and acumen. The problem was where to escape to in a society where travel was restricted by military control permits and so many communities were undergoing revolutionary mobilization. Some were released from labor camps and transported to undergo “struggles” against them led by local cadres and activists in their hometowns or villages. Others, whether detained as common criminals, vagrants, prostitutes, or drug or political offenders, were returned to situations much changed in their absence and typically assigned to an enterprise undergoing party-directed restructuring through campaigns. Ku Hak-chung had felt so pressured by the Three Anti Campaign “struggle” sessions held against him by cadres and worker activists at the district trade association, he was almost relieved to be arrested in 1952. Yet, when released a little over six months later, he found that his shop had been moved, taken over by others to become a stateenterprise, and his partners dispersed. Finding himself prevented from again opening a business and without any family to support him, Ku felt he had little choice but to depend on the party-state and take part in revolutionary activities.72 The Thought Reform Campaign was the name of only one of the major CCP revolutionary campaigns that reshaped China’s political, economic, social, and cultural landscape in the formative years of the People’s Republic. However, in fact, the ideals and methods of thought reform were as intrinsic to all of the Communist re-education programs and campaigns involved in reforming society as they were to the new penal reformative system. Just as before 1949, the CCP’s method of expansion and extension of its rule depended on the continual recruitment and training of ever-increasing numbers of new cadres and, increasingly

Revolutionary Thought Reform after 1949, the re-education of former mid- and low-ranking government officials needed to administer cities and towns. Out of money and prospects in 1949 Beijing, the twenty-eight-year-old Beijing University student Liu Shaotong answered an advertisement to join a “working group” of the recently arrived CCP, only to find himself confined to a strict training regimen of lectures, group discussions, writing autobiographical self-criticisms, confession, and mutual criticism sessions led by member activists. Before long, he had conceded to criticizing his father, family, and friends and articulating the correct views on politics, class, and labor that the activists and cadres, including a woman cadre of some authority, required. And he had learned the CCP theoretical jargon, their deliberately crude manner of “proletarian” talk, and how to act and look “progressive.” Then he and his unit were outfitted in uniforms, informed they had been made part of a section of PLA “cultural workers,” and dispatched southward to work on propaganda in the wake of the advancing army. By the time they reached Wuhan, Liu’s status had been abruptly changed to New China News Agency reporter. He had been promoted to be a trusted cadre with considerable responsibility. But Liu had seen too much that troubled him to continue serving as an apologist for the CCP, and so he escaped, first to Hong Kong and then on to Taiwan. In his initial autobiographical account, before he went on to become one of the great promoters of autobiographical writings on twentieth-century Chinese history—a lifelong endeavor that drew sharp criticism from the CCP and KMT73—Liu described the interconnection between the programs of thought reform and propaganda he had experienced and the extreme violence of the revolutionary conquest. And he penned a haunting lamentation for the heavy costs paid by those who became, as he had briefly been, instruments of the revolutionary state: No one knows how many men had to sacrifice their families to the blood hungry Revolution. No one really knows how many husbands had to give up their wives and their future to work for the future of the Organization. No list could be made of the young men who were poured out onto the battlefields without sufficient military training; of how many wounded soldiers were deserted in moments of defeat or died for lack of proper medical treatment. If lists and figures could be drawn up, no one would believe the number of people who had to change their professions or how many women were forced to marry for the honor of the People. The worst damage was that done to the minds and hearts of a whole nation. Yet the rulers were full of praise for individual instances of the tragedy, and used them as further propaganda to educate the members of their Organization.74

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Revolutionary Thought Reform Alfred Kong (Yeo-leong) was not a member of that “organization” when the PLA reached Kunming in 1950. Rather, this overseas Chinese born in Britishruled Borneo and educated in Shanghai was an experienced Maritime Customs officer when he was instructed by the new authorities to undertake “voluntary” training for former tax officials held in some holiday bungalows in the Western Mountains above Kunming Lake. He and his colleagues spent the next eight months in highly regimented “training,” replete with roll calls, inspections, schedules of lectures, instruction in revolutionary slogans and songs, CCP ideology, policies and history, and viewing propaganda films and dramas. They participated in manual labor and in writing self-critical autobiographies, group discussions, self-criticism confession, and struggle sessions. Emerging from this experience much like a released labor-reform prisoner, Kong found he was to be demoted and dispatched to a remote border office. Resigning his post, he hoped to make a living in the private sector at a distance from the new authorities, who initially struck him as too understaffed and underresourced to extend the sort of control over society about which they spoke. He would soon learn how wrong his calculation had been, in good measure because the very thought reform methods he had experienced helped build the forces of the new regime and bring about the extension of their infiltration and control of society in a way that made up for the limited resources initially at their disposal.75 Among the earliest and best known cases of this extension of thought reform beyond party and government ranks came with the late 1951 through 1952 Thought Reform Campaign aimed at and so in the process formative of, as Eddy U has pointed out, the broad category of “intellectuals” (zhishifenzi). The breadth of the campaign and so the category of intellectual expanded beyond scholars, academics, and writers to include all who worked with knowledge and culture. This meant university, institute, and high school students, high school and primary schoolteachers, and many professionals presumed to rely on advanced knowledge. Special thought reform courses, training institutes, programs, and study materials were prepared not just for students and teachers, but also for journalists, media workers, and medical doctors.76 Even well before the campaign developed within institutions nationally, models of thought reform self-criticism writings were disseminated in booklets and major newspapers. Among the most prominently promoted of these model thought reform writings were those by several of the most famous nonpolitically aligned scholars to have remained on the mainland—the philosophers Feng Youlan and Zhang Dongsun, the sociologist Fei Xiaotong, the economist Ma Yinchu, and the political scientist Qian Duansheng. Their confessional writings testified before millions both to the potential redeemability of all and the effectiveness and correctness of the

Revolutionary Thought Reform method that could sway even such great minds. What was less evident initially was how these public confessions were being coordinated with the reorganization of the education system, the folding of formerly highly regarded foreign missionary established universities like Yenching, the erasure of “Western,” especially Anglo-American “liberal” influence, the marshaling of anti-American sentiment in relation to the Korean War in support of domestic revolutionary agendas, and the restructuring of the proto-political parties of elite intellectuals, like the Chinese Democratic League and Yan Jingyue’s Chinese Association for the Promotion of Democracy, into Leninist-style “united front” organizations whose purpose was to mobilize certain segments of society in support of the party-state.77 As in Yan’an, such disciplining of the educated elites was a prerequisite to building the party as a disciplined vanguard of social transformation. This, of course, was just one sphere of the early PRC party-state directed processes of social redefinition and categorization, division, and reorganization, that, as Elizabeth Perry following Chen Yung-fa’s notion of “controlled polarization” has argued, was central to the Communist state’s establishment of a form of governance that could so dominate and transform society. For Mao Zedong and the other founding leaders, these processes of reorganization were to be supported by violent suppression, operate in tandem with campaigns, and be presaged and continually refreshed by thought reform. The regime of conversion was presented as an expanded development on the Soviet MarxistLeninist model and the central mechanism driving the ongoing revolutionary process of constructing a new state and society. Nearly everybody throughout the nation, it appeared, needed to undergo the process of personal reformation for the new society to be realized.78 Indeed, the ideal of thought reform was promoted to all the newly formed categories of PRC society, which resulted, in time, in millions experiencing the process throughout the country. Workers from the factory floors of Shanghai to mobile nonpenal and penal labor brigades building the Ya’an-to-Lhasa Highway three thousand meters high in the Himalayas all gathered for “thought work” in study and discussion groups for instruction and mutual and self-criticism. Urbanite salaried service workers and small-scale business people were to go through the process of reforming their thinking. Among “peasant” farmers too, eventually there were models of thought reform, like the former beggar turned Huanggang County (Hubei) village cadre, Liu Shaomei. Liu’s published confession told in the simplest language (as recorded by others) of how, despite all the party had given him, he had, to satisfy his “own desires,” taken “the capitalist road,” “attacked party policy, and even said that his family’s living standard had not risen after liberation.” With the example and advice of lenient cadres, Liu explained how he

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Revolutionary Thought Reform came to be ashamed, confess, take on a new mentality, and remake himself. Even Alfred Kong, who, had found a niche to hide away in the shadows as a jazz-band musician in one of the last dance cabarets in Kunming, eventually had to attend “study sessions” organized by the club’s work committee.79 So, finally, throughout PRC society, as within the penal regime, there was little possibility of evading the programs of re-education that were inherent to the Communist grassroots organizational restructuring of society carried out by growing numbers of newly trained cadres and activists. If much in the method and forms of the CCP thought reform (sixiang gaizao) resembled its precursor reformation (ganhua), still, not just the scale and intensity but much in the structure and method of the post-1949 project were a stark departure from the past and attained extraordinary potency. In essence, in so extending and attempting to realize the dream of conversion as mass state-directed social transformation—a nation of reformation—the CCP also altered much that had been compellingly inherent to earlier formulas of ethical reformation. The scale of the attempt was part of the problem. But also such CCP additions to the methods of reformation as the “struggles” involving assaults on basic human dignity, the denial of any values that openly could connect individuals to a sense of their past and organic community, the pressing of crudely reductive terminology, formulaic enthusiasms for scripted policies, and demands for confessions even when knowingly false—all had their costs for those undergoing and those directing thought reform. Returning to Beijing to work for the new China in late 1950 after a fourteen-year absence full of diverse experiences in the years of war and revolution, Bai Yongda recalled, from his experience of thought reform, the astonishing way CCP cadres, both those who had come to the city from rural areas and urban “youth” activists, could only interpret the complexities of society and recent history in their reductively simple terminologies. And out of this “knowledge formation,” Bai commented, they “created contradictions and obstructed understanding” and so passed judgments on people’s fates. The untidy fullness of pre-1949 China and the individuals who inhabited it could not even be articulated, much less appreciated or tolerated in the purified New China.80 The danger of formulaic repetition had been with institutional regimes of reformation from the start, always being decried and then reasserting themselves. So it is not surprising to find a report by an Indian journalist taken on a guided tour of a factory in Nanjing in 1952 observing that workers gathered for the daily small group discussions were “listlessly looking around or pretending to listen to the political education that was being offered.”81 Accommodations had to be made, as ever, with authority, as outright resistance proved futile. Thought reform did not come as a replacement for forms of coercive power but rather as

Revolutionary Thought Reform a companion of it. And as a form of authority, it continuously required participation that could not be avoided even by seclusion or escapism. One had to appear to have been converted in order to no longer be subjected to the process. Before 1949 even feigned compliance had usually involved negotiations, interpretations, and tensions relating to closely held notions of truth and value. It at first seemed an open question if that would still be possible in the reformation nation. The respected historian and folklorist Gu Jiegang, as Xie Yong has shown, experienced his “thought reform” at the Shanghai Academy in the summer of 1952 against the backdrop of rumored suicides and while dealing with the family crisis of the arrest of his brother-in-law in Nanjing as a “counterrevolutionary.” Still trusting in the privacy of his personal diary, Gu wrote candidly about the process. It had begun on July 9, unpromisingly, with a special trip to the municipal government compound where the chairman of the East China Education and Culture Committee, Shu Tong, spoke for four hours in such a strong Jiangxi accent and with such a lack of public-speaking ability that many could not understand and gave up paying attention. Back at the academy, day after sweltering day and into many evenings, the discomfort increased with each group session and the incessantly repeated patterns of demands, inducements, threats, ganging up and berating, long hours of sitting, and sleep deprivation— all to pressure confession. So much of it seemed pointless: “Everybody must speak, and what they say has to be what was already said last time. Thought reform has descended into formalism, which makes it difficult to reform anyone.” Gu despaired of the movement and its implication, writing, “(August 9, 1952) During the Three Antis Campaign, it was better to be corrupt than not. In the Thought Reform Campaign, it is better to be reactionary than not, as the corrupt and the reactionary have something they can say, things they can offer up, while those who are not corrupt or reactionary are not thought to be sincere. That it is difficult to be a good person is an unexpected aspect of the era of new democracy-ism; how sad!”82 This terrible recognition not of corruption or failures or immorality, but of the emptiness—the amorality—to this mechanism presumed to involve an attitude of sincerity, the creation of the good in the mind, was the deepest kind of indictment for a regime whose ubiquitous programs of thought reform were spreading everywhere its unassailable values and truths. During the spring 1957 “blooming and contending” meetings, Zhu Xing, an arts editor at New Observer magazine, stated a much more blunt criticism: “The aim of thought reform is to beat down a person’s sense of self-respect . . . until they finally beat down all people’s sense of self-respect, so the party can easily rule.”83 The party cared just little enough to prove Zhu’s point, sending him and hundreds of thousands, in

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Revolutionary Thought Reform the subsequent Anti-Rightist Campaign, to labor-reform camps and to be “re-educated” in rural cooperatives and communes. DECISIONS IN THE NEW CHINA

Yan Jingyue chose to see 1949 as a great opportunity. Finally, hope against hope, this could be the moment for China to expunge the cruelties and corruption of past regimes and attain the peace and stability necessary to grow into a wealthy and strong country safe from foreign invasion and meddling, and respected in the world. This was the chance to realize that grand social transformation—the building of a new world—by intelligently designed state-directed social organization and education and the realization of a renewed national morality that he had been thinking about and, in his own way, working for his whole life. Whatever sacrifices might be required, it must have to be worth it. Yan was among the liberal notables respectfully courted by the CCP and invited to join the CPPCC to be representatives in what was, theoretically, the new consultative government led by the Communists. Yan attended the first CPPCC sessions in Beijing at the end of September 1949. He participated in the intensely rancorous small group and mass sessions for thought reform at Yenching University. He made his own self-criticism, confessing his former admiration for the last American president of the university and the last U.S. ambassador on the mainland, John Leighton Stuart, repudiating him as an “agent of imperialism.” Sufficiently contrite, he remained among the prominent professors and administrators who oversaw the dissolution of the university in 1952 and of the academic discipline of sociology in which he had been trained and first developed as a scholar. He was allowed to join with others in establishing the Beijing Academy of Politics and Law, where he attempted to work as a scholar for the state, translating and writing about law and constitutions. This work, like the law he wrote about, was only consequential to the new regime as propaganda performance in support of party-state projects before those, at home and abroad, who might think that such things still mattered. As early as 1951, in the midst of the great suppression, and again later, Yan wrote extolling the “new” Communist reform-through-labor approach to transforming criminals. After 1957, there was no more writing. Yan’s usefulness in print and as a member of a “united front” organization had been exhausted. Eventually, in 1969, he, along with his wife, was sent to a labor camp in Su County, Anhui. Unlike Bao Junfu, who was arrested again during the Cultural Revolution and died in 1969 at the Qincheng Prison complex near Beijing, Yan Jingyue managed to survive three years as a prisoner before release permitted him a few last years in Beijing.84

Revolutionary Thought Reform Hu Yimin was also present in Beijing at the October 1 founding of the People’s Republic and was, initially, cautiously optimistic about the great promise of change and a possible role for himself in government service. Yet, while staying at the home of his niece’s in-law, the former KMT general Feng Qinzai, he grew skeptical about the CCP’s invitations for him to “stand with the people” and anxious about the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” In response to sobering news from his daughter in Nanjing about the pending new municipal government’s “settling of accounts” expropriation of his properties, his villas at Sipailou and Tangfangqiao, his Binggeng Farm, and the Cairo Hotel, Hu tried to appeal privately to friends in power, above all to Chen Mingshu, who had accepted a minor ministership. Receiving no support and feeling anxious and unwell, Hu boarded a train south to assess the situation in Nanjing for himself. Before long, heeding his daughter’s concern that he could soon be again sent to prison, Hu and his daughter packed what they could carry and took the train southward, crossing, when it was still easy to do so, to British Hong Kong by the early summer Dragon Boat Festival (June) of 1950. He spent the next thirty years living and working on the outskirts of Kowloon on an experimental farm modeled on his wartime Binggeng Farm community—coming, as the years passed, to have an exile’s deep longing for his distant native Zhejiang countryside.85 Most could not and would not flee. They made decisions of accommodation and compliance in quiet obscurity. Most who stood up to the system are unknown; and the way they articulated their decisions and responses was probably quite unlike educated elites such as Yan Jingyue and Hu Yimin. Ku Hakchung, having successfully survived a labor camp through collaborating as an activist, chose a similar course after his release, working as an activist in coordination with Guangzhou Public Security in support of drug suppression and other campaigns. He played his role speaking up in meetings and rallies and “exposed” and informed on people. At least he would survive. His nihilism was challenged, however, by witnessing many injustices and being shaken by certain of them to the point that he finally determined to escape. One such event began with the PSB slowly parading eight condemned “secret society chiefs” in the back of a truck through the streets of Guangzhou to the execution ground at Liuhua Bridge. Ku was alongside, playing his role of whipping up the crowds of onlookers, when a woman and four children burst in front of the truck and fell to their knees. The procession came to an abrupt halt before them. She was, in Ku’s view, an unremarkable local woman of about thirty, a mother to these children ranging in ages from three to perhaps twelve. The armed PSB guards rushed forward to drive them away with rifle butts and rattan switches. But neither she nor the children budged; they only wept quietly. Something in their

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Revolutionary Thought Reform stoic act caused the guards, Ku, and all around to stop. The woman shouted out mournfully, “Jingsheng, forgive me. I’ve been your wife for more than ten years and today you are going to die and I have no way even to buy you a coffin in which to bury you. Since you were arrested, we already haven’t eaten three meals. Forgive me . . . Jingsheng, open your eyes and look upon your son!” The condemned husband, whichever of the eight he was, was too restrained or too far gone to respond. But for a moment, the whole generated mass excitement for punishment was calmed. Moved by the spectacle, Ku noticed people in the crowd weeping and one of the armed guards, his head down, wiping away a tear. How could anyone with “human feeling,” Ku thought, not feel sympathy for this family, their plight, and their justifiable claim to see off the husband and father on the way to his death. Soon, however, the armed guards seized the woman and her children, taking them away, as the procession quickly moved on, without any further fanfare, to complete its purpose. Ku recognized that what he had beheld was not an act of resistance so much as a cry for justice—a ritual of moral merit—that led this woman to stand up to the party-state. And he wondered if the woman and her children had realized that they had made of themselves a ritual sacrifice for the dead.86

CONCLUSION

Chairman Mao famously boasted to the American journalist Edgar Snow on his first post-1949 visit to China, “Our prisons are not like the prisons of the past; our prisons are actually schools, and also factories or farms.” Mao made this statement on October 22, 1960, amid the horrors of the Great Leap Forward famine resulting largely from his failed utopian policies; China’s teeming prisons and labor camps were swollen to a gargantuan scale, spiraling out of the Ministry of Public Security’s control and descending into their most hellish period of brutality and starvation. Many risked everything to escape and in futile uprisings; uncounted multitudes suffered and died.1 Hypocritical and callous in the extreme, Mao’s utterance was also breathtakingly banal. The same ideal was upheld in Jiang Jieshi’s Republic of China on Taiwan, where the former warden Yin Bingdong wrote in retirement that the main purpose of modern prison reform was “to make the prison just the same as a factory or school.”2 As this book has shown, virtually the same statement had been made decades earlier by early Republican officials, and the theory and institutional practices of this ideal had taken shape well before Mao came to power. Through relating instructive cases and the experiences of emblematic participants, this book has explored the historical formation of the distinctive modern Chinese penal regime of reformation (ganhua) and its extension into and interrelated expansion with state thought reform programs that reached their apex under the Communists in the 1950s. It has sought to move beyond vague attributions to “sinofied” Soviet or “Confucian” origins and influences and presumptions about the “success” or “failure” of the thought reform regime by its own or other idealized standards in order to uncover the complex historical processes involved in its institutional establishment and revealing of the role it played as a mechanism of modern Chinese state power. Hence, this book is centrally 297

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Conclusion concerned with the crucial institutional foundational period when the ideals and standard practices of penal reformation took hold within the modern prisons constructed between the last years of the Qing dynasty and the first decade and a half of the Republic. The influence of Soviet-style party training is not discounted but is shown to have been introduced, initially by the KMT, as a significant addition to the already institutionalized modes of reforming thought. The system of penal reformation was formulated over the course of 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 socialgeographical settings; they acted in relation to the particular conditions of their situation, time, and place in a manner informed by specific historically formed cultural conceptual patterns, affinities, and proclivities. Along with mass propaganda, citizenry training and performance of state rituals in schools and social organizations, and Leninist party and military-unit political indoctrination, penal reformation soon became a key constituent part of an evolving mode of modern governance, which was radically transforming the relationship between the state and the individual. The age of major party-state projects for politicalsocial transformation and mobilization for total war and revolution ultimately brought an expansion, extension, and proliferation of the custodial and noncustodial forms of reformation. Thought reform had become an indispensable feature of mid-twentieth-century Chinese state power of momentous consequence, but not because it ever attained its self-proclaimed utopian ideal of reforming minds; rather, its potency inhered in what it justified, controlled, coerced, and compelled in the name and perpetual pursuit of its elusive ideal. Let me review the major conclusions presented in the preceding chapters. To begin with, the initial institutional formation of the system of penal reformation originated at the end of the Qing dynasty and the early Republic with the establishment of modern prisons, which along with schools and army units, were at the forefront of incipient state projects to remake society through indoctrinating individuals. The Qing scholar-official designers of these prisons not only interpreted a specific Meiji Japanese blueprint of a high modernist, statist progressive plan for rehabilitative incarceration in the Neo-Confucian language of moral education and self-cultivation, they also produced a radical theoretical redefinition of punishment as a manifestation of the late imperial NeoConfucian elite social-ethical educative project wherein the penal process became a core means of governance through individualized moral suasion. The resulting highly moralistic definition of reformation was represented as a modern technique that realized valued ancient principles and contributed to saving the state. In an era when penal reform had been linked with the drive to

Conclusion revoke extraterritoriality and regain national sovereignty, penal reformation was presented in the early Republic as vital to China’s national renewal through the transformation of criminals into disciplined, morally upstanding modern citizens. While legitimating potentially radical interventions by state authorities into the lives and internalities of citizens, the system of penal reformation advanced in a gradual, fragmented manner. Yet still by the early 1920s reformation had become the officially enshrined, powerfully conventional ideal of the legal-penal bureaucracy that had assumed a generative centrality in penal administration. Moreover, it was widely accepted by new academics and legal experts and seen as a compelling ideal for elite moralists, advocates of popular social education, citizenship training, and political indoctrination interested in remaking the hearts and minds of the “masses” as part of their envisioned agendas for a vast national social and political transformation. It was, however, the prison wardens and above all the mid-ranking prison instructors who first made a living institutional reality of penal reformation. In an era of limited funding and relatively weak central governments, these instructors, as new agents of the modernizing state, at once teacher-moralists and disciplinary officials, adapted and implemented codes and policies in ways practicable in their setting, culturally sensible and imbued with meaning and purpose for themselves and their charges. Assigned to institutions designated to support the imposition of a new urban social order for a disciplined modern society and the training of a modern citizenry to revive the nation, they creatively developed methods and teachings out of a fusion of endogenous late imperial– early Republican jiaohua public moralism with foreign-influenced civics and patriotism education, wherein long-standing conceptual patterns of ethical cultivation framed and modified discourses of modern social discipline and nationalism. Hence, the project to reform offenders and make of them “good citizens” for the modern Chinese nation centered on moral education infused with late imperial Neo-Confucian ethics hinging on filial piety and supported by the invocation of supernatural forces of moral retribution. And even as they pragmatically adapted new, imported techniques and technologies of control, surveillance, and mass propagation into culturally familiar forms feasible in their underresourced institutional settings, the instructors also employed longstanding methods of moral self-cultivation and family and community moral guidance aimed at inspiring an internal transformation. Considering crime ultimately to stem from moral failings in Confucian and Buddhist terms and the mind to be, in origin, good yet corruptible, reformable, and even purifiable through correct practice, they sought to stimulate an emotional crisis leading to catharsis—often involving powerful emotions linked to filial piety with respect

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Conclusion to a male convict’s mother; this was to be followed by a sequence of confession, feeling shame, coming to self-awareness and recognition of the original moral failing, and finally commitment to renewal and the practice of purifying the mind and maintaining sincerity. As much as the frequently referenced ideals of the system were never attained, the recorded efforts by instructors and wardens to adjust, pare down, and tailor the reformative programs to their common, mostly illiterate young male inmates reveal much not only about their actual contribution but also that of the prisoners to the construction of this institutional regime. Even though prison techniques of surveillance and evaluation could not fully reveal prisoners in all their individual human complexity let alone “know” their internal thinking, prison instructors and officers, in keeping with their service ideology of “reformationism,” routinely produced evaluations of inmates and arranged paroles and other releases that, in sum, pronounced some prisoners “reformed” and nearly all reformable. To do so, they necessarily adjusted the system in practice to accommodate prisoners as they were, not as they were idealized. Indeed, the institutional self-justification of the reformative principle was so thoroughly enshrined in standardized statistical formulas and procedures that there was no official means of even questioning whether it was possible; standards had to be modified and practical measures taken to produce plausibly reformed prisoners. In the process, prisoners had to perform their role, compromising just enough to show evidence of their reform, even as, in effect, their negotiation with authorities influenced the system and revealed the extent and limits of its power as it actually was, not as it was presumed to be. Failures of the system could only be ascribed to incompetence or corruption, inevitably triggering, in accordance with the institutional ethos of progress, calls for administrative reform and proposals promising the thorough attainment of the ever-elusive ideal of reforming minds. Much of the expansion and development of the system was carried forth by an increasingly professionalized prison bureaucracy charged with supporting burgeoning state agendas, initially, for securing urban social order through the pursuit of their standardized service ideology of “reformationism.” The dynamics of bureaucratic continuity proved a steady source of the dissemination of the methods, content, practices, and ideals of penal reformation under the KMT in the 1930s and 1940s as well as under the wartime collaborationist governments. And, their emulation of Soviet methods and claims to uniqueness notwithstanding, CCP guerrilla-base governments of the 1930s and 1940s accepted “reformationism” in its established Chinese form as a normative modern, progressive mode of penality, constructing their own systems of penal thought and labor reform on this foundation.

Conclusion It was not just Communist cadres who extended this system, originally developed in major cities, into jails and detention centers in far-flung county towns; certain reformist provincial judicial officials, county magistrates, and jail wardens did so as well, often collaborating with local elite philanthropists, public moralists, and religious organizations with whom they shared commitments well beyond the securing of local social order. The case of the Buddhist movement in Zhejiang and Jiangsu shows how local and provincial officials who had become fervent Buddhists had, in responding to a social-order crisis produced by the unfunded mandates of the new incarceration-based penal system, promoted the system of penal reformation out of their multiple, intertwining interests in local governance, moral education, and Buddhist salvation. They deployed religious mystical and ritual concepts and practices to compensate for the lack of central state funding and drew on support from the wealthy and influential members of Shanghai’s lay Buddhist associations, extended networks of lay Buddhists and monks, the Shanghai-based Buddhist publishing sector, and a Pure Land Buddhist revival led by a charismatic monk. For several years the “Buddhist reformation” movement came briefly to dominate the Zhejiang and Jiangsu penal systems, reinvigorating and spreading throughout county towns the modern techniques of penal control and reformation. Other Buddhist and Christian figures and charitable organizations and public moralist-philanthropists for decades into the late 1940s supported the penal reformation system with prison preaching and counseling, donations to underfinanced institutions, and assistance with processing released prisoners, mainly through serving as guarantors for early release cases. At the same time, the emerging cohorts of academic specialists in law, penology, and criminology, many of whom were frequent critics of the prisons, almost uniformly supported the reformation ideal, often advised on reforms, and even assumed positions as reformist prison administrators themselves. In effect, not only did many nongovernmental elites actively support the rise of penal reformation, there was general social acquiescence to the system in spite of its endemic crises and failures. With the exemplary exception of the writer Lu Xun, even vociferous critics of the prisons among academic experts, liberal rights activists, media critics, protesting parents of prisoners, and hunger-striking inmates (CCP and nonCCP alike) typically railed against mismanagement, abuses, corruption, and decried the failure of moral authority among officials and the national leadership without ever questioning the validity of the reformation system. Still, the dramatic expansion of the system of penal reformation and its significant extension beyond prison walls began with the KMT party-state and its ambitious state-building agendas, not only to attain legal-penal modernity

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Conclusion and the reordering of urban society, but also to eradicate the drug problem and suppress the Communist insurgency. This escalated further still with the imperatives of total war mobilization. The sustained mass incarceration of drug and political offenders in the 1930s, along with the rising tensions with Japan and eventual outbreak of war, drastically destabilized major prisons, undermined the reformative ideal, and brought widespread chaos and destruction. Yet these same developments also became a potent impetus to prison reform and expansion, the dissemination of penal reformation methods throughout the country, and the planning and initial development of rural prison labor camps; they also inspired the extension of the reformation system into new special carceral institutions for drug and political offenders. Even as these new institutions adapted such Soviet Leninist-style techniques of KMT party training as small group “discussions” and the coercive voluntarist inmate oral and written expression of political doctrine, they were largely modeled on the existing institutional patterns of penal reformation. Indeed, initially the self-examination institutes were often run by officials from the penal-judicial bureaucracy and KMT party–member advocates of reformation. Tensions between prison service officers and activist party cadres remained but were minimized, finally, out of a coalescence around the reformative ideal and its value to realizing their shared sense of a paternalistic generational duty to reform and so save talented “youths” for the nation. By the mid-1930s party activists, many of whom were Zhongtong internal security agents, not only took the lead in the self-examination institutes that had become key instruments in the growing apparatus of state security which was successfully suppressing the urban Communist movement, but also promoted their politicized form of reformation to the prisons and more broadly within society. This occurred amid an emerging convergence between penal reformation and Jiang Jieshi’s KMT programs for political training and the New Life Movement—the incipient mass campaign to inculcate ethics, proper social conduct, and patriotism that resembled certain visions of early Republican public moralists as well as the Japanese kyoka programs that pursued, in Sheldon Garon’s words, “systematized moral suasion on a nationwide scale.”3 The imperatives of wartime mobilization produced a stunning escalation of the earlier developments. Once unleashed by the eruption of full-scale war in 1937, the intense collective emotions for patriotic resistance to Japan were harnessed to support and inspire processes of reformation by the Chongqing KMT and Yan’an CCP governments. All the major wartime states relied on prisons to support the war effort and constructed political prisons led by militarized internal security-service agents and party activists, in part, to convert and recruit through thought reform redeemable political enemies. There were

Conclusion also initiatives adapting Japanese and Soviet Russian influences—notably those of the Japanese authorities and Wang government in the Lower Yangzi, Jiang Jingguo and his KMT forces in southern Jiangxi, the postwar KMT campaigns in Jiangsu, and the CCP Rectification and Salvation campaigns in their northern base areas—which attempted to develop comprehensive, multipronged regimes of custodial and noncustodial thought reform to “re-educate” and so win over “offenders” and “enemies” as well as those recruited to their organizations and members of targeted groups within society that might lead community mass mobilization. Out of the wartime crucible, the regime of reformation / thought reform proliferated not as an alternative to coercive violence, but as a mutually reinforcing companion and enabler of it in the projects of state-building and the making of war and revolution. The ideal of re-education inspired the necessary will of party-state agents in the name of the party’s benevolent humanitarian purposes, and legitimated, and was combined liberally with the means of violent suppression. Mass violence could be justifiably pursued because it was only meant to deal with those who would not be redeemed by conversion. Notably, as Gao Hua has argued, it was during the 1942 Rectification Campaign that “thought revolution” became the central mechanism of the Communist movement.4 And it was, thereupon, a core instrument in the process of revolutionary advance and conquest and the transformation of society after 1949. If an extreme version, early PRC revolutionary thought reform was an ultimate extension of this wartime mode. CCP thought reform programs were surely as critical to the disciplining of a rapidly expanding party and military apparatus as they were to the system of prison labor camps that mushroomed to an unprecedented scale in the early 1950s. Building on a half century of state agendas and idealized visions, the CCP constructed their vast network of penal labor camps, prisons, and reformatories initially to detain and process enormous numbers of urban underclass petty criminals, homeless “vagrants,” drug addicts and sellers, prostitutes, and purveyors of cheap leisure activity rounded up in their ordering of the cities and, especially from 1951, several million “counterrevolutionaries,” “reactionaries,” and other political prisoners branded under a variety of condemnatory labels and caught up in the whirlwind of revolutionary societal restructuring that treated all actual and potential opponents as political offenders. If often disastrously mismanaged to horrific consequence the prison-camp system became geographically and socially pervasive. Labor was the primary daily activity of the “reform-through-labor” camps, yet the demonstration of the reformed mind and character remained, in principle, the key requirement for progress and release. At the same time, throughout Chinese society, thought reform programs were

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Conclusion integral to the CCP’s processes of state-building and radical transformative social transformation as first former officials and a very broadly defined category of “intellectuals” and eventually most of those assigned to the revolutionary state’s social categories were directed to reform their minds for the sake of the revolution. In tandem with the deployment of massive military and internal security-service forces, unprecedented means of state extraction and control over economic activity, mass media, culture, and education, as well as the division of society into discrete governable units, the penal system and thought reform programs operating within numerous initiatives and campaigns had a central part in the Communist state’s radically transformative revolution. Much of the CCP version of the thought reform regime resembled its predecessors and revealed its debt to the foundations laid in the early decades of the century. Even the adapted Leninist emphasis on small group “study” and “selfcriticism” sessions, the coercive voluntarist repetitive oral and written recitation of the party line, and the involvement of participants in “leading” the process were accentuations of and expansions on methods developed earlier by others, mainly under the KMT. Yet even if many of the CCP claims to uniqueness were overblown, the CCP did introduce several distinctive modes and methods that rendered their thought reform regime unlike its predecessors not just in its vast scale, but also in the experience of its disciplinary process. Notably, the CCP enacted a style of performed ascetic egalitarianism closely linked to the controlled empowerment of activists selected from within the reforming group and so assisting in its direction from within. In the penal and labor-camp setting, the model of trained cadres and activists following a simple set of methods in austere, provisional settings was easily reproducible. And where inmate activists predominated, neither “cage-heads” nor the communal inmate bond of the nanyou could exist. Such activists, moreover, took a leading role in carrying out the Soviet secret police–influenced interrogation and organized intimidation “struggle” tactics inducing severe physical and psychological distress, adapted by Kang Sheng during the wartime Salvation Movement. Even though the party leadership periodically disavowed the most extreme of these methods, the Salvation Movement tactics were generally combined with earlier reformation approaches in 1950s CCP thought reform in a manner that regularly inverted a disciplinary mode long designed and still often pursued in highly moralistic terms into, as Gu Jiegang discovered to his distress, an amoral commitment to absolute loyalty. That is not how Mao Zedong saw it. In his view, those who cast the sort of aspersions on thought reform that Gu did failed to understand Mass Line theory (through which the party discerned and promoted the will of the masses) and

Conclusion the Communist morality that inhered in the revolutionary masses and was represented by the CCP. Callous and banal as he and his fellow leadership were, they were not cynical about the reformative ideal, nor did they consider it superficial. Indeed, they took thought reform in all its guises to be the preeminent defining practice of the Maoist advances in Communist revolutionary social transformation. Perhaps the most striking way this case was made to domestic and international audiences was through the propaganda campaigns celebrating the “reform” and releases of prominent incarcerated Japanese, collaborator, and KMT “war criminals.” When the Soviet officials planning the return of 969 Japanese POWs to China in July 1950 told their Chinese counterparts that these Japanese military officers were the “worst sort of reactionaries” who “absolutely cannot be reformed,” the CCP leadership took great interest in their “reform,” as they did with the Manchukuo emperor, Puyi. The Japanesebuilt Fushun Prison in Liaoning was refitted to be the model institution for this performative transformation that could be viewed by visiting delegations. Then in February 1956, a group of these “famous Japanese war criminals” was taken on a national tour both so they could view and acknowledge the evidence of “war crimes” and see the wonders of China’s revolutionary change. At public rallies, for instance, on their arrival at railway stations in major cities, Japanese POWs like Miyazaki Hiroshi would appear before the crowds, hang their heads, confess their crimes, and, shedding tears, publicly apologize to the Chinese people. Following these performed moments of transformation came releases with the special Tenth Anniversary amnesties in 1959 for select labor-camp prisoners and the main group of Japanese “war criminals.” This was promoted as evidence of one of the great unprecedented achievements of the first decade of CCP rule—that even those most evil of the evil could be remade into the good.5 Thus dramatized, thought reform represented the transcendent power of the CCP, acting in the name of “the people.” Such displays of moral authority— evidence of a correct way patiently pursued by a benevolent party-state— became the distinctive emblem of a Maoist communism purporting to be a model alternative route to modernity for China and the world. Internationally, critics of Maoism who feared “brainwashing” and sympathizers impressed by an apparently humanitarian alternative to Stalinism tended to share an acceptance of its mythology, and for years they continued to debate the extent of its success.6 And even after several decades, when, for instance, in the case of prominent KMT “war criminals,” evidence came to light that some had been more amenable to re-education than others, scant attention was paid to how the entire category had been defined, arranged, and staged for their role. The officially reported 871 KMT “war criminals” held in

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Conclusion 1957 was not a full accounting but a category of those deemed to have the potential to be useful through their performed re-education.7 The role of thought reform in propaganda ought not to be taken as a sign of its limitations as a mechanism of governance. Much work remains to be done in a future study to examine the multiple ways in which thought reform was deployed, evolved, experienced, and engaged with in the Mao era; but certainly there is much evidence to suggest it was a persistent mechanism in many settings for ordering conduct and establishing the party’s truths. Thought reform processes defined for those involved both the “correct line” and what was incorrect, what belonged to the promise of the future and what was to be consigned to the incinerator of history. Even the recovery of modern history with the Historical Documents Collection (Wenshi ziliao) series began when, with the support of Zhou Enlai in 1962, former KMT and Beiyang officials and others with notable pre-1949 experiences were “invited” to write memoirs, as one memoirist recalled, as “a good opportunity to reform your thinking.”8 The regime of thought reform and the language that accompanied it became ubiquitous, always easily reproduced for every campaign or occasion. After all, even Deng Xiaoping, when sent down to Jiangxi by Mao during the Cultural Revolution, acknowledged and underwent the performance of labor and thought reform.9 Not unlike penal reformation, then, thought reform had the multiple significant manifestations as a convention for ordering conduct and expression of unified core principles, as a performed representation of the benevolent moral authority of the state and as an ultimate ideal generally attractive and capable of inspiring action. As Gao Hua pointed out, “The appeal to education” of the Yan’an Rectification Campaign thought reform initially inspired “an affinity that was easily accepted by people.”10 In fact, as this book has shown, the linking of long-standing utopian dreams of morally cultivating people to secure earthly order, justice, and harmony to modern institutional techniques of governance had originated well before, in early twentieth-century penal reformation. Amid the horrifying mid-century violence and chaos, the Communist version of this optimistic vision of pursuing the conversion and perfection of all for the good of all constituted a compelling promise and motivating impetus in the making of the Maoist revolutionary state. Yet all of this, as this study has shown, rested precariously on systems that, of course, were ever distant from their ideals. As has been argued here, even in the wake of its formative period, penal reformation became a significant instrument of state power in spite of the fact that it was fundamentally incapable of attaining its own idealized standard of inducing thorough internal conversions. What it could accomplish, seemingly, at least in the sufficiently well organized and administered institutions and

Conclusion programs of reformation of all the various political regimes, was compelled compliance and compromise before institutional authority sufficiently plausible, through adjusted practices and evaluations to accommodate inmates according to their actual capacities and subjective human mentalities, to pronounce them “reformed.” Even as minds were not reformed in any ideal sense, those undergoing the process mostly conformed before authority. And even as their own sincerely voiced expressions were central to the process, their voices could not remain entirely free of the program to reform them. With the KMT and CCP introduction of Leninist political indoctrination methods, especially the impelled lengthy recitation of the controlled scripts of the party line, the significance of the inmate’s voice as an expression of authentic, elemental core values was, contrary to party-state claims, minimized in the pursuit of uniformity. Some officials clearly recognized that thought reform programs for mobilization pursued through rote repetition often enforced with pressuring and intimidation could produce superficial parroting, duplicity, disaffection, passive withdrawal, and mental collapse. Yet even as the idea of the originally good and so purifiable mind persisted, as did forms of self-cultivation and internal exposure to reveal the root failings within, followed by the generated emotionally cathartic moment born of shame and so inspiring a profound recognition of the highest universal, immanent moral principles, the Communist methods that dominated after 1949 in practice increasingly moved away from anchoring the reform process in an experience of moral authenticity. This evoked surprise from some who had expressed a willingness to undergo a reformation process only to encounter Kang Sheng’s methods of relentless confession, self-criticism, mutual criticism, and exposure of others driven by intimidation, physical abuse, social manipulation, the undermining of others, and outright falsehood and fabrication in the name of the “correct” truth. Such methods designed to crush individuality and forge extreme loyalty, not unlike penal reformation, produced not converts but the initiated, who, through the hard lessons of survival, learned their designated role, how to interact with and speak the language and lines assigned them by authorities. Through such coercive indoctrinary means, the system succeeded in securing mass compliance in support of “the people’s” party-state. But the amorality to the process, it seems, had its costs. Lurking behind a regime so constructed was a specter of nihilism that promised to shake the faith not just of those subject to the system, but also of those directing it and, by extension, in the legitimacy of the party-state itself. There was much else certainly contributing to undermining that legitimacy. As Maoism began to run off the rails with the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, there was only an increase in the formulaic demands to

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Conclusion reform thought and in the commonness of some form of prison labor-camp experience. Among the figures discussed in this book who stayed on the mainland after 1949, it was not just the Shanghai Tilanqiao prison wardens of three different regimes who ended up incarcerated within the much-troubled penal system. In 1969, the same year Yan Jingyue was sent to a labor camp and Bao Junfu died at a detention house adjacent to Qincheng Prison outside Beijing, He Fang entered a rural May Seventh Cadre School, an institution much like a labor camp, remaining for nine years. Even Public Security Minister Luo Ruiqing, after surviving a suicide attempt at the onset of the Cultural Revolution, ended up in prison.11 Maoism consumed many who had made and led the state institutions of control. When Mao’s heirs began China’s great reversal of course, the thought reform regime, as with other key elements of Mao’s revolutionary state, was not immediately dismantled, but rather much diminished in such a way that its descendants have been recognizable but pale forms. Li Honglin, for instance, has described the relatively anemic state campaigns of the 1980s as the final stages of a CCP thought reform regime that began in Yan’an in 1942.12 Indeed, periodic calls to rectification and party moralism and political training, often drawing directly on thought reform language, have continued from time to time ever since within the CCP.13 Still, its ongoing influence has longest been preserved in the prison system, even amid concerted efforts to distinguish the present system from the Maoist labor camps. The term “reformation” (ganhua) is again described as the key mechanism of the prisons; and echoes from the past resound in post–Mao era laudatory official accounts of rehabilitation programs. For instance, a 1991 Jiangsu No. 1 Prison report related the woman inmate Chen Yin’s description of her reform after an instructor had a “heart to heart talk” with her when she was upset. Shedding tears as she spoke, she said that thanks to the instructor, she had come to understand: “I let down my parents, let down my husband, and even more let down my child. My child is more than three years old and I haven’t in the slightest taken the responsibility of a mother.” A lecturer at the prison, moreover, was described as speaking words that “made people weep, moving them to the bottom of their hearts, deeply impacting the spirits of those that had gone astray.”14 A similar case from 2000, focusing on the relationship of a benevolent instructor and a troubled inmate, concludes, “In the end, prisoner Chen was moved by the true feelings of [instructor] Chen Dexun, weeping and saying, ‘I certainly want sincerely to be obedient and to actively reform, lest I be unworthy of the concern and caring of my government cadre.’ ”15 This sort of emotional moral discourse has been portrayed by contemporary Chinese penal authorities as intrinsic to a

Conclusion distinctively Chinese form of penal rehabilitation, usually without any reference to its historical origins. At least in theory, the ideal of penal reformation lives on in the prisons. Yet the penal reformative ideal is resoundingly no longer accompanied by noncustodial thought reform programs or a part of anything like the grand transformative vision of state and society that reached its apex in the 1950s. The post-1978 shift away from the pervasively invasive mobilizational state to the authoritarian control state and the freeing of the energies of families and individuals for the sake of improving their economic lot in order to enrich the nation was not compatible with thought reform. When the individual was no longer foremost conceived of by the state as a political-ethical person but rather as an economic person whose economic success (along with tacit loyalty) was of greatest import, the regime of conversion became obsolete. Even so, there is still much to explore, consider, and tell of this twentieth-century history and good reasons not to forget or obscure it. Authorities who obstruct such historical investigations implicitly betray a complicity in the injustices of the past; to ignore such history is also to miss an opportunity. As in so many other notable cases, uncovering process and contingencies in history reveals, among other things, that there is nothing inevitable, inherent, or indefinitely characteristic of a particular place and people. The worst horrors, including the prison camps and mass executions of 1950s China, are not phenomena outside of history; they are not external to the realm of common human experience, and so do not fall beyond our understanding and responsibility. Thus inspired, this book has sought to tell the story of a compelling ideal, how it came to compel unrelenting endeavors to remake minds, a society, and nation, and what it compelled, bringing, finally, tragic consequences for so many people and assuming a significant part in the making of modern China.

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SELECTED GLOSSARY OF CHINESE TERMS

anfen shouji baojia baoshi Binggeng nongzhuang changshi chi danghua daochang datong fa fanxing fanxing biji fanxingyuan fanxing zizhuan fohua foxue ganhua gaiguo qianshan gaiguo zixin gaizao ganhua ganhua dui ganhua jiaoyu ganhua quandao ganhuayuan ganhuazhuyi ganqing gemian xixin

安分守己 保甲 保釋 幷耕農莊 常識 恥 黨化 道場 大同 法 反省 反省筆記 反省院 反省自傳 佛化 佛學感化 改過遷善 改過自新 改造 感化 感化隊 感化教育 感化勸導 感化院 感化主義 感情 革面洗心

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Glossary geyan gongde gonggong weisheng gongyi guanggun guanjiao guanxun hanjian huiguo zixin jianyu jianyuxue jiao jiaodai jiaohua jiaohua zhi ru jiaohui jiaoyangsuo jiaoyu jiefa jieyansuo junzi kanshousuo kaozheng laodong gaizao laodong ganhuayuan laodong shengchansuo laogai li longtou lüeyou mingxing bijiao namo emituofo nanyou nianfo qiangjiu yundong qianshansuo renqing saihui shanshu shenghuo jiantao hui sixiang gaizao

格言 公德 公共衛生 公益 光棍 管教 管訓 漢奸 悔過自新 監獄 監獄學 教 交代 教化 教化之儒 教誨 教養所 教育 揭發 戒煙所 君子 看守所 考證 勞動改造 勞動感化院 勞動生產所 勞改 禮 籠頭 略誘 明刑弼教 南無阿彌陀佛 難友 念佛 搶救運動 遷善所 人情 賽會 善書 生活檢討會 思想改造

Glossary sixiang ganhua sixiang kaocha sixiang lu Subei wei xin xinao xing xingqi wuxing xinren xuexiao xiushen xiuyangren xuexi taolun hui xueyuan xundao xunlian yi yuantu jujiao bamin yin yinguo baoying zhengzhifan zixinren zixin xueyisuo zuifan xiyisuo

思想感化 思想考察 思想錄 蘇北 偽 心 洗腦 刑 刑期無刑 新人學校 修身 修養人 學習討論會 學員 訓導 訓練 以圓土聚教罷民 陰 因果報應 政治犯 自新人 自新學藝所 罪犯習藝所

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ABBREVIATIONS IN THE NOTES

“BFZSF”: BHDYJB: BIC: “BJJYJ”: BRIC: “BSFTF”:

“BYMNY”: “BZCTB”: “CCGXJQ”:

CCLPC:

CFYZJ:

CICRC:

Yan Jingyue, “Beijing fanzui zhi shehui fenxi” (A social analysis of crime in Beijing), Shehui xuejie, no. 2 (June 1928). Wu Zhiyuan, Beiping hebei diyi jianyu baogao (Report on the Beiping Hebei No. 1 prison) (Beiping: Hebei diyi jianyu, 1937). Kenneth Chen, Buddhism in China (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1964). Yan Jingyue, “Beiping jianyu jiaohui yu jiaoyu” (Beiping prison moral instruction and education), Shehui xuejie, no. 4 (June 1930). Holmes Welch, The Buddhist Revival in China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968). Zhang Jingyu, “Beijing sifabu fanzui tongji de fenxi” (Analysis of the Beijing Ministry of Justice crime statistics), Shehui xuejie, no. 2 (June 1928). Zhou Shuzhao, “Beiping yibai ming nufan yanjiu”(Research on a hundred women criminals in Beiping), Shehui xuejie, no. 6. “Beijing zaijianren chengfa tongji biao,” SFGB, no. 2.12 (Sept. 30, 1914). “Cheshi chafu ge xinjian jiaohui qingxing” (Thoroughly investigate and report on the moral instruction situation in the various new prisons) (June 22, 1923), SFGB, no. 179 (July 31, 1923). Philip C. C. Huang, Code, Custom, and Legal Practice in China: The Qing and the Republic Compared (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002). Deng Zimei, Chuantong fojiao yu zhongguo jindaihua (The Buddhist tradition and Chinese modernization) (Shanghai: Huadong shifan daxue chubanshe, 1996). Commission Internationale Contre Le Régime Concentrationnaire, White Book on Forced Labour in the People’s Republic of China (Paris: Centre International d’Edition et de Documentation, 1957– 58), vols. 1 and 2.

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Abbreviations CLR: CPP: “CRSCC”: “CXSGL”:

DFZ: “DSSSXABB”:

DXTN: FP: FPP: FTW: FZ: FZXYJ: “GJY”: “GSGJ”:

GZ: GZZ: GZZZDSX:

“HDZY”:

JDEJBS: JDJB:

China Law Review. Frank Dikötter, Crime, Prison and Punishment in Modern China (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002). Yen Ching-yueh [Yan Jingyue], “Crime in Relation to Social Change in China,” Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1934. “Choushe xinjian shixing ganhua ling”(Order to plan to carry out reformation in the new prisons) (Sept. 15, 1923, Presidential Order), SFGB, no. 184 (Oct. 31, 1924). Dongfang zazhi (Eastern miscellany). “Difang shenpanting siniandu shoushou xingshi anjian bijiao biao” (Comparative chart of 1915 local court processed criminal cases), SFGB, no. 60 (May 30, 1916). Diyici xingshi tongji nianbao (First annual report of crime statistics) (Beijing, 1914). Falu pinglun (The legal critic). Chen Chi, First Peking Prison (Peking: First Peking Prison, 1916). Faquan taolun weiyuanhui (Commission on the discussion of legal rights). Faxue zazhi (Legal studies magazine). Sun Xiong, Fanzuixue yanjiu (Criminology research) (Shanghai: Zhonghua shuju, 1939). Zhao Jianxun, “Gaige jianyu yijianshu”(Opinion letter on prison reform), FP, no. 600 (May 12, 1935). “Guanyu suzhou guomindang jiangsu lujun junren jianyu zuotanhui fayan zhaiyao” (Summary of the speeches at the discussion meeting concerning the KMT army prison in Suzhou), WZX, no. 69 (1980). Gemingshi ziliao (Revolutionary history materials), vol. 13 (Beijing, 1984). Ge Zhaoguang zixuanji (Selected collection of Ge Zhaoguang) (Guilin: Guangxi shifan daxue chubanshe, 1997). Zhongguo di’er lishi dang’an guan (Second Historical Archives of China), Guomindang zhengfu zhengzhi zhidu dang’an shiliao xuanbian (Edited selections of archival historical materials of the KMT government political system), vol. 2 (Hefei: Anhui jiaoyu chubanshe, 1994). Xiao Ming, “He dajiemen zai yuzhong” (With the big sisters in prison), in Zhonggong nanjing shiwei dangshi bangongshi yu yuhuatai lieshi jinianguan, ed., Tiechuang suiyue: Gongchandang ren zai nanjing yuzhong de douzheng, 1927–1937 (Years of iron windows: The prison struggles of the communists in Nanjing) (Nanjing, Dongnan daxue chubanshe, 1992). Liang Jinhan, Jingshi di’er jianyu baogao shu (Report on the capital No. 2 prison) (Beijing: Jingshi di’er jianyu, 1920). Wang Yuanzeng, Jingshi diyi jianyu baogao (Capital No. 1 Prison report), 2nd ed. (1915; repr., Beijing: Jingshi diyi jianyu, 1917).

Abbreviations JDL: JDYJB: JFL: JGGJBL:

JGJ: “JGLJ”: JJDDS: “JJSS”: JPA: “JSDEJZG”:

JWZJ: JZ1.1: JZL: “KGJZBT”:

KSJ: “LXYZG”: MJFX:

MOJ: MRDC: “MSDJZ”:

Rui Jiarui, Jianyu zhidu lun (On the prison system) (Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1934). Li Zhuxun, Jiangsu diyi jianyu baogao (Report on the Jiangsu No. 1 Prison) (Nanjing, 1919). Dong Kang, ed., Jianyu fangwen lu (A record of visits to prisons) (Beijing, 1907). Zhu Shen, Jingwai gailiang ge jianyu baogao luyao (Summaries of reports on prison reform inside and outside the capital) (Beijing, 1919). Wang Yuanzeng, Jianyu guize jiangyi (Lectures on prison rules) (Beijing: Jingshi diyi jianyu, 1917). “Jianyu gailiang jiyao” (Summary of prison reform), March 1924, SFGB, no. 191 (May 31, 1924). Liu Qifei, ed., Jiang Jieshi de daqiutu shilu (Records of the major prisoners of Jiang Jieshi) (Beijing: Tuanjie chubanshe, 1994). Ni Yaokui, “Jiangsu jiu sifajie suoji” (Trivial record of the Jiangsu old judicial circles), in JWZJ. Jiangsu Provincial Archives. “Jiangsu sheng di’er jianyu zhengzhifan gao quanguo lushi gonghui shanghai lushi lianhehui shu” (Letter from the political prisoners of the Jiangsu No. 2 Prison to the National Lawyers Association and the Shanghai United Lawyers Association), letter dated Mar. 30, 1933, Hoover East Asian Collection, 4270/3481. Jiangsu wenshi ziliao jicui (Select collection of Jiangsu historical materials) (Nanjing: Jiangsu wenshi ziliao jicui bianjibu, 1995). Jianyu zazhi (Prison magazine), no. 1.1 (Nov. 1929). Ogawa Shigejiro, Jianyu zuoye lun (On prison work), trans. Xu Jinxiong (Tokyo: Tokyo Keikan gakko, 1908). Wang Shurong, “Kaocha geguo jianyu zhidu baogaoshu tiyao” (Summary report of investigation of various nations’ prison systems) in Wang Shurong, ed., Yuwu wuzhong (Five documents on prison affairs) (Beijing, n.d., ca. 1922). Kaocha sifa ji (Investigation of the judicial system) (Beijing: Beijing ribao guan, 1924). Wang Wenbao, “Lidai xinglu yange zhi gailue” (Historical development of criminal law), Shehui xuejie, no. 1 (June 1927). Shandong sheng laogaiju, ed., Minguo jianyu fagui xuanbian (Selected prison laws and regulations of the republic) (Jinan: Zhongguo shuge, 1990). Ministry of Justice. Xu Youchun, ed., Minguo renwu dacidian (Biographical dictionary of the republic) (Shijiazhuang: Hebei renmin chubanshe, 1991). Yin Changfa, “Minchu Shanxi diyi jianyu zuifan de jiaohui yu zuoye tanxi” (A discussion of convict moral instruction and work at the Shanxi No. 1 Prison in the early republic), in ZJZBYW.

317

318

Abbreviations “NDD”: “NDZJ”:

NYLJ: OHP: “PSMQLC”: QFYS: QMGJZ:

QSHH: QXZ: QZYXSZJC:

RCETC: RGAPC: “RQ”: “RQZH”: RTMC: SBBQB: SDFXYGZBG: “SDJQQG”:

SDWXTN:

Xia Zhixu, “Nujian de douzheng” (The women’s ward struggle), in Tiechuang suiyue. Shuai Mengqi, “Nu dangyuan zhi jiechuzhe: Ji He Baozhen lieshi” (An outstanding female party member: Remembering martyr He Baozhen), in Tiechuang suiyue. Nanjing yuhuatai lieshi jinianguan (Nanjing Yuhuatai martyrs memorial). Norval Morris and David J. Rothman, eds., The Oxford History of the Prison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). Joanna Waley-Cohen, “Politics and the Supernatural in Mid-Qing Legal Culture,” Modern China 19, no. 3 (July 1993). Bo Yibo, Qishinian fendou yu sikao (Seventy years of struggle and reflection) (Beijing: Zhonggong dangshi chubanshe, 1996). Xue Meiqing, Xu Jungang, Yang Ying, Yang Diansheng, and Chen Zhihai, eds., Qingmo minchu gailiang jianyu zhuanji (Special collection on the prison reforms at the end of the Qing and beginning of the Republic) (Beijing: Zhongguo jianyu xuehui, 1997). Sifayuan, Quanguo sifa huiyi huibian (Collected reports of the national judicial conference) (Nanjing, 1935). Qingshigao xingfazhi zhujie (Explanatory notes on the annals of criminal law in the Qing history) (Beijing: Falu chubanshe, 1957). Tao Xisheng, Qingdai zhouxian yamen xingshi shenpan zhidu ji chengxu (The Qing era district and county office criminal justice system and process) (Taibei: Shihuo chubanshe, reissue 1972). Report of the Commission on Extra-territoriality in China, no. 3 (London: His Majesty’s Secretary for Foreign Affairs, 1926). Ministry of Justice, Rules for the Government and Administration of Prisons in China (Peking, 1913). Huang Jue’an, “Ruyu qianhou” (Before and after going to jail), in Tiechuang suiyue. Chen Zhixi, “Ruyu qinian zhi huigu” (Looking back on seven years in prison), Jianyu zazhi, no. 1.1 (Nov. 1929). Wing-tsit Chan, Religious Trends in Modern China (New York: Columbia University Press, 1953). Sifabu baniandu banshi qingxing baogao (Report on the management situation of the Ministry of Justice in 1919) (Beijing, 1919). Shandong fanxingyuan gongzuo baogao (Work report of the Shandong self-examination institute) (Jinan, 1934). “Shanxi diyi jianyu quanqi qiufan gao gejie tongbao shu” (Letter from all the Shanxi No. 1 Prison prisoners to inform the various compatriots), letter dated Nov. 11, 1933, in Zhongguo luntan (China forum), no. 3.3 (Dec. 1933). Sifabu di wuci xingshi tongji nian (Ministry of Justice fifth annual crime statistics) (Beijing, 1921).

Abbreviations SFGB: “SFGZBG”: SHAC: SHP: SJBQB: SJP: “SJYSZGZ”:

SJZ: “SNDSF”:

“SXEN”:

“SXXSGFNSS”:

SZD: TOM:

“WDTS”: WZX: XSH: XZYHZ:

YFW: YGLSX:

Sifa gongbao (Judicial report). “Sifa gongzuo baogao” (Judicial work report), in QMGJZ. Second Historical Archives of China. Shen Hong preface in JZL. Sifa jiuniandu banshi qingxing baogao (1920 judicial work report) (Beijing, 1922). Shen Jiaben preface to Dong Kang, ed., Jianyu fangwen lu (A record of visits to prisons) (Beijing, 1907). Hu Yimin, “Sanfan jianyu, sici zuolao de guomindang zhongyang jianyu zhang” (The KMT central prison warden, who built three prisons and was imprisoned four times), in JJDDS. Li Guilian, Shen Jiaben zhuan (Biography of Shen Jiaben) (Beijing: Falu chubanshe, 2000). Xu Huifang and Liu Qingyu, “Shanghai nuxingfan de shehui fenxi” (Social analysis of Shanghai female offenders), Dalu (Mainland), no. 1.4 (Oct. 1, 1932). “Sifa xingzheng bu ershisi nian yiyue zhi bayue gongzuo gaiyao” (Outline of Ministry of Judicial Administration work from January to August 1935), FP, no. 621 (Oct. 6, 1935). “Sifa xingzheng bu xunzheng shiqi gongzuo fenpei nianbiao shuoming shu” (Explanation of the annual charts on the Ministry of Judicial Administration work allocation in the time of political tutelage), JZ1.1. Sifabu zongwuting diwuke (Fifth section of the general affairs department of the Ministry of Justice). Xiaoqun Xu, Trial of Modernity: Judicial Reform in Early Twentieth Century China, 1901–1937 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008). Huang Kai, “Wo de tegong shengya” (My career as a special agent), in ZWZW. Wenshi ziliao xuanji (Selections of historical materials). Xu Shiying, Xu Shiying huiyilu (Memoir of Xu Shiying) (Taibei: Renjianshi yuekanshe, 1966). Guo Ming, Xueshu zhuangxing yu huayu chonggou: Zouxiang jianyuxue yanjiu de xin shiyu (Academic transformation and the reconstruction of discourse: Toward a new perspective on penology research) (Beijing: Zhongguo fangzheng chubanshe, 2003). Yinguang, Yinguang fashi wenchao (Collected writings of master Yinguang), Xu Weiru, ed., (Suzhou: Honghua she, 1934). Yuhuatai geming lieshi shuxin xuan (Selected letters of the Yuhuatai revolutionary martyrs) (Nanjing: Jiangsu shaonian erzhong chubanshe, 1988).

319

320

Abbreviations YGZJMS:

YJLJ: YSJGJZ: YWDQ: YZZS: ZGDYR: “ZGY”: “ZJBNGZY”:

“ZJH”:

ZJSH: “ZJW”: ZJWCYXW:

ZJZBYW:

“ZLSZYK”:

ZMZ: ZNSDGB: ZPA: ZRGSCZH:

Ying Mingyang, Yuan guomindang zhongyang jianyuzhang miwen shilu: Ying Mingyang changpian jishi wenxue xuan (A true record of the secrets of the former KMT central prison warden: Selected full-length reportage of Ying Mingyang) (Beijing: Jingji ribao chubanshe, 1991). Yan Jingyue, Yan Jingyue lunwen ji (Yan Jingyue’s collected scholarly articles) (Beijing: Kaiming chubanshe, 1995). Yunnan sheng jianyu guanliju jianyu zhiban (Yunnan Province Prison Management Bureau prison records office). Sun Xiong, Yuwu daquan (Compendium on prison affairs) (1931, repr., Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1935). Hu Yimin, Yuzhong zishu (Prison account) (Nanjing, 1928). Mao Dun, ed., Zhongguo de yiri (One day in China) (1936, repr., Shanghai: Minguo congshu, vol. 3, Shanghai shudian, 1991). Zhang Mingyuan, “Zai guomindang yuzhong” (In the KMT jail), in GZ. Xu Yongshun, “Zhongguo jianyu bu neng gaijin zhi yaoyin” (The key reasons why China’s prisons cannot be improved), Dagongbao (L’Impartial), (Feb. 26, 1930). Zhang Jinbao, “Zhang Jinbao huiyilu”(Memoir of Zhang Jinbao), Jiangsu dangshi ziliao (Jiangsu party historical materials), vol. 4 (1985). Zhongguo jianyu shiliao huibian (Collected historical materials on Chinese prisons), vol. 1 (Beijing: Qunzhong chubanshe, 1988). Yan Jingyue, “Zhongguo jianyu wenti” (The Chinese prison question), Shehui xuejie, no. 3 (Sept. 1929). Zhongguo zhengfa daxue jianyushi yanjiu zhongxin yu Tianjinshi jianyu guanliju, eds., Zhongguo jianyu wenhua de chuantong yu xiandai wenming (The traditions and modern civilization of Chinese prison culture) (Beijing: Falu chubanshe, 2006). Xia Zongsu and Zhu Jimin, eds., Zhongwai jianyu zhidu bijiao yanjiu wenji (Collected comparative research on Chinese and foreign prison systems) (Beijing: Falu chubanshe, 2001). Li Weiyan, “Zhongguo lidai shenpan zhidu yange kao” (Research on the evolution of China’s historical court system), in Faxue congkan, no. 1.1 (Mar. 1930). Hao Zaijin, Zhongguo mimi zhan (China’s secret war) (Beijing: Jincheng chubanshe, 2010). Zhonggong Nanjing shiwei dangshi gongzuo bangongshi (CCP Nanjing municipal party committee party history work office). Zhejiang Provincial Archives. Zhonghua renmin gongheguo shenpanfa cankao ziliao huibian (People’s Republic of China judicial law reference documents compilation) (Beijing: Zhengfa xueyuan, 1956).

Abbreviations ZWJSD:

ZWZW: ZXJBL: ZXZX:

Liu Junwen and Chi Tianwen, Zhongri wenhua jiaoliu shi daxi, Fazhi zhuan (The great historical ties of cultural exchange between Japan and China, legal system volume) (Hangzhou: Zhejiang renmin chubanshe, 1996). Zhonghua wenshi ziliao wenku (China historical materials collection), vol. 8 (Beijing: Zhongguo wenshi chubanshe, 1996). Zhu Ziyuan, Zhongguo xinjiu jianyu bijiao lu (A comparison of China’s old and new prisons) (Beijing, 1916). Peng Ming, ed., Zhongguo xiandaishi ziliao xuanji (Selection of Chinese contemporary history materials), vol. 3 (Beijing: Fengtai yinshuachang, 1987).

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NOTES

pr o l o g u e 1. Robert Jay Lifton, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of “Brainwashing” in China (New York: W.W. Norton, 1963), vii, ix, xi, 3, 5, 6, 414, 419. 2. Edward Hunter, Brainwashing in Red China: The Calculated Destruction of Men’s Minds (New York: Vanguard Press, 1951); Edward Hunter, Brainwashing: The Story of the Men Who Defied It (New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1956); Tung Chi-ping and Humphrey Evans, The Thought Revolution (New York: Coward-McCann, 1966). 3. Edgar Snow, The Other Side of the River: Red China Today (London: Victor Gollancz, 1966); Allyn Rickett and Adele Rickett, Prisoners of Liberation (New York: Anchor Press, 1973); Harriet C. Mills, “Thought Reform: Ideological Remolding in China,” Atlantic Monthly 204 (Dec. 1959). 4. John W. Clifford, SJ, In the Presence of My Enemies (New York: W.W. Norton, 1963), 75–77; Lifton, Thought Reform; Hunter, Brainwashing, 1951 and 1956; J. A. Fyfield, Re-Educating Chinese Anti-Communists (London: Croom Helm, 1982), 90; Philip F. Williams and Yenna Wu, eds., Remolding and Resistance among Writers of the Chinese Prison Camp: Disciplined and Published (London: Routledge, 2006), 2; James Seymour and Richard Anderson, New Ghosts, Old Ghosts: Prisons and Labor Reform Camps in China (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1998), 17; Stuart Schram, The Political Thought of Mao Tse-tung (New York: Praeger, 1963), 84. 5. At the time, the only English-language work to have discussed Republican Chinese prisons in more than passing was Dutton’s book based almost entirely on secondary sources. Michael Dutton, Policing and Punishment in China: From Patriarchy to ‘the People’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 6. Frank Dikötter, Crime, Prison and Punishment in Modern China (hereafter CPP) (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002); Xiaoqun Xu, Trial of Modernity: Judicial Reform in Early Twentieth-Century China, 1901–1937 (hereafter TOM) (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008). A more recent volume, Klaus Muhlhahn, Criminal Justice in China: A History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009) is largely based on secondary sources, including my dissertation and Dikötter’s book.

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Notes to Pages 3–9 7. Pan Min, Jiangsu riwei jiceng zhengquan yanjiu 1937–1945 (Research on the Japanese and puppet regime basic-level governmental power in Jiangsu 1937–1945) (Shanghai: Renmin chubanshe, 2006); Gao Hua, Hongtaiyang shi zenmeyang shengqide: Yan’an zhengfeng yundong de lailong qupai (How the red sun arose: The origin and development of the Yan’an rectification campaign) (Xianggang: Zhongwen daxue chubanshe, 2000); Gao Hua, “ ‘Xinren’ de dansheng” (Birth of the “new person”), in Gao Hua, Geming niandai (The era of revolution) (Guangzhou: Guangdong renmin chubanshe, 2010).

c hapter 1. ar c h i t ec t s o f pen al r ef o r m a ti o n in the la te qing emp i r e an d ear l y r epu b l i c o f chin a , 19 0 0 – 19 2 0 1. The late Qing term “model” prison was replaced in 1912 by the referent “new-style” (xinshi) prison. As the names of prisons changed in relation to periodic bureaucratic restructuring, I have for clarity chosen one name to represent a prison over the course of each major period discussed. 2. Wang Yuanzeng, Jingshi diyi jianyu baogao (Capital No. 1 Prison report) (hereafter JDJB), 2nd ed. (1915; repr., Beijing: Jingshi diyi jianyu, 1917), 90–92; Chen Chi, First Peking Prison (hereafter FPP) (Peking: First Peking Prison, 1916), 71–72; Zhu Ziyuan, Zhongguo xinjiu jianyu bijiao lu (A comparison of China’s old and new prisons) (hereafter ZXJBL) (Beijing, 1916), 169. 3. Wang, JDJB, 90–92; Chen, FPP, 71–72; Zhu, ZXJBL, 169. 4. Chen, FPP, 3, 13; Wang Yuanzeng, Jianyuxue (Penology) (Beijing: Jingshi diyi jianyu, 1924); Wang Wenbao, “Lidai xinglu yange zhi gailue” (Historical development of criminal law) (hereafter “LXYZG”), Shehui xuejie (Sociology circles), no. 1 (June 1927): preface, 1, 119; Xu Yongshun, “Zhongguo jianyu bu neng gaijin zhi yaoyin” (The key reasons why China’s prisons cannot be improved) (hereafter “ZJBNGZY”), Dagongbao (L’Impartial), Feb. 26, 1930; Guo Ming, Xueshu zhuangxing yu huayu chonggou: Zouxiang jianyuxue yanjiu de xin shiyu (Academic transformation and the reconstruction of discourse: Toward a new perspective on penology research) (hereafter XZYHZ) (Beijing: Zhongguo fangzheng chubanshe, 2003), 72–73; Dikötter, CPP, 74; Xu, TOM. 5. Derk Bodde and Clarence Morris, Law in Imperial China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), 116–117; Chu Tung-tsu, Law and Society in Traditional China (Paris: Morton, 1965), 217, 219–220; Jonathan K. Ocko, “I’ll Take It All the Way to Beijing: Capital Appeals in the Qing,” Journal of Asian Studies 47, no. 2 (May 1988): 291; Hsu-dau Lin, “Crime and Cosmic Order,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 30 (1970); E-Tu Zen Sun, Ch’ing Administrative Terms (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961), 270–274; Joanna Waley-Cohen, “Politics and the Supernatural in Mid-Qing Legal Culture” (hereafter “PSMQLC”), Modern China 19, no. 3 (July 1993): 339–341; Philip C. C. Huang, Code, Custom, and Legal Practice in China: The Qing and the Republic Compared (hereafter CCLPC) (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002); Tao Xisheng, Qingdai zhouxian yamen xingshi shenpan zhidu ji chengxu (The Qing era district and county office criminal justice system and process) (hereafter QZYXSZJC) (Taibei: Shihuo chubanshe, reissue 1972), 94–95; John Henry Gray, China: A History of

Notes to Pages 9–10

6.

7.

8. 9.

10.

the Laws and Manners, and Customs of the People (London: Macmillan, 1878) 29; Mark C. Elliott, The Manchu Way: The Eight Banners and Ethnic Identity in Late Imperial China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 198; Chalonor Alabaster, Notes and Commentaries on Chinese Criminal Law (London: Luzac, 1899), 39. Marinus Meijer, The Introduction of Modern Criminal Law in China (Batavia, 1950), 24–25, 29, 163; Li Guilian, Shen Jiaben zhuan (Biography of Shen Jiaben) (hereafter SJZ) (Beijing: Falu chubanshe, 2000), 284–285; Dikötter, CPP, 46; Huang, CCLPC, 17, 28; Jan Kiely, “Making Good Citizens: The Reformation of Prisoners in China’s First Modern Prisons,” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2001). G. W. Keeton, The Development of Extraterritoriality in China, vol. 2 (1928, repr., New York: Howard Fertig, 1969), appendix 19, 268–271; Dikötter, CPP, 47; Li, SJZ, 171, 180; Laurence Oliphant, Elgin’s Mission to China and Japan, vol. 1 (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1970), 183–184; Timothy Brook, Jérôme Bourgon, and Gregory Blue, Death by a Thousand Cuts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 170–202. Qingshigao xingfazhi zhujie (Explanatory notes on the annals of criminal law in Qing history) (hereafter QXZ) (Beijing: Falu chubanshe, 1957), 26. Philip A. Kuhn, Origins of the Modern Chinese State (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 21; Philip A. Kuhn Soulstealers: The Chinese Sorcery Scare of 1768 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990); Huang, CCLPC; Matthew Sommer, Sex, Law, and Society in Late Imperial China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000); and Waley-Cohen, “PSMQLC.” “Qingshigao xingfazhuan,” in QXZ; Ye Shu, “Woguo de xingfa zhongzhong” (Our country’s various punishments), Zhuanji wenxue (Biographical literature) 4, no. 67 (Oct. 1995): 100; Chen Zhao, Yi fofa: Guanli ganhua xingshi renfan zhi jianyi (With Buddhism: A proposal for the management and reformation of convicts) (Beiping: Shanshuju, 1935), 3; Zhang Yumao, Xiao Jun zhuan (Biography of Xiao Jun) (Chongqing: Chongqing chubanshe, 1992), 31; Edward Harper Parker, China: Past and Present (London: Chapman & Hall, 1903), 377–380; Zhao Erxun, “Xingbu yifu huli jin fu Zhao zouqing gesheng tongshe zuifanxiyisuo” (Board of Punishments deliberates and reports on interim governor Zhao’s memorial requesting the various provinces to establish convict work training houses), in Xue Meiqing, Xu Jungang, Yang Ying, Yang Diansheng, and Chen Zhihai, eds., Qingmo minchu gailiang jianyu zhuanji (Special collection on the prison reforms at the end of the Qing and beginning of the Republic) (hereafter QMGJZ) (Beijing: Zhongguo jianyu xuehui, 1997), 8–18; Tao, QZYXSZJC, 103; Li Weiyan, “Zhongguo lidai shenpan zhidu yange kao” (Research on the evolution of China’s historical court system) (hereafter ZLSZYK), in Faxue congkan (Legal studies collection) no. 1.1 (Mar. 1930): 36–38; Zhang Zhidong, “Huguang zongdu Zhang Zhidong zouchen shengcheng mofan jianyu kaiban qingxing zhe” (Huguang Governor-General Zhang Zhidong memorializes on the situation in the opening of the model prison in the provincial capital) (hereafter Zhang memorial) (1907), in QMGJZ, 36; Zhang Zhidong and Liu Kunyi second reform memorial (July 1901), “Jiang chu hui zou” in QMGJZ, 3–4; Mark Allee, Law and Local Society in Late Imperial China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 235, 237–240; Dikötter, CPP, 29; Alabaster, Notes, 39; Meijer, Modern Criminal Law, 21, 192; Ocko, “Capital Appeals,” 305.

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Notes to Page 11 11. Daqing huidian (Collected statutes of the Qing) (Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1909), especially juan 56; QXZ, 119; Daqing luli (Great Qing code), in English, The Great Qing Code, trans. and ed. William Jones (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 369, 372, 374, annotated selections in Zhongguo jianyu shiliao huibian (Collected historical materials on Chinese prisons) (hereafter ZJSH), vol. 1 (Beijing: Qunzhong chubanshe, 1988), 194–203; Zhao Shuqiao, Tilao beikao (Jail management reference) (Beijing, 1893); Wang Keng, “Woguo lidai jianyu jianjie” (Basic introduction to our nation’s prisons of past dynasties,” in ZJSH, vol. 1, 421; Zhu, ZXJBL, 70, 161–162, 183; Wang, Jianyuxue, 24–25; Xue Meiqing and Zhang Shoudong, “ ‘Tilao beikao’ dui jianshe wenming jianyu de qishi” (The ‘tilao beikao’ guidance in constructing civilized jails), in Xia Zongsu and Zhu Jimin, eds., Zhongwai jianyu zhidu bijiao yanjiu wenji (Collected comparative research on Chinese and foreign prison systems) (hereafter ZJZBYW) (Beijing: Falu chubanshe, 2001), 135–140; Jonathan Ocko, Bureaucratic Reform in Provincial China: Ting Rih-ch’ang in Restoration Kiangsu 1867–1870 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 78–80, 86–87; Derk Bodde, “Prison Life in Eighteenth Century Peking,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 89, no. 2 (Apr.–June 1969); Parker, China: Past and Present; Gray, China: A History of the Laws and the Manners, 47–50; Stanley Lane Poole, Sir Harry Parkes in China (London: Methuen, 1901), 241; John Lee Scott, Imprisonment in China (London: W. H. Dalton, 1841); Bradley Reed, Talons and Teeth: County Clerks and Runners in the Qing Dynasty (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000); Zhang memorial in QMGJZ, 34; Gan Houci, ed., Beiyang gongdu leizuan (Beiyang public record collected materials), vol. 5.5 (1909, repr., Taibei: Wenhai chubanshe, 1966), 2b. 12. QMGJZ, 6–18; Meijer, Modern Criminal Law, appendix, 128–134; Tao, QZYXSZJC, 105; Li, “ZLSZYK,” 36–38. 13. “Tianjin fuzhi Ling Fupeng bincheng” (Tianjin Prefect Ling Fupeng reports to superiors), appended to “Zhili zongdu Yuan zou chuangshe zuifan xiyisuo banli qingxing zhe” (Zhili Governor-General Yuan memorializes on the establishment of convict work training houses), in QMGJZ, 20–22; Gan, Beiyang gongdu, 2b–24b; Stephen R. Mackinnon, Power and Politics in Late Imperial China: Yuan Shi-Kai in Beijing and Tianhun, 1901–1908 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 154; Douglas Reynolds, China 1898–1912: The Xinzheng Revolution and Japan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 174; Shimada Masao, Shinmatsu ni okeru kindaiteki hoten no hensan: Toyohoshi ronshu, daisan (The compilation of modern legal codes in late Qing China: Collected essays on Oriental law, number three) (Tokyo: Sobunsha, 1980), 140–143; Dikötter, CPP, 46, 53–55; Zhang, memorial in QMGJZ, 36; “Jiang chu huizou” in QMGJZ, 3–4; Han Yanlong, ed., Zhongguo jindai jingcha zhidu (China’s modern police system) (Beijing: Zhongguo renmin gong’an daxue chubanshe, 1993), 29, 37–40; Di Wang, “Street Culture: Public Space and Urban Commoners in LateQing Chengdu,” Modern China 24, no.1 (Jan. 1998): 57–60; Kristen Stapleton, Civilizing Chengdu: Chinese Urban Reform, 1895–1937 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 99, 127; Cong Xibin and Wu Zhongyue, “Qingmo shichuang de ‘zixinjian’ dui sifa tequan de weihu” (The initial establishment of ‘self-renewal jails’ in the late Qing and the defense of the judicial prerogative), in Zhongguo zhengfa

Notes to Pages 11–14

14.

15. 16.

17.

18. 19.

daxue jianyushi yanjiu zhongxin yu Tianjinshi jianyu guanliju (The Prison History Research Center of the China University of Political Science and Law and the Tianjin Prison Management Office), ed., Zhongguo jianyu wenhua de chuantong yu xiandai wenming (The traditions and modern civilization of Chinese prison culture) (hereafter ZJWCYXW) (Beijing: Falu chubanshe, 2006), 105–106. Guo, XZYHZ, 33–35; Dikötter, CPP, 34–40, 44; Ssu-yu Teng and John Fairbank, China’s Response to the West (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1954), 139–140; Paul Cohen, Between Tradition and Modernity: Wang T’ao and Reform in Late Ch’ing China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974), 72; Li, SJZ, 209; Liu Junwen and Chi Tianwen, Zhongri wenhua jiaoliu shi daxi, Fazhi zhuan (The great historical ties of cultural exchange between Japan and China, legal system volume) (hereafter ZWJSD) (Hangzhou: Zhejiang renmin chubanshe, 1996), 187–189; Noriko Kamachi, Reform in China: Huang Tsun-hsien and the Japanese Model (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 52–53; Reynolds, China 1898–1912, 172; Marie-Claire Bergère, Sun Yat-sen, trans. Janet Lloyd (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 67; Xu Zhangrun, “Qingmo duiyu xifang yuzhi de jiechu he yanjiu” (Research and engagement with Western prison management at the end of the Qing), in Xu Zhangrun, ed., Shoufa huofa lifa (The spoken law, living law, and established law) (Beijing: Zhongguo fazhi chubanshe, 2000), 33–34; Daniel Botsman, Punishment and Power in the Making of Modern Japan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 207; Guo Fuchun, “Lushun jianyu jiuzhi: Lishi ji lai fazhan shulue” (The former site of the Lushun Prison: A summary of its history and development), in ZJWCYXW, 128–144. Li, SJZ, 193–194. Li, SJZ, 205–206, 213, 284–285, 298; Dong Kang, “Zhongguo xiuding falu zhi jingguo” (Experience of legal reform in China), in Dong Kang, Dong Kang faxue wenji (Collected legal works of Dong Kang), He Qinhua and Wei Qiong, eds. (Beijing: Zhongguo fazheng daxue chubanshe, 2005), 467; Huang, CCLPC, 3–4, 17, 28; Xu, TOM, 49–52; Zhang Demei, Tansuo yu jueze: Wanqing falu yizhi yanjiu (Exploration and choice: A study of the transplanting of law in the late Qing) (Beijing: Qinghua daxue chubanshe, 2003); Chen Yu, Qingmo xinzheng zhong de xiuding faluguan: Zhongguo falu jindaihua de yiduan wangshi (The Legal Revision Bureau of the late Qing new policies: A part of the past of China’s legal modernization) (Beijing: Zhongguo zhengfa daxue chubanshe, 2005); You Zhi’an, Qingmo xingshi sifa gaige yanjiu: Yi zhongguo xingshi susong zhidu jindaihua de shijue (A study of late Qing penal and judicial reform: A perspective on Chinese penal and legal modernization) (Beijing: Zhongguo renmin gong’an daxue chubanshe, 2004). Ogawa Shigejiro, “Diqici wanguo jianyu huiyi yu yuzhi gailiang zhi qiantu” (The Seventh International Prison Congress and prospects for prison reform), trans. He Jianfo, in Dongfang zazhi (Eastern miscellany) (hereafter DFZ), no. 3.5 (1906): 129–136. Ogawa, “Diqici,” 129–136; QMGJZ, 20–22. Dan Fenno Henderson, “Japanese Influences on Communist Chinese Legal Language,” in Jerome Cohen, ed., Contemporary Chinese Law: Research Problems and Perspectives (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970), 161–168; Liu and

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Notes to Page 14 Chi, ZWJSD, 206, 229; Reynolds, China 1898–1912, 81; Yoshino Sakuzo, “Shinkoku zaikin no nihonjin kyoshi”(Japanese instructors working in the Qing Empire), Kokka gakkai zasshi (Journal of the Association of Political and Social Sciences) 23, no. 5 (1909): 773–774; Chen, FPP, 5; Wang, Jianyuxue, 21; Wang Yuanzeng, Riben jianyu shiwu (Actual affairs of Japanese prisons) (Jiading: Jiading jiaoyuhui, 1908); Guo, XZYHZ, 43, 47, 67, 74; Zhang memorial in QMGJZ, 34; Akira Masaki, Reminiscences of a Japanese Penologist (Tokyo: Japan Criminal Policy Association, 1964), 16; Howard L. Boorman and Richard C. Howard, eds., Biographical Dictionary of Republican China, vol. 3 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1967), 340; Shen Jiaben preface (hereafter SJP) to Dong Kang, ed., Jianyu fangwen lu (A record of visits to prisons) (hereafter JFL) (Beijing, 1907), 1; Reynolds, China 1898–1912, 175; Liu and Chi, ZWJSD, 204; “Qian xiulu da dachen daliyuan zhengqing Shen zouqing shixing gailiang jianyu zhe” (Former Legal Revision Commissioner and Minister of the Daliyuan Shen memorializes for the reform of prisons) (hereafter Shen memorial), in DFZ, no. 7 (1907): 354–355. 20. Dikötter, CPP, 5–6. 21. Pieter Spierenburg, The Spectacle of Suffering (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); Pieter Spierenburg, The Prison Experience: Disciplinary Institutions and their Inmates in Early Modern Europe (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1991); Norval Morris and David J. Rothman, eds., The Oxford History of the Prison (hereafter OHP) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995); Martin J. Wiener, Reconstructing the Criminal: Culture, Law and Policy in England, 1830–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Michael Ignatieff, A Just Measure of Pain: The Penitentiary in the Industrial Revolution, 1750–1850 (New York: Pantheon, 1978); David J. Rothman, Conscience and Convenience: The Asylum and its Alternatives in Progressive America (Boston: Little, Brown, 1980); David J. Rothman, The Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic (Boston: Little, Brown, 1990); Estelle B. Freedman, Their Sisters’ Keepers: Women’s Prison Reform in America, 1830–1930 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1981); Patricia O’Brien, The Promise of Punishment: Prisons in Nineteenth-Century France (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982); Georg Rusche and Otto Kirchheimer, Punishment and Social Structure (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939); Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Allen Sheridan (New York: Vintage Press, 1979). 22. Endo Koichi, “Kaimei kanryo to shakai jigyo: Ogawa Shigejiro no shogai to shiso, 3.4” (Enlightened official and social enterprise: Ogawa Shigejiro’s career and thought, installments 3 and 4), Meiji gakuin ronso shakai gaku (Meiji Gakuin Review for Sociology) 324 (Tokyo, 1982): 331; Wang, Jianyuxue, 97; Sun Xiong, Jianyuxue (Penology) (Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1936), 61; Shimada, in QMGJZ, 457; Dong Kang included his notes on Ogawa’s lectures, JFL (1907), in his Jianyu shiyi (Necessary arrangements for prisons); other compilations of notes on Ogawa’s lectures published in this period include Ogawa Shigejiro, Jianyuxue (Penology), comp. and trans. He Guochang (1905); Ogawa Shigejiro, Jianyuxue (Penology), comp. and trans. Liu Fan (1905), based on lectures Ogawa delivered at the Legal Administration

Notes to Pages 15–18

23.

24.

25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

University, republished in the Republican Fazheng yebian series; Ogawa Shigejiro, Jianyu zuoye lun (On prison work) (hereafter JZL), trans. Xu Jinxiong (Tokyo: Tokyo Keikan gakko, 1908); there is also the translation of Ogawa’s 1897 lectures on the German prison law: Liu Dami, Duyi jianyu fa (German prison law) (Tianjin, 1907); Dikötter also notes another Ogawa-based compilation: Xiong Yuanhan, Jianyuxue (Beijing, 1911), see Dikötter, CPP, 51–52; and Guo notes another book by one of Ogawa’s Chinese students: Tu Jingyu, Zhongguo jianyu shi (History of Chinese prisons) (Tianjin: Beiyang guanbao ju, 1908), see Guo, XZYHZ, 47, 67; also see Hu Yuzhi, ed., Minguo shiqi zongshumu: Falu (Republican period comprehensive bibliography: Law) (Beijing: Shumu wenxian chubanshe, 1990), 341. On subsequent points, see Rui Jiarui, Jianyu zhidu lun (On the prison system) (hereafter JDL) (Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1934), 156; Wang, Jianyuxue, 2; Wang, JDJB, 1–2, 28; Zhang Dazheng, Jianyuxue (Penology) (n.p., n.d, ca. 1920s), 10; Shimada, in QMGJZ, 453, 457; Shimada cites a Japanese magazine in Beijing, Tsubame gami (Yanjing worldly affairs) 1.5 (Beijing: 1908): 49; Chen, FPP, 5; Wang Gengnian, Jingshi falu xuetang biji (Notes from the Capital Law School) (Beijing, 1911); Liu and Chi, ZWJSD, 240; Xue Meiqing and Ye Feng, “Jiu zhongguo diyi bu jianyu fadian: ‘Daqing jianyu lu cao’an’ ” (Old China’s first prison code: ‘The great Qing draft prison law’), in ZJSH, vol. 1, 528. Masaki, Japanese Penologist, 5, 16; Ono Shuzo, “Ogawa Shigejiro kakusho: Kangoku gyosei kanryo no tanjo” (Essay on Ogawa Shigejiro: An administrator of prisons in Meiji Japan) Mita Shogaku kenkyu (Mita Business Review) 41, no. 4 (Oct. 1998): 175– 176, 189; Botsman, Punishment and Power, 4, 129–132, 165, 194–196; Han Linong, “Riben jianyu de leijin zhidu” (The progressive system of the Japanese prisons), in Xia and Zhu, ZJZBYW, 204. QMGJZ, 21–22; Nanyang guanbao (Nanyang Gazette), no. 31 (1909), reprinted in Ye Chucang, ed., Shouduzhi (Capital gazetteer) (Nanjing, 1935), 613–614; “Xiyisuo banfa” (Work training house method), in QMGJZ, 69–70; Dong, JFL, 20R–L, 26L, 97L; Ogawa Shigejiro, Jianyuxue (Penology), comp. and trans. Liu Fan, (n.p., 1905), 71, 75, 92; Ogawa Shigejiro, Jianyuxue, comp. and trans. He Guochang, (n.p., 1905), 65; Ogawa, JZL, Shen Hong preface (hereafter SHP), 4; Endo, “Kaimei,” 331. Dong, JFL, 9L, 26L, 39L, 51R, 71R–L, 76R, 87R; Ogawa (trans. Liu), Jianyuxue, 1, 7, 19, 24, 78, 92; Ogawa, JZL, SHP, 2, Huang Mingsu preface, 13–14; Zhang, Jianyuxue, 10–12; Wiener, Reconstructing the Criminal, 185, 234, 263, 279, 320, 368, 381; O’Brien, Promise of Punishment, 10; O’Brien, in Morris and Rothman, OHP, 205, 209–210, 215; Freedman, Their Sisters’ Keepers, 110; Rothman, Conscience and Convenience, 1, 5, 10, 43–44, 58, 117. Dong, JFL, 3R–L, 34R, 35R, 54–56, 71R; Ogawa, JZL, SHP, 4, Huang preface, 13–14. Ogawa (trans. He), Jianyuxue, 65, 80; Dong, JFL, 29R, 38–39L, 50L, 51R, 52L; Ogawa (trans. Liu), Jianyuxue, 93, 113. Ogawa, JZL, Xu preface, 19. Dong, JFL, 15L, 30R, 57R; Ogawa, Jianyuxue, trans. Liu, 2, 5, 52, 83; Ogawa (trans. He) Jianyuxue, 67. Shimada, in QMGJZ, 458–459 (Shimada cites Ogawa, Shinkoku no gakusei [Students of the Qing Empire], vol. 1, [n.p., n.d.], 56).

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Notes to Pages 18–22 31. Sheldon Garon, Molding Japanese Minds: The State in Everyday Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 52, 59. 32. Li Guangcan, “Ping ‘Jiyi wencun’ ” (Critique of ‘Jiyi’s collected writings’), in ZJSH, vol. 1, 418; Boorman and Howard, Biographical Dictionary, vol. 3, 98–99; Sommer, Sex, Law, and Society, 23; Li, SJZ, 16–17, 53–54, 58–59; commemorative plaque in Beijing (Jinjing hutong). 33. Shen memorial, 354–355; Li, SJZ, 87, 135–141; Guo, XZYHZ, 47. 34. Li, SJZ, 298, 311, 347. 35. QMGJZ, 21–22; Zhang memorial in QMGJZ, 37; “Guangdong nanhai xian, gailiang jianyu shiban jianzhang” (Management regulations for prison reform in Nanhai County, Guangdong), in DFZ, no. 5, 1907, 224; Shen memorial, 355; Yi chapter in the Yijing (Book of changes); Zizhi tongjian (Comprehensive mirror to aid government) Tangji dezong jianzhong sinian sec.; also Lu Jiuyuan, Xiangshan xiansheng quanji (Collected works of Mr. Xiangshan), juan 14, in “Yu Luo Zhangfu” (Letter to Luo Zhangfu) (Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, repr. 1935 (original text dated to twelfth century ce); Wang Jianyin et al., eds., Zhongguo chengyu da cidian (China set phrase dictionary) (Shanghai: Shanghai cishu chubanshe, 1995), 404; Wang Shushan, ed., Zhongguo gudai geyan (China’s ancient wise maxims) (Taiyuan: Shanxi jiaoyu chubanshe, 1997), 312. 36. Dong, JFL (SJP), 2R. 37. Shen memorial, 354. 38. Brian E. McKnight and James T. C. Liu, eds., The Enlightened Judgments: Ch’ingming Chi (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), 64, 356–358 (use of “yuantu” quote, 417); Sommer, Sex, Law, and Society, 41, 266, 314–315, 367; (Wei Yuan quote) Wei Yuan, Wei Yuan ji (Collected works of Wei Yuan) (Beijing: Zhonghua, 1976), cited in Kuhn, Origins, 50; also Kuhn, Origins, 70–71; Waley-Cohen, “PSMQLC,” 339; Joanna Waley-Cohen, “Banishment to Xinjiang in Mid-Qing China, 1758–1820,” Late Imperial China 10, no. 2 (1989): 61; Joanna Waley-Cohen, Exile in Mid-Ch’ing China: Banishment to Xinjiang, 1758–1820 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991); “Jiang chu hui zou,” in QMGJZ, 3–7; William Rowe, Saving the World: Chen Hongmou and Elite Consciousness in Eighteenth-Century China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 408–409; Zhang memorial in QMGJZ, 36; for a contrasting interpretation, see Dikötter, CPP, 8, 49. For an example of a Christian convert jailer in 1890s Sichuan teaching his inmates, see World Missions Review 13, no.6 (June 1900): 469–470. 39. Zhao memorial, in QMGJZ, 8; Shen memorial, 354; (on legitimating arguments with classical provenance) Joseph R. Levenson, Confucian China and Its Modern Fate (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), vol. 1, 50; Guo, XZYHZ, 43. 40. Shen Jiaben, Lidai xingfa kao: Fu Jiyi wencun (Research on historical penal law: Appended collected writings of Jiyi) (1907–1908, repr., Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1985), yukao sec., 1157, 1160, Deng Jingyuan and Pian Yuqian preface, 2; Dong, JFL, SJP, 2R; Arthur Hummel, Eminent Chinese of the Ch’ing Period, vol. 2 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1943), 697.

Notes to Pages 22–25 41. Guo, XZYHZ, 22–43; Dong, JFL, SJP, 1L; Zhang Zhidong made a similar historical contrast: see his memorial in QMGJZ, 34; Roger Thompson, China’s Local Councils in the Age of Constitutional Reform, 1898–1911 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 32–33. In 1911, Shen became vice president of the Qing constitutional assembly: see Edward J. M. Rhoads, Manchus and Han: Ethnic Relations and Political Power in Late Qing and Early Republican China, 1861–1928 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000), 157; Min Tu-ki, National Polity and Local Power: The Transformation of Late Imperial China (Cambridge, MA: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University Press, 1989), 84, 143. 42. QMGJZ, 42; (related 1909 memorials) QMGJZ, 43, 46; “Fabu zichouban mofan jianyu jian yusan chengli zhiqi baobu zha ti fasi fen xing wen” (The Ministry of Justice deliberates and makes arrangements for the model prison as to establishing the budget; the esteemed ministry’s letter suggests the judicial offices be implemented separately), in QMGJZ, 46. 43. Joanna F. Handlin, Action in Late Ming Thought: The Reorientation of Lu K’un and Other Scholar-Officials (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 13, 17; Cynthia J. Brokaw, The Ledgers of Merit and Demerit: Social Change and Moral Order in Late Imperial China (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 161; I-fan Ch’eng, “Kung as an Ethos in Late Nineteenth-Century China: The Case of Wang Hsiench’ien (1842–1918),” in Paul A. Cohen and John E. Schrecker, eds., Reform in Nineteenth-Century China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University East Asia Research Center, 1976), 170, 173, 180; Rowe, Saving the World, 117, 124; Hao Chang, “Confucian Cosmological Myth and Neo-Confucian Transcendence,” in Richard J. Smith and D. W. Y. Kwok, eds., Cosmology, Ontology, and Human Efficacy: Essays in Chinese Thought (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1993). 44. Dong, JFL, SJP, 2L. 45. Li, SJZ, 368–384. 46. Xu Shiying, Xu Shiying huiyilu (Memoir of Xu Shiying) (hereafter XSH) (Taibei: Renjianshi yuekanshe, 1966), 5, 9, 18, 23, 27, 32, 47–49, 84, 88, 92–93, 99, 108–109; “Fabu zou paifu mei wanguo jianyu gailiang hui Xu Qian deng hui jing baogao” (Official Ministry of Justice report of Xu Qian et al. on returning to the capital after being dispatched to the international prison reform meeting in America) (hereafter Xu report) in QMGJZ, 50; Wang Shurong, “Dibaci wanguo jianyu xiehui baogao shu tiyao” (Summary report of the Eighth International Prison Congress), in Wang Shurong, ed., Yuwu wuzhong (Five documents on prison affairs) (Beijing, n.d., ca. 1922), 4; Li, SJZ, 150; Zui Xu, That Chinese Woman: The Life of Sai Chin Hua, trans. and ed. Henry McAleavy (New York: Thomas Cromwell, 1959). 47. Chen, FPP, 3, 13; Wang, Jianyuxue; Wang, “LXYZG,” preface, 1, 119; Hu, ed., Minguo shiqi zongshumu, 346; Li Fang and Jin Shaocheng, “Shiwu guo shenpan jianyu diaocha ji” (A record of the inspections of the courts and prisons of fifteen nations), in Wang, Yuwu wuzhong, 1; Xu, XSH, 108; Xu Youchun, ed., Minguo renwu dacidian (Biographical dictionary of the Republic) (hereafter MRDC) (Shijiazhuang: Hebei renmin chubanshe, 1991), 102; Wang Yuanzeng, Jianyu guize jiangyi (Lectures on

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Notes to Pages 25–28

48.

49.

50. 51. 52. 53. 54.

prison rules) (hereafter JGJ) (Beijing: Jingshi diyi jianyu, 1917); Liang Jinhan, Jingshi di’er jianyu baogao shu (Report on the Capital No. 2 Prison) (hereafter JDEJBS) (Beijing: Jingshi di’er jianyu, 1920), 4. Wang Shurong served for many years as the chief high procurator of Jiangsu. Alexander Woodside, “Some Mid-Qing Theorists of Popular Schools,” Modern China 9, no. 1 (1983): 27; William T. Rowe, Hankow: Conflict and Community in a Chinese City, 1796–1895 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1989); Mary B. Rankin, Elite Activism and Political Transformation in China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1986); DFZ, no. 1.1 (1904): 4; DFZ, no. 6 (1907): 295; Gan, Beiyang gongdu, juan 5, 2–24; Tian Tao and Guo Chengwei, eds., Qingmo Beijing chengshi guanli fagui (Late Qing Beijing city management laws and regulations) (Beijing: Beijing yanshan chubanshe, 1996), 241–510; Sidney Gamble, Peking: A Social Survey (New York: George Doran, 1921), 145, 284, 290, 294; H. S. Brunnert and V. V. Hagelstrom, Present Day Political Organization of China, trans. A. Beltchenko and E. E. Moran (Shanghai: Kelly and Walsh, 1912), 171; MacKinnon, Power and Politics, 38–40, 154; Wang, “Street Culture,” 57–60; Stapleton, Civilizing Chengdu, 84, 99, 127, 133; Thompson, China’s Local Councils, 35; Sun, Jianyuxue, 70; “Guangdong nanhai xian,” 222; Wang Xiaoshan, Shiqu de yingxiang: Qingmo minguo jianyu lao zhaopian (Lost images: Photographs of late Qing, early Republic prisons) (Beijing: Falu chubanshe, 2009), 5, 18; Dikötter, CPP, 56–57; Janet Y. Chen, Guilty of Indigence: The Urban Poor in China, 1900–1953 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), ch. 1. Xu, XSH, 84, 88, 92–93, 99, 108–111; Xu report, 50, 53; Wang, “Dibaci wanguo,” 4, 12–13; Wang Shurong, “Kaocha geguo jianyu zhidu baogaoshu tiyao” (Summary report of investigation of various nations’ prison systems) (hereafter “KGJZBT”) in Wang, Yuwu wuzhong, 12–15, 18; Wang, Jianyuxue, 123–130, 360; Li and Jin, “Shiwu guo shenpan,” 2–8, 15, 41, 55, 71; Los Angeles Herald, Sept. 30, 1910; J. J. Kelso, Conclusions of the International Prison Congress Held in Washington, Oct. 2–8 (Toronto: 1910). Wang, “Dibaci wanguo,” 12–13; Xu report, 53; Wang, “KGJZBT,” 12–15; Wang, Jianyuxue, 123–130; Xu, XSH, 111. Xu, XSH, 116, 118–119, 126; Xu, MRDC, 110, 1626; Boorman and Howard, Biographical Dictionary, vol. 3, 376–377. Xu, XSH, 45–46, 126–127; Hu Sijing, Guowen beicheng (Preparing to make use of national news) (Shanghai: Shanghai shudian chubanshe, 1997), 95. Xu report, 52–55. “Sifa zongzhang Xu Shiying sifa jihua shu” (Minister of Justice Xu Shiying judicial plan) in QMGJZ, 56–58; (classical reference) Zhu, ZXJBL, Long Zhihan preface, 1, 5–6, 169; Wang, Jianyuxue, 1–2, 39, 126; Wang, “LXYZG,” 157; Liang, JDEJBS, Yin Chaozheng preface, 1–2; Li Zhuxun, Jiangsu diyi jianyu baogao (Report on the Jiangsu No. 1 Prison) (hereafter JDYJB) (Nanjing, 1919), Wang Shurong preface, 1; Wang, “KGJZBT,” 15; Chen, FPP, 6–13; Xu, MRDC, 110, 1626; Boorman and Howard, Biographical Dictionary, vol. 2, 439, vol. 3, 99, 376–377; Wu Zhiyuan, Beiping hebei diyi jianyu baogao (Report on the Beiping Hebei No. 1 Prison) (hereafter BHDYJB) (Beiping: Hebei diyi jianyu, 1937), 1; Wang Yusan, Yuzheng shihua (A brief history of

Notes to Pages 28–30

55.

56.

57.

58.

59.

the prison administration) (Taibei: Geda shuju, 1967), 1–2, 6, 59–61, 64, 81–83; Shandong sheng laogaiju, ed., Minguo jianyu fagui xuanbian (Selected prison laws and regulations of the Republic) (hereafter MJFX) (Jinan: Zhongguo shuge, 1990); Yan Jingyue, “Beiping jianyu jiaohui yu jiaoyu” (Beiping prison moral instruction and education) (hereafter “BJJYJ”), Shehui xuejie, no. 4 (June 1930): 36; Sun, Jianyuxue, 71; Ministry of Justice (hereafter MOJ), Chinese Prisons (Peking, 1925), 3; Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 9, 37, 94; Xu, TOM, 7. Chen Duxiu, “Yanjiushi yu jianyu” (The laboratory and the prison), in Chen Duxiu wenji (Collected works of Chen Duxiu) (Hong Kong: Longmen shudian, 1964); Lu Xun, “Guanyu zhongguo de liang san jian shi” (Two or three things with regard to China) (1934), in Lu Xun, Lu Xun Sanwen (Short essays of Lu Xun), no. 2, ed. Zhang Mingao et al. (Beijing: Zhongguo guangbo dianshi chubanshe, 1992), 21. Xu Shiying plan in QMGJZ, 58; Zhu, ZXJBL, Long preface, 1–2, 184; Liu Zulin, “Dashe yanlun” (Discussion of the general amnesty), Fazheng xuebao (Legal administration studies news), no. 4.2 (Feb. 1925): 36; Liang, JDEJBS, 2; Liang Jinhan, “Juantou yu” (Words atop a scroll), Jianyu zazhi (Prison magazine), no. 1.1 (hereafter JZ1.1) (Nov. 1929); Falu pinglun (The legal critic) (hereafter FP), no. 109 (Aug. 2, 1925): 25; FP, no. 130 (Dec. 27, 1925): 8–10; Zhao Yinian, “Chefei lingshicaipanquan huigu yu qianzhan” (Looking over the past and to the future of the removal of extraterritorial rights), Faxue zazhi (Legal studies magazine) (hereafter FZ), no. 8.3 (May 1935): 347; Faquan taolun weiyuanhui (Commission on the discussion of legal rights) (hereafter FTW), Kaocha sifa ji (Investigation of the judicial system) (hereafter KSJ) (Beijing: Beijing ribao guan, 1924), 1–6, 9–16; Sun, Jianyuxue, 72; (prison reform opinion papers) Jiangsu Provincial Archives (hereafter JPA) 1047/17/564, 1923. Xingzhengyuan (Administrative Yuan), Jianyu gailiang (Prison reform) (Nanjing: Xingzhengyuan xinwenju yinxing, Aug. 1947), 1; Dikötter, CPP, 65, 88–92; Wang, JGJ, 6, 15–16, 27–31, 92; Chen, FPP, 9, 12, 14, 17–18, 23; Liang, JDEJBS, 1, 19, 25–26; Gamble, Peking, 309, 313; Zhu Shen, Jingwai gailiang ge jianyu baogao luyao (Summaries of reports on prison reform inside and outside the capital) (hereafter JGGJBL) (Beijing, 1919), 1, 3, 28, 39, 45, 49, 181; Wang, Jianyuxue, 21–22; Li, JDYJB, 1, 3; Zhu, ZXJBL, 183; (new court system) Huang, CCLPC, 2. Report of the Commission on Extra-territoriality in China (hereafter RCETC), no. 3 (London: His Majesty’s Secretary for Foreign Affairs, 1926) 77; MOJ, Chinese Prisons, 12, 33; Gamble, Peking, 311, 319; Second Historical Archives of China (hereafter SHAC) 1049/2442; SHAC 1049/2472; SHAC 1049/2641; SHAC 1049/2440; SHAC 1049/2642; JPA 1047/26/440; SHAC 1049/2709; “Jianyu gailiang jiyao” (Summary of prison reform) (hereafter “JGLJ”), March 1924, Sifa gongbao (Judicial report) (hereafter SFGB), no. 191 (May 31, 1924): 89; FTW, KSJ, 106–108; Zhu, JGGJBL, 1, 3; Chen, FPP, 13, 16, 19, 50, 56. Xu, MRDC, 41, 102, 183; Who’s Who in China, vol. 3 (Shanghai: Millard’s Review, 1920), 425; Liang, JDEJBS, 4, 32; Sun, Jianyuxue, 71; Jin Peiren, “Luetan Xie Guansheng yu guomindang sifajie” (A basic discussion of Xie Guansheng and the Guomindang judicial circles), Wenshi ziliao xuanji (Selections of historical materials)

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Notes to Pages 30–34

60.

61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66.

67.

68.

69. 70. 71. 72.

73. 74.

(hereafter WZX), no. 78 (1982): 89; W. W. Blum, “Legal Education in China,” China Law Review (hereafter CLR), no. 1.7 (Oct. 1923): 307; Xu “ZJBNGZY.” Zhu, JGGJBL, 15, 18, 40, 137–138; MOJ, Rules for the Government and Administration of Prisons in China (hereafter RGAPC) (Peking, 1913), 6, 13–14; Chen, FPP, 21, 42, 51, 55, 58–59; Gamble, Peking, 312, 318; MOJ, Chinese Prisons, 46; Dikötter, CPP, 88–92. Wang, JGJ, 47; MOJ, RGAPC, 9–12; Zhu, ZXJBL, 157; Wang, JDJB, 77, 87; Zhu, JGGJBL, 13. Wang, JGJ, 48; “Banshi banli jianyu zuoye xuntiao chi” (Order to promulgate instructions for managing prison work) (July 28, 1915) in MJFX, 399. Wang, JGJ, 48; Zhu, ZXJBL, 87. Wang, JDJB, 2; Chen, FPP, 9 (the quote), 19. Wang, JGJ, 49; Wang, JDJB, 1, 25, 66, 69–71; Chen, FPP, 17, 27, 41, 45; Zhu, JGGJBL, 10, 21, 32, 139; MOJ, Chinese Prisons, 32; Gamble, Peking, 313; Liang, JDEJBS, 62L. Wang, JDJB, 20, 67–68; SHAC 1049/2472; MOJ, Chinese Prisons, 24, 42–43, 73, 79, 85; Zhu, JGGJBL, 10, 13, 37, 54, 142; Zhu, ZXJBL, 81; Liang, JDEJBS, 2, 23, 71–73; Chen, FPP, 11, 46; MJFX, 399–400; Sifabu baniandu banshi qingxing baogao (Report on the management situation of the Ministry of Justice in 1919) (hereafter SBBQB) (Beijing, 1919), 153; JPA 1047/26/440, 1922; (artisanal workshops) Gail Hershatter, The Workers of Tianjin, 1900–1949 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1986), 45; Madeleine Dong, Republican Beijing: The City and Its Histories (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); for details, see Kiely, “Making Good Citizens.” JPA 1047/17/642; JPA 1047/26/440; SHAC 1049/2472; MOJ, Chinese Prisons, 25, 33; Wang, JDJB, 23–24, 67; Li, JDYJB, 12, 25; Liang, JDEJBS, 2, 28; Zhu, ZXJBL, 145; Zhu, JGGJBL, 25, 32, 134; Wang, JGJ, 63; FTW, KSJ, 351; “Jiangsu sheng zhengzhi nianjian” (Jiangsu Province government yearbook) in Ye, Shouduzhi, 615. “JGLJ,” 99; “Choushe xinjian shixing ganhua ling” (Order to plan to carry out reformation in the new prisons) (hereafter “CXSGL”) (Sept. 15, 1923, Presidential Order), SFGB, no. 184 (Oct. 31, 1924): 49; MOJ, Chinese Prisons, 13; “Beijing sifabu zuoniandu zhi shizheng fangzhen” (Last year’s administrative policy of the Beijing Ministry of Justice), FP, no. 242, (1928): 21. Wang, JGJ, 75–76, 80–81; Li, JDYJB, 31; Zhu, JGGJBL, 143. Wang, JGJ, 74, 79–81; Chiu-sam Tsang, Nationalism in School Education in China (Hong Kong: Progressive Education, 1933); Zhu, ZXJBL, 98, 171. Zhu, ZXJBL, 10, 165, 167, 169. Wang, JGJ, 73–74, 77–78; Zhu, ZXJBL, 5, 14, 23–24, 67, 70, 165, 168–169, 184; Liang, JDEJBS, 2; Lu Renji, Ganhua jiaoyu (Reformatory education) (Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1931), 37; Wang, Jianyuxue, 1, 237. On gaiguo zixin, see the biography of Wu Wangti (Wu wangti liezhuan) in the Shiji (Book of history); (similar) MJFX, 181. FTW, KSJ, 17. Yan, “BJJYJ,” 36; (similar official statements) JPA 1047/26/440, 1922; “Cheshi chafu ge xinjian jiaohui qingxing” (Thoroughly investigate and report on the moral instruction situation in the various new prisons) (hereafter “CCGXJQ”) (June 22, 1923), SFGB, no. 179 (July 31, 1923): 20.

Notes to Pages 34–38 75. Qian Mu, Guoshi dagang (Outline of national history) (n.p., 1939), 663–703. 76. Zhang Yongfang, “Wo duiyu linshi zhizheng dashe ling zhi ganxiang” (My thoughts on the provisionally administered general amnesty order), FP, no. 89 (Mar. 15, 1925): 19–20; Wang, JGJ, 123; Liu, “Dashe yanlun,” 35–36; Sun Xiong, Yuwu daquan (Compendium on prison affairs) (hereafter YWDQ) (1931, repr., Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1935), 835. 77. Wang, JDJB, 6, 15–16, 27–31, 92; Chen, FPP, 9, 12, 14, 17–18, 23; Liang, JDEJBS, 1, 19, 25–26; Gamble, Peking, 309, 313; Zhu, JGGJBL, 1–3, 28, 39, 45, 49, 181; Wang, Jianyuxue, 21–22; Li, JDYJB, 1–3; Zhu, ZXJBL, 183. 78. RCETC, 31–33, 47, 81–82; Lu, Ganhua jiaoyu, 73; David Strand, Rickshaw Beijing: City People and Politics in the 1920s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 74; Yan Jingyue, “Beijing fanzui zhi shehui fenxi” (A social analysis of crime in Beijing) (hereafter “BFZSF”), Shehui xuejie, no. 2 (June 1928): 36; CLR, no. 1.4 (ca. 1922–1923): 163–164; Sifa jiuniandu banshi qingxing baogao (1920 judicial work report) (hereafter SJBQB), no. 161 (Beijing, 1922), 13; Ernest Young, The Presidency of Yuan Shih-k’ai: Liberalism and Dictatorship in Early Republican China (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1977), 145. 79. Qingshigao xingfazhuan, 119–120; Wang, Yuzheng shihua, 1, 22, 31, 36; FTW, KSJ, 10, 108–109; Luo Wengan, Yuzhongren yu (Words of a prisoner), in Shen Yunlung, ed., Jindai zhongguo shiliao yekan (Collected materials of modern China), vol. 16 (Taibei: Wenhai chubanshe, 1966), 54; (Ministry of Justice investigations and statistics) FTW, KSJ, 20; SHAC 1049/2641; Li, “ZLSZYK,” 38; Chen, Guilty of Indigence, ch. 1. 80. Hsu Chien, “The Court System of China,” CLR, no. 1.1 (Apr. 1922): 6; “Liang qian sifa zongzhang chengdan zongtong sifa jihua shiduan liubei caizewen” (Selected documents of the ten principles for restraining arrangements from Minister of Justice Liang’s petition to the president on the judicial plan), SFGB, no. 28 (May 31, 1914): 2; Shen Yunlong, “Yuan shikai yu minchu sifa” (Yuan Shikai and justice in the early Republic), Zhuanji wenxue, no. 38.2 (Feb. 1, 1981): 28; Wang, JGJ, 5; Wang, JDJB, 95–97; see Lu Xun “Medicine” and “AhQ—The Real Story,” in Lu Xun, Diary of a Madman and Other Stories, trans. William A. Lyell (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1990); Shen Congwen, “Xin yu jiu” (Old and new), in Shen Congwen, Xin yu jiu (Old and new) (Shanghai: Liangyou tushu yinshua gongsi, 1936), 123–142; Zhang Yumao, Xiao Jun zhuan, 31; Hu Shi, “Xinxin yu fanxing” (Confidence and selfexamination), Duli pinglun (Independent critic) 103 (June 3, 1934). 81. Zhu, ZXJBL, Long preface, 1; Wang, Jianyuxue, 29; Wang Chung-hui, “Individualization of Punishment,” Chinese Social and Political Science Review, no. 5.2 (June 1919): 91–92; Wang Chonghui, “Chufa congren shuo” (On carrying out punishment from the person), Falu zhoukan (Law weekly), no. 4 (July 29, 1923): 8, continued in Falu zhoukan, no. 5 (Aug. 5, 1923): 5–8. 82. Liu, “Dashe yanlun,” 35; MOJ, Chinese Prisons, 5; JPA 1047/26/440; JPA 1047/17/642; “CXSGL,” 49. 83. Michael Tsin, Nation, Governance, and Modernity in China: Canton 1900–1927 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 8; Merle Goldman and Elizabeth

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84.

85. 86.

87.

88.

89.

90.

Perry, eds., Changing Meanings of Citizenship in Modern China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002). Qian, Guoshi dagang, 663–703; William T. Rowe, “Education and Empire in Southwest China: Ch’en Hung-mou in Yunnan, 1733–38,” in Benjamin Elman and Alexander Woodside, eds., Education and Society in Late Imperial China 1600–1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 419; Rowe, Saving the World, 124, 406; Wang Gungwu, “The Chinese Urge to Civilize: Reflections on Change,” Journal of Asian History 18, no. 1 (1984); with regard to ordering local customs, there are examples in the Liji (Book of rites) and the Hanshu (Book of Han), such as Dong Zhongshu zhuan (Biography of Dong Zhongshu), passage from Liang Zhangju, Tui’an suibi (Random notes on withdrawing to a cottage), and Zizhi tongjian, all in Wang Zhongguo gudai geyan, 114–117. Wang Yangming, Chuanxilu (Instructions for practical living) (Beijing: Zhongguo wenlian chuban gongsi, 1995), vol. 1, 1.49, 56–57. Fujiaobian (On assisting education) (Changzhou: Tianningsi kejingchu, 1920), 113, 135; “Jiedu wuji de gushi” (Stories of abstaining from transcending without extremes), in Liudu jijing (Collected sutras of the six transcendings) (Gaoxiong: foguang chubanshe, 1996), 106–107; Wendi xiaojing (Classic of filial piety of Lord Wen), and Taiweixianjun gongguoge (Ledger of merit and demerit of the great abstruse spirit), in Tang Dachao, ed., Quan shanshu zhuyi (Annotated complete morality books) (Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe, 2004), 86, 94, 107; Cheng Shaojun, ed., Mingchen jiaxun (Family instruction letters of famous officials) (Wuhan: Hubei renmin chubanshe, 1995), 301, 336; Yangzhengbian (translation of Emma L. Ballou, Guide Right: Ethics for Young People), trans. R. E. Chambers and Cheung man-hoi (Canton: China Baptist Publication Society, 1915), preface, 1–4; Jiduzongjiao lishi (a translation of W. McGlothlin’s The Course of Christian History, 1918) (Canton: China Baptist Publications, 1921), preface, 9. Jing Hengyi, “Quan zhe jiaoyu siyi” (Private treatise on Zhejiang education), originally Apr. 1913, repr. in Tong Fuyong, ed., Zhongguo jindai jiaoyu shi ziliao huibian (Collected materials on Chinese modern education history) (Shanghai: Shanghai jiaoyu chubanshe, 1997), 802–803; Yang Quan, “Renge jiaoyu yu minde” (Character education and civic virtue), DFZ, no. 21.20 (1924): 16; Tsin, Nation, Governance, Modernity, 64. Han Hongxia, “Minchu shiyejia Mu Ouchu de jiaoyu guan” (Early Republican industrialist Mu Ouchu’s views on education), in Mingguo dang’an (Republican archives) 3, no. 73 (2003): 119. Li Xiaoti, Qingmo de xiaceng shehui qimeng yundong (The enlightenment movement for the lower stratum of society in the late Qing) (Taibei: Zhongyang yanjiuyuan jindaishi yanjiusuo, 1992). Sun Yat-sen speeches: “Changren yu geren facai, wo dang yu renren facai” (The desire of the ordinary person is for the individual to get rich, the desire of the party is for everybody to get rich), “Sanminzhuyi shiliujiang diyijiang” (Three principles of the people lecture 16.1), Jan. 27, 1924; “Dangyuan yao fengyou xisheng jingshen” (Party members should be rich in the spirit of sacrifice), Oct. 15, 1923; “Gaige guojia shi yao gaizao renxin” (To reform the nation requires reforming people’s minds), Dec. 30, 1923; “Xuanchuan: Jiushi yong yuyan wenzi lai fendou” (Propaganda: It is using

Notes to Pages 42–50 language to struggle), June 29, 1924; “E’guo yu zhongguo jie wei daguo, chenggong yi jiang xiangsi” (Both Russia and China are great nations, their success will also be similar), Nov. 25, 1923, in Meng Qingpeng, ed., Sun Zhongshan wenji (Collected works of Sun Zhongshan) (Beijing: Tuanjie chubanshe, 1997), 50, 52, 55, 64, 386, 901, 909, 919, 921, 1009; John Fitzgerald, Awakening China: Politics, Culture, and Class in the Nationalist Revolution (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996).

c h apt er 2 . g u i d es t o r ef o r m 1. Shao Zhenji, Jiaohui qianshuo (Introduction to moral instruction) (1925, repr., Shanghai: Foxue shuju, 1936), 4. 2. Shao, Jiaohui, prefaces, introduction, back cover; JPA 1047/26/440, 1922; JPA 1047/17/644, 1928 (includes Warden Wu Kui’s report to the Jiangsu High Court). 3. Kiely, “Making Good Citizens.” 4. Shao, Jiaohui, Shao Zhenxuan 1925 afterword, 1; JPA 1047/26/440, 1922; Sun, YWDQ, faling sec., 107; (brief biography) Shanghai shi difangzhi (Shanghai local gazetteer), http://www.shtong.gov.cn/, accessed Mar. 31, 2011; Luke Kwong, T’an Ssu-t’ung, 1865– 1899: The Life and Thought of a Reformer (Leiden: Brill, 1996), 134–136. 5. Li, JDYJB, 30; Liang, JDEJBS, 31R; SHAC 1049/2472, 1927. 6. MJFX, 118 (Apr. 1919 Provisional Regulations for Employing Prison Employees). 7. Yan, “BJJYJ,” 36. 8. Shao, Jiaohui, Shao afterword, 1; JPA 1047/26/440, 1922; JPA 1047/17/644, 1928; SHAC 1049/2472, 1927; Sun, YWDQ, 107; Li, JDYJB, 30; Liang, JDEJBS, 31R; Frederic Wakeman, Jr., History and Will: Philosophical Perspectives of Mao Tse-tung’s Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 139. 9. Shao, Jiaohui, Shao afterword, 1; JPA 1047/26/440, 1922; JPA 1047/17/644, 1928. 10. SHAC 1049/2442, 1925; SHAC 1049/2641, 1927; SHAC 1049/2472, 1927; SHAC 1049/2644, 1927; Wang, JDJB, 7. 11. SHAC 1049/2440, 1925; SHAC 1049/2642, 1927; Liang, JDEJBS, 32; Zhu, JGGJBL, 37. 12. SHAC 1049/2440, 1925. 13. JPA 1047/17/642, 1921; Li, JDYJB, 3–4, 31; Zhu, JGGJBL, 142; MOJ, Chinese Prisons, 74. 14. JPA 1047/17/642, 1921. 15. SHAC 1049/2709, 1927; SHAC 1049/2440, 1925; SHAC 1049/2642, 1927; Zhu, JGGJBL, 88, 100, 111, 142, 166. 16. JPA 1047/17/642, 1921; (similar examples) JPA 1047/26/440, 1922; Zhu, JGGJBL, 142. 17. Shao, Jiaohui, 24–25. 18. Guo Jianlin, Beiyang zhengfu jianshi (A brief history of the Beiyang governments) vol. 2 (Tianjin: Tianjin guji chubanshe, 2000), 818; Cyrus H. Peake, Nationalism and Education in Modern China (New York: Columbia University Press, 1932), 71. 19. Wu Xiangxiang, “Xu Shiying de yisheng” (The life of Xu Shiying), Zhuanji wenxue, no. 5.5 (Nov. 1964): 10. 20. Wang, “KGJZBT,” 10–11; Li and Jin, “Shiwu guo shenpan,” 2. 21. JPA 1047/26/440, 1922; (other examples) Wu, BHDYJB, 1; MOJ, Chinese Prisons, 35, 88; Zhu, JGGJBL, 49.

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Notes to Pages 50–55 22. SHAC 1049/2847 (opinion letter dated Dec. 11, 1913). 23. SHAC 1049/2847. 24. Jan Kiely, “Shanghai Public Moralist Nie Qijie and Morality Book Publication Projects in Republican China,” Twentieth-Century China 36, no. 1 (Jan. 2011). 25. “Jianyu huiyi yi’an” (Prison conference proposal), SFGB, no. 38 (Aug. 31, 1915): 53. 26. “Jianyu huiyi yi’an,” 55; Paul R. Katz, Divine Justice: Religion and the Development of Chinese Legal Culture (London: Routledge, 2008); Paul Katz, “Ritual? What Ritual? Secularization in the Study of Chinese Legal History, From Colonial Encounters to Modern Scholarship,” Social Compass 56, no. 3 (2009): 328–344. 27. Zhu, ZXJBL, 169; Chen, FPP, 54; Lu, Ganhua jiaoyu, 37; Yan, “BJJYJ,” 36; SFGB, no. 81 (Sept. 30, 1917) (MOJ order no. 5710, June 26, 1917), 80; Gamble, Peking, 312; MOJ, Chinese Prisons, 22; Liang, JDEJBS, 83. 28. Zhu, ZXJBL, 97–98, 170–171. 29. Zhu, ZXJBL, 170. 30. Wang, JGJ, 74–75. 31. Wang, Jianyuxue, Wang Wenbao preface, 1; Chen, FPP, 54; Chen, Yi fofa, preface, 2L. On these Buddhist practices, Ding Fubao, Foxue Dacidian (Buddhist Dictionary) (1920, repr., Shanghai: Foxue shuju, 1996), 1902, 1972. 32. JPA 1047/17/642, 1921; JPA 1047/26/440, 1922; Liang, JDEJBS, 83–84; Zhu, JGGJBL, 142; MOJ, Chinese Prisons, 74; Yan, “BJJYJ,”40; Sun, YWDQ, 835. 33. Shao, Jiaohui, 9, 23–25, 32, 36, 39, 49, 62, 84–87. 34. JPA 1047/17/642, 1921. 35. SHAC 1049/2440, 1925; SHAC 1049/2472, 1926; SHAC 1049/2641, 1927; SHAC 1049/2644, 1927; SHAC 1049/2642, 1927; JPA 1047/17/642, 1921; JPA 1047/17/440, 1922; JPA 1047/26/440, 1922; JPA 1047/17/564, 1923; JPA 1047/11/600, 1924; JPA 1047/17/644, 1928; JPA 1047/17/1483, 1927–31; Zhu, JGGJBL, 14, 37–38, 142; Liang, JDEJBS, 83L; MOJ, Chinese Prisons, 74; Yan, “BJJYJ,” 38–40; Liang Gongchen, Quanjielu (A record of exhortations and admonishments), no. 8 (1881, repr., Shanghai: Yixue shuju, 1935), 1; Shao, Jiaohui, Shao afterword, 1; Chen Zhixi, “Ruyu qinian zhi huigu” (Looking back on seven years in prison) (hereafter “RQZH”), in JZ1.1, 9–10; MJFX, 366–368; Zhao Zhenzhong, “Shanghai jiu jianyu dui zuifan de jiaoyu” (Education of convicts in Shanghai’s old prisons), in Xia and Zhu, ZJZBYW, 285; Kiely, “Shanghai Public Moralist”; Christopher A. Reed, Gutenberg in Shanghai: Chinese Print Capitalism, 1876–1937 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2004); and Cynthia Brokaw and Christopher A. Reed, eds., From Woodblocks to the Internet: Chinese Publishing and Print Culture in Transition, circa 1800 to 2008 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2010). Robert Culp notes that collections like the Wuzhong yigui were included in the end of Qing education-reform-ethics curriculums. Robert Culp, Articulating Citizenship: Civic Education and Student Politics in Southeastern China, 1912–1940 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 30. 36. Ge Zhaoguang, “Daojiao yu zhongguo minjian lunli” (Daoism and Chinese popular ethics), in Ge Zhaoguang zixuanji (Selected collection of Ge Zhaoguang) (hereafter GZZ) (Guilin: Guangxi shifan daxue chubanshe, 1997), 64–65; Kiely, “Shanghai

Notes to Pages 55–61

37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

44.

45.

46. 47. 48.

Public Moralist,” 5–8; Brokaw, Ledgers of Merit and Demerit; Sakai Tadao, Chugoku zensho no kenkyu (Research on Chinese morality books) (Tokyo: Kobundo, 1960); Wolfram Eberhard, Guilt and Sin in Traditional China (introduction to and translation of Taishang baofa tushuo) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967); Teng Ssu-yu, Family Instructions for the Yen Clan (introduction to and translation of Yanshi jiaxun) (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1968); Angela Leung, “Elementary Education in the Lower Yangtze Region in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” in Elman and Woodside, eds., Education and Society; Liang, Quanjielu, no. 8, sec. dao, 84; Fu MeiChang Chen, “Local Control of Convicted Thieves in Eighteenth-Century China,” in Frederic Wakeman, Jr., and Carolyn Grant, eds., Conflict and Control in Late Imperial China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), 134–137; Li, Qingmo xiaceng shehui, 304–306, 330–331. Kiely, “Shanghai Public Moralist”; Lewis Hodous, “The Chinese Church of the Five Religions,” Journal of Religion 4, no. 1 (Jan. 1924): 71–76. Shao, Jiaohui, 15, 24–27, 41, 45, 48, 52–53, 56–57, 61– 62, 106. Shao, Jiaohui, 18, 41, 45, 48, 52–53, 56–57, 60–61, 72–75, 78–79, 82–89, 93–97, 114; Liang, JDEJBS, 85R–87R; Yan, “BJJYJ,” 40–41. Shao, Jiaohui, 15, 24, 27, 62, 106. Ge, GZZ, 78–79. Foucault, Discipline and Punish. JPA 1047/17/642, 1921; Chen Junsan, “Xingshi zhengce zhidu gaiyao: Jianyu gailiang zhengce” (The essential penal policy and system: Prison reform policy), FP, no. 98 (May 17, 1925): 1; Li Zhuxun, Jingshi di’er jianyu baogao (Report on the Capital No. 2 Prison) (Beijing, 1923), 55. Yan, “BJJYJ,” 36, 43–45; Lu, Ganhua jiaoyu, 37, 72; MOJ, Chinese Prisons, 25–26; (on social learning) Edgardo Rotman, “The Failure of Reform,” in Morris and Rothman, OHP, 179–181. JPA 1047/11/600, 1924; SHAC 1049/2709, 1927; SHAC 1049/2644, 1927; SHAC 1049/2641, 1927; SHAC 1049/2472, 1927; MJFX, 365–368; Yan, “BJJYJ,” 36; Zhu Jingneng and Tao Xingzhi, Pingmin qianzike (The commoners’ primer), 4 vols. (Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1923); Chinese Common People’s Promotion Society (Zhongguo pingmin cujin zonghui), see Peake, Nationalism and Education, 81–82, 89, 98, 159–161; Shirley Garrett, Social Reformers in Urban China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970), 151–152, 158–162; Culp, Articulating Citizenship, 35; Charles Hayford, To the People: James Yen and Village China (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990); Jean-Pierre Drege, La Commercial Press de Shanghai, 1897–1949 (Paris: Institut des Hautes Études Chinoises, 1978). Yan, “BJJYJ,” 36, 43–45. The last (109th) issue of the periodical was published in July 1924. JPA 1047/11/600, 1924. Yan, “BJJYJ,” 36, 40; MOJ, Chinese Prisons, 24, 31, 74; “Jingshi di’er jianyu zaijianren jiaoyu nianji zongbiao” (General chart of Capital No. 2 Prison prisoners education annual plan), SFGB, no. 194 (Aug. 31, 1924): 23; JPA 1047/11/600, 1924; Li Chien-nung,

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Notes to Pages 61–64

49. 50.

51.

52. 53.

54.

55.

The Political History of China, trans. Teng Ssu-yu and Jeremy Ingalls (New York: Van Nost, 1956), 467–470. SHAC 1049/2709, 1927; SHAC 1049/2644, 1927; SHAC 1049/2641, 1927; SHAC 1049/2472, 1927. Yan, “BFZSF,” 53–60; Sifabu zongwuting diwuke (Fifth sec. of the General Affairs Department of the Ministry of Justice) (hereafter SZD), Diyici xingshi tongji nianbao (First annual report of crime statistics) (hereafter DXTN) (Beijing, 1914); Zhang Jingyu, “Beijing sifabu fanzui tongji de fenxi” (Analysis of the Beijing Ministry of Justice crime statistics) (hereafter “BSFTF”), Shehui xuejie, no. 2 (June 1928): 97, 113, 132–143; Li Jinghan, “Beiping zuidi xiandu de shenghuo chengdu de taolun” (A discussion of the lowest level of livelihood in Beiping), Shehui xuejie, no. 3 (Sept. 1929): 9; Li, JDYJB, Wang preface, 1; Dikötter, CPP, 77–78; Jan Kiely, “Dangerous Cities: Judicial Authorities, Criminologists, and the Perception of Crime Zones in 1920s and 1930s China,” in Billy K. L. So and Madeleine Zelin, eds., New Narratives of Urban Space in Republican Chinese Cities: Emerging Social, Legal, and Governance Orders (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2013). A “bare-stick” male is a poor young man at the bottom of the social hierarchy, who would never be able to afford a wife and family (and so could never meet Confucian social expectations). “Difang shenpanting siniandu shoushou xingshi anjian bijiao biao” (Comparative chart of 1915 local court processed criminal cases) (hereafter “DSSSXABB”), SFGB, no. 60 (May 30, 1916): 113–115; Sifabu diwuci xingshi tongji nian (Ministry of Justice fifth annual crime statistics) (hereafter SDWXTN) (Beijing, 1921), 1–7, 309–314; SZD, Sifabu baniandu banshi qinxing baogao (MOJ 1919 management situation report) (Beijing, 1919), 135–136; FTW, KSJ, 514–515; RCETC, 48, 51, 54, 63; “JGLJ,” 99; SHAC 1049/2442, 1925; Li, JDYJB, 20; Shao, Jiaohui, 22–23, 72, 86; Zhang, “BSFTF,” 80–83, 89, 95, 121; Zhou Shuzhao, “Beiping yibai ming nufan yanjiu” (Research on a hundred women criminals in Beiping) (hereafter “BYMNY”), Shehui xuejie, no. 6, 42–43; Yan, “BFZSF,” 38–46, 53–58; Liang Yeung-li, “The New Criminal Code,” China Weekly Review (Sept. 8, 1928): 104; Dikötter, CPP, 77–80, 97–98; Jun Ke Choy, My China Years (San Francisco: East/West Publishing, 1974), 56; Strand, Rickshaw Beijing, 71. Kiely, “Dangerous Cities”; “CCGXJQ,” 20. Fitzgerald, Awakening China, 12; Henrietta Harrison, The Making of the Republican Citizen: Political Ceremonies and Symbols in China 1911–1929 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Joshua A. Fogel and Peter G. Zarrow, eds., Imagining the People: Chinese Intellectuals and the Concept of Citizenship, 1890–1920 (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1997); Culp, Articulating Citizenship. Xu, MRDC, 1554; SFGB, no. 197 (Sept. 13, 1924), 19; Jean Chesneaux, Marianne Bastid, and Marie-Claire Bergère, China from the Opium Wars to the 1911 Revolution (New York: Pantheon, 1976), 61, 78; China Yearbook (London: G. Routledge; Tientsin Tientsin Press, 1917), 267–269; James E. Sheridan, Chinese Warlord: The Career of Feng Yu–hsiang (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1966), 87, 134. JPA 1047/17/548, 1924. This file includes: Xue Dubi, Tanlianjing (Warnings on greed and honesty), 1– 5, 7, 10, 15, 21–23, and Xue Dubi, Jiaoduojian (Warnings on arrogance

Notes to Pages 65–72

56.

57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65.

66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76.

77. 78. 79. 80.

and idleness), sec. 1, 2, sec. 2, 2–5, 8–12. On Xue Dubi’s songbook, see SFGB, no. 197 (Sept. 13, 1924) 19–23; JPA 1047/ 11/ 600, 1924; Sheridan, Chinese Warlord, 90–91, 105. Shao, Jiaohui, 1–3, 14–17, 21–33, 36, 40–44, 63–68, 71–72, 83–84; Susan Burns, “Health and the Nation in Nineteenth-Century Japan,” in Timothy Brook, ed., Nation Work: Asian Elites and National Identities (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001). Shao, Jiaohui, 25, 66, 69–72, 90–91, 115; JPA 1047/26/440, 1922; JPA 1047/17/1483, 1927; Zhu, JGGJBL, 142; MOJ, Chinese Prisons, 46, 82; Yan, “BJJYJ,” 40. Shao, Jiaohui, 24, 27, 66–70. Shao, Jiaohui, 1–3, 36, 83–84. Shao, Jiaohui, 108–113. Shao, Jiaohui, 97–101. Shao, Jiaohui, 103–106. JPA 1047/26/440, 1922. Ge, GZZ, 80. SHAC 1049/2440, 1925; SHAC 1049/2472, 1926; SHAC 1049/2641, 1927; SHAC 1049/2642, 1927; SHAC 1049/2644, 1927; JPA 1047/17/642, 1921; JPA 1047/26/440, 1922; JPA 1047/11/600, 1924; Zhu, JGGJBL, 14, 37–38, 142; Liang, JDEJBS, 83L; Yan, “BJJYJ,” 38; MJFX, 366–368; Shao, Jiaohui, 15–17, 21, 28–33, 40–44; Shen Wenjun, Guochi xiaoshi (A brief history of national humiliation) (Shanghai: Zhongguo tushu gongsi, 1925), 1, 11, 39, 73; Peake, Nationalism and Education, 107, 114, 161, 173; Weng Zhangzhong, Gongmin mofan (The model citizen) (Shanghai: Zhonghua, 1914); Joan Judge, Print and Politics: “Shibao” and the Culture of Reform in Late Qing China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 88, 108; Culp, Articulating Citizenship. For Xue Dubi’s patriotic songs, SFGB, no. 197 (Sept. 13, 1924), 20–23, and JPA 1047/11/600, 1924; (on similar themes) Sheridan, Chinese Warlord, 80, 88. Shao, Jiaohui, 32–33, 101, 118–138; Shen, Guochi xiaoshi, 39. Shao, Jiaohui, 120–125. Shao, Jiaohui, 122. Shao, Jiaohui, 122. SHAC 1049/2709, 1927. Yan, “BJJYJ,” 37–42. Sun, YWDQ, 726–728. SHAC 1049/2472, 1927; Yan, “BJJYJ,” 41. JPA 1047/17/642, 1921; SHAC 1049/2641, 1927; SHAC 1049/2642, 1927; SHAC 1049/2709, 1927; Zhu, JGGJBL, 38, 54; Li, JDYJB, 31; Yan, “BJJYJ,” 36. JPA 1047/17/1483, 1927–31; SHAC 1049/2709, 1927; SHAC 1049/2641, 1927; SHAC 1049/2440, 1925; SHAC 1049/2472, 1927; SHAC 1049/2642, 1927; Zhu, JGGJBL, 38, 54; Li, JDYJB, 31; Yan, “BJJYJ,” 36; MOJ, Chinese Prisons, 75. Zhu, JGGJBL, 14; Gamble, Peking, 312. JPA 1047/26/440, 1922. SHAC 1049/2709, 1927; JPA 1047/17/1483, 1927; JPA 1047/26/440, 1922; Zhu, JGGJBL, 14, 38, 142; Li, JDYJB, 31; Liang, JDEJBS, 83L; Yan, “BJJYJ,” 36. See JPA 1047/17/642, 1921. Zhu, JGGJBL, 14, 38, 200; MOJ, Chinese Prisons, 33, 45; JPA 1047/26/440, 1922; Liang,

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Notes to Pages 72–77

81. 82. 83. 84.

85.

86. 87. 88. 89. 90.

91. 92.

93. 94. 95.

96. 97. 98. 99.

JDEJBS, 83L; Yan, “BJJYJ,” 40; Leung, “Elementary Education,” 393–394; Benjamin A. Elman, A Cultural History of Civil Examinations in Late Imperial China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 265; Ichisada Miyazaki, China’s Examination Hell: The Civil Service Examinations of Imperial China, trans. Conrad Schirokauer (New York: Weatherhill, 1976), 15. JPA 1047/17/642, 1921. JPA 1047/26/440, 1922. Yan, “BJJYJ,” 46, 51. JPA 1047/11/600, 1924–25; SHAC 1049/2644, 1927; MJFX, 365–366; Yan, “BJJYJ,” 36, 39, 45, 50–51; FP, no. 87 (Mar. 1, 1925): 9; SFGB, no. 194 (Aug. 31, 1924): 18, 23; SFBG, no. 193 (July 31, 1924) (MOJ order no. 440, June 1924), 12; MOJ, Chinese Prisons, 45; Sun Yanjing, “Bieyou yifan moli” (A distinctive magic power), in Zhang Yigong, Gediao bianzi de zhongguo (Queue cutting China) (Beijing: Zhongguo qingnian chubanshe, 1997), 63–66; Zeng Sujin, Zhongguo dazhong yinyue (China’s music of the masses) (Beijing: Beijing Guangbo xueyuan chubanshe, 2003) 168–171, 179, 188–189; Li, Qingmo xiaceng shehui, 294. Yan, “BJJYJ,” 36, 50; JPA 1047/11/600, 1924; Wang, JDJB, 83; SFGB, no. 197 (Sept. 13, 1924), 19; Zeng, Zhongguo dazhong yinyue, 56, 169, 171; Sheridan, Chinese Warlord, 87. Xue Dubi completed and published the first edition of Songs to Exhort the People when still in Shaanxi in early 1922. JPA 1047/11/600, 1924; SFGB, no. 197 (Sept. 13, 1924), 19; (for a similar example) Yan, “BJJYJ,” 50. SHAC 1049/2709, 1927. Yan, “BJJYJ,” 46–48. SHAC 1049/2642, 1927. Zhu, JGGJBL, 6, 29, 50; Chen, FPP, 16, 50–51, 62; RGAPC, 5, 17; Liang, JDEJBS, 55 and appendix, 5–7; MOJ, Chinese Prisons, 20, 36, 42; Zhu, ZXJBL, 50–51, 123–128; Wang, JDJB, 61–62; Li, JDYJB, 18; JPA 1047/17/642, 1921. Foucault, Discipline and Punish; Morris and Rothman, OHP and Dikötter, CPP. Liang, JDEJBS, appendix, 5; RGAPC, 19–20; Zhu, JGGJBL, 35, 138, 140–141; Wang, JDJB, 121; Chen, FPP, 39, 51, 67–68; MOJ, Chinese Prisons, 37–38, 46; JPA 1047/17/642, 1921; Dikötter, CPP, 90. Zhu, JGGJBL, 29; Zhu, ZXJBL, 11–13, 123; Wang, JDJB, 60; Liang, JDEJBS, appendix, 2. SHAC 1049/2709, 1927. Shao, Jiaohui, 11, 38, 59, 61, 73, 78; Liang, JDEJBS, 84L, 86L. See Taishang ganying pian (The treatise of the Most Exalted One on moral retribution), in Shi Yuhan and Nie Qijie, Ganying leichao (The response collection) (1670, repr., Shanghai, 1924); Liang, Quanjielu. Yan, “BJJYJ,” 41. Liang, JDEJBS, 84R–86L. JPA 1047/17/642, 1921. Liang, JDEJBS, 85L–86L; Sun, YWDQ, 841–842; Brokaw, Ledgers of Merit and Demerit; JPA 1047/11/600, 1924.

Notes to Pages 77–86 100. Shao, Jiaohui, 6, 60, 72, 117. See Yuan Huang’s “Gaiguo lun” in his Sixun (Four instructions), in Shi and Nie, Ganying leichao. 101. I differ with Dikötter’s view of internalizing as a means for discipline. Dikötter, CPP, 15. 102. JPA 1047/17/642, 1921. 103. Liang, JDEJBS, 83–84. 104. Wang, JGJ, 77–78. 105. Shao, Jiaohui, 4. 106. Shao, Jiaohui, 22. 107. Shao, Jiaohui, 38. 108. Shao, Jiaohui, 13, 30; (a similar example) Liang, JDEJBS, 86L. 109. Shao, Jiaohui, 22–23. 110. Shao, Jiaohui, 31. 111. Shao, Jiaohui, appendix, 1, 7, 41. 112. Zhu, JGGJBL, 38, 54. 113. Shao, Jiaohui, 20, 29, 52–60. 114. Shao, Jiaohui, 9, 12, 29. 115. Ping-chen Hsiung, A Tender Voyage: Children and Childhood in Late Imperial China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 145–149, 154. 116. Eugenia Lean, Public Passions: The Trial of Shi Jianqiao and the Rise of Public Sympathy in Republican China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 14. 117. Shao, Jiaohui, 19–20; Liang, JDEJBS, 86L–87R.

c hapt er 3 . o b j ec t s o f r ef o r m a ti o n 1. Chen, “RQZH,” 1–5. 2. Yan, “BFZSF,” 33–38, 43–47, 53, 56–66; Yan Jingyue, “Zhongguo jianyu wenti” (The Chinese prison question) (hereafter “ZJW”), Shehui xuejie, no. 3 (Sept. 1929), 26, 39; Yan, “Fanzui gailun,” 2–3; Yan Jingyue, Zhongguo de fanzui wenti yu shehui bianqian de guanxi (Crime in relation to social change in China), trans. Wu Zhen (Beijing: Beijing daxue chubanshe, 1986), Wang Zhen introduction, 1–3; Lei Jieqiong preface to Yan Jingyue, Yan Jingyue lunwen ji (Yan Jingyue’s collected scholarly articles) (hereafter YJLJ) (Beijing: Kaiming chubanshe, 1995), 1; Yan Jingyue, “Fanzui shumu” (Bibliography of criminology), Shehui xuejie, no. 3 (Sept. 1929), appendix; Zhou, “BYMNY,” 32, 80–81; Zhang, “BSFTF,” 84; JZ1.1, 1–2; Chen, “RQZH,” 13; R. D. Arkush, Fei Xiaotong and Sociology in Revolutionary China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981); Fu Sudong, “Yanjing daxue shehuixuexi sanshi nian” (Thirty years of the Yanjing University Sociology Department), in Yanda wenshi ziliao (Historical materials of Yenching University), vol. 2 (Beijing: Beijing daxue chubanshe, 1991), 139–157; Yin Changfa, “Minchu Shanxi diyi jianyu zuifan de jiaohui yu zuoye tanxi” (A discussion of convict moral instruction and work at the Shanxi No.1 Prison in the early Republic) (hereafter “MSDJZ”), in Xia and Zhu, ZJZBYW, 359; Xu, MRDC, 41. 3. Chen, “RQZH,” 8; Mingyi zhongxue xiaozhang Zhang Yuankai (Mingyi Middle School Principal Zhang Yuankai), www.fygzw.org, accessed 2011, May 16.

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Notes to Pages 86–91 4. Chen, “RQZH,” 1, 6, 14. 5. SZD, DXTN, 365–366, 400–402; “DSSSXABB,” 113–115; SDWXTN; SJBQB; FTW, KSJ, especially 514–515; SHAC 1049/2472, 1927; SHAC 7/ 7634, 1935; JPA 1047/17/1486, 1935; JPA 1047/17/1503, 1935; Yan, “BFZSF,” 53–60, 67; Yan, “BJJYJ,” 36; Zhang, “BSFTF,” 97, 113, 132–143; Li, “Beiping zuidi,” 9; Wang, JDJB, 107; Li, JDYJB, 20; Chen, FPP, 17; Liang, JDEJBS, 83L; Li Jianhua, Jianyuxue (Penology) (Shanghai: Zhonghua shuju, 1936), 47–48, 116; Xu Huifang and Liu Qingyu, “Shanghai nuxingfan de shehui fenxi” (Social analysis of Shanghai female offenders) (hereafter “SNDSF”), Dalu (Mainland), no. 1.4 (Oct. 1, 1932): 85; Sun Xiong, Fanzuixue yanjiu (Criminology research) (hereafter FZXYJ) (Shanghai: Zhonghua shuju, 1939), 50–51, 59, 111, 267–268; Ye, Shouduzhi, 618; JPA 1047/17/1524, 1935. 6. SHAC 1049/2709, 1927; SHAC 1049/2642, 1927; SHAC 1049/2440, 1925; SHAC 1049/2641, 1927; SHAC 1049/2472, 1927; SHAC 1049/2442, 1925; SHAC 7/ 7634, 1935; Yan, “ZJW,” 34. 7. JPA 1047/17/1516–1517, 1928–29; JPA 1047/17/1492, 1929; JPA 1047/17/1502–1503, 1934; JPA 1047/17/1486, 1935; SHAC 7/1271, 1936; Xu and Liu, “SNDSF,” 74–81; Bo Yibo, Qishinian fendou yu sikao (Seventy years of struggle and reflection) (hereafter QFYS) (Beijing: Zhonggong dangshi chubanshe, 1996), 92. 8. Zhao Jianxun, “Gaige jianyu yijianshu” (Opinion letter on prison reform) (hereafter “GJY”), FP, no. 600 (May 12, 1935), 8; Zhu, ZXJBL, 113, 124; Wang, JGJ, 76; (recidivism) JPA 1047/17/1486, 1935; SHAC 1049/2709, 1927; JPA 1047/26/440, 1922; SHAC 1049/2443, 1925; SHAC 1049/2642, 1927; SHAC 1049/2440, 1925; SHAC 1049/2641, 1927; SHAC 1049/2472, 1926; SHAC 1049/2442, 1925; Li, JDYJB, 20; Wang, JDJB, 107; Chen, FPP, 16; SZD, SJBQB, 14; SZD, SDWXTN, 309–314, 321–322. 9. JPA 1047/17/1487, 1936; Yan, “BFZSF,” 53–60; SZD, DXTN; Zhang, “BSFTF,” 97, 113, 132–143; Dikötter, CPP, 77–80; Li, Jianyuxue, 47–48, 116; Deng Juesheng, “Fanzui de shehui yuanyin” (Social causes of crime), JZ1.1, 2–5; Li Maodi, “Lun jiaoyuxingzhuyi yu fanjiaoyuxingzhuyi” (On educational penalism and antieducational penalism), FZ, no. 8.1 (Jan. 1935): 21–22; Wang Yongbin, “Shicha huabei qisheng sifa baogaoshu,” (Report on the investigation of justice in seven provinces in north China), FP, no. 621 (Oct. 6, 1935): 3; SHAC 7/7634, 1935; Sun, FZXYJ, 50–51, 59, 267–268. 10. Sun, FZXYJ, 74, 80; Yen Ching-yueh [Yan Jingyue], “Crime in Relation to Social Change in China” (hereafter “CRSCC”) (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1934), abstract in American Journal of Sociology 40, no. 3 (Nov, 1934): 301–302; Xu and Liu, “SNDSF,” 78–79, 85; (interview with Warden Niu) Ye, Shouduzhi, 618; Stapleton, Civilizing Chengdu, 39; Susan Naquin, Peking: Temples and City Life, 1400–1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 364. 11. Yan, “BFZSF,” 53–60. 12. Zhou, “BYMNY,” 41, 48, 50, 52, 53–54, 57–58, 60–62, 73, 75, 77; Xu and Liu, “SNDSF,” 74–75, 78–81, 84–85. 13. See statistics in n. 5; Dikötter, CPP, 77–80. 14. Yan, “BFZSF,” 33–73; Ramon Myers, The Chinese Peasant Economy: Agricultural Development in Hopei and Shantung, 1890–1949 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970); Philip C. C. Huang, The Peasant Economy and Social Change in North

Notes to Pages 91–93

15.

16.

17.

18. 19.

20. 21. 22.

China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1985); Prasenjit Duara, Culture, Power, and the State: Rural North China, 1900–1942 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988); Elizabeth J. Perry, Rebels and Revolutionaries in North China, 1845–1945 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1980); Lu Hanchao, Beyond the Neon Lights: Everyday Shanghai in the Early Twentieth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). Zhao, “GJY,” 12; Chen, Yi fofa, 16; Constantin Rissov, Le Dragon Enchaîné: De Chiang Kai-Shek à Mao Ze Dong trente-cinq ans d’intimité avec la Chine (The chained dragon: Thirty-years of intimacy with China from Chiang Kai-shek to Mao Zedong) (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1985), 182. Brian G. Martin, The Shanghai Green Gang: Politics and Organized Crime, 1919–1937 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 30; Robert Bickers, Empire Made Me: An Englishman Adrift in Shanghai (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 69; Frederic Wakeman, Jr., Policing Shanghai, 1927–1937 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Frederic Wakeman, Jr., The Shanghai Badlands: Wartime Terrorism and Urban Crime, 1937–1941 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Cai Shaoqing, Minguo shiqi de tufei (Bandits of the Republican era) (Beijing: Zhongguo renmin daxue chubanshe, 1993); Phil Billingsley, Bandits in Republican China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988); J. Usang Ly, “An Economic Interpretation of the Increase of Bandits in China,” Journal of Race Development 8, no. 3 (Jan. 1918): 366–378; Diana Lary, Warlord Soldiers: Chinese Common Soldiers, 1911–1937 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). Sun, FZXYJ, 52; Zhou, “BYMNY,” 49; “Shi Jianqiao fuchou hou yuzhong xizuo” (Shi Jianqiao’s activitities since her imprisonment for revenge), Dagongbao, Dec. 7, 1935; Chen Shangfan and Lin Ren, “Shi Jianqiao baochou” (The revenge of Shi Jianqiao), in Wen Di, Minguo sida qi’an (Four great strange cases of the Republic) (Beijing: Zhongguo wenshi chubanshe, 1995), 205–206; Lean, Public Passions; Huang, CCLPC, 199. Zhou, “BYMNY,” 63. Sun, FZXYJ, 56–58, 86–87, 92; Xu and Liu, “SNDSF,” 74–85; Rissov, Dragon Enchaîné, 181–182; Zhou, “BYMNY,” 48–62, 73–77; Yen, “CRSCC,” 303; Martin, Green Gang, 18, 30, 50–53; Li Yaochen, Ren zai jianghu (People of the romantic vagrants) (Xianggang: Zhongyuan chubanshe, 1990), 13–16; Emily Honig, Sisters and Strangers: Women in the Shanghai Cotton Mills, 1919–1949 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1986); Gail Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures: Prostitution and Modernity in Twentieth-Century Shanghai (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). Sun, FZXYJ, 56–58, 86–92; Xu and Liu, “SNDSF,” 78–79; Rissov, Dragon Enchaîné, 181–182. Yin, “MSDJZ,” 359; Dikötter, CPP, 97; SHAC 1049/2709, 1927; JPA 1047/26/440, 1922; Li, JDYJB, 20. SHAC 1049/2442, 1925; Li, JDYJB, 20; Zhou, “BYMNY,” 42, 48–49; Yan, “BFZSF,” 45–46, 53, 56–58; Zhang, “BSFTF,” 121; Shao, Jiaohui, 22–23, 72, 86; Yen, “CRSCC,” 302–303; Xu and Liu, “SNDSF,” 84; Sun, FZXYJ, 79, 97; Mrs. A. R. Caton, “Dongfang

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Notes to Pages 94–97

23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29.

30. 31.

32.

jianyu de yinxiang” (Impressions of eastern prisons), JZ1.1, 3; Ono Kazuko, Chinese Women in a Century of Revolution, 1850–1950, trans. Joshua Fogel (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1989), 144; Arthur P. Wolfe and Chieh-shan Huang, Marriage and Adoption in China, 1845–1945 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1980), 230; Jones, trans., Great Qing Code, 257–259, 353; Honig, Sisters and Strangers, 96–99, 151; Gail Hershatter, “Modernizing Sex, Sexing Modernity: Prostitution in Early Twentieth-Century Shanghai,” in Engendering China: Women, Culture and the State, ed. Christina Gilmartin, Gail Hershatter, Lisa Rofel, and Tyrene White (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 167; Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures, 75, 181–188, 191, 200, 202–204; Huang, CCLPC, 157, 159–161, 168–170, 181– 182; Martin, Green Gang, 30; SHAC 1049/2709, 1927; JPA 1047/26/440, 1922; SHAC 1049/2443, 1925; SHAC 1049/2642, 1927; SHAC 1049/2440, 1925; SHAC 1049/2641, 1927; SHAC 1049/2472, 1926; SJBQB, 14. RCETC, 48; Yan, “BFZSF,” 40. Chen, Yi fofa, 1–2. Lean, Public Passions; Xin Tianjin bao (New Tianjin news), Nov. 13, 1935, and Yishi bao (Social welfare news), Nov. 14, 1935; Da Duan, “Shu Shi Jianqiao teshe linghou” (On Shi Jianqiao’s special pardon), FP, no. 676 (Oct. 25, 1936): 1. Yan, “ZJW,” 41. Lu, Ganhua jiaoyu, 9. Hu Yimin, Yuzhong zishu (Prison account) (hereafter YZZS) (Nanjing, 1928), Ma Qingwan preface, 1. Shao, Jiaohui, 28–29; (Li Yimin account) “Guanyu suzhou guomindang jiangsu lujun junren jianyu zuotanhui fayan zhaiyao” (Summary of the speeches at the discussion meeting concerning the KMT army prison in Suzhou) (hereafter “GSGJ”), WZX, no. 69 (1980), 44; Zhang Jinbao, “Zhang Jinbao huiyilu” (Memoir of Zhang Jinbao) (hereafter “ZJH”), Jiangsu dangshi ziliao (Jiangsu party historical materials), vol. 4 (1985), 64; SHAC 7/1305, 1937. Chen, “RQZH,” 4–5. Yan, “BFZSF,” 64; SHAC 1049/2472, 1927; MOJ, Chinese Prisons, 75; Chen Fuzhi, “Canguan jiangsu di’er jianyu ji” (Visiting the Jiangsu No. 2 Prison), Fazheng zhoukan (Legal administration weekly), no. 1.6 (Dec. 8, 1930): 12–13; Xu and Liu, “SNDSF,” 90; Xiao Ming, “He dajiemen zai yuzhong” (With the big sisters in prison) (hereafter “HDZY”), in Zhonggong nanjing shiwei dangshi bangongshi yu yuhuatai lieshi jinianguan (The Chinese Communist Party Nanjing Municipal Party Committee Party History Office and the Yuhuatai Martyrs Memorial), ed., Tiechuang suiyue: Gongchandang ren zai nanjing yuzhong de douzheng, 1927–1937, (Years of iron windows: The prison struggles of the Communists in Nanjing) (Nanjing: Dongnan daxue chubanshe, 1992), 101; Zhang, “ZJH,” 27, 61–66; Shuai Mengqi, “Nu dangyuan zhi jiechuzhe: Ji He Baozhen lieshi” (An outstanding female party member: Remembering martyr He Baozhen) (hereafter “NDZJ”), in Tiechuang suiyue, 17–18; Huang Jue’an, “Ruyu qianhou” (Before and after going to jail) (hereafter “RQ”), in Tiechuang suiyue, 60. “Luo Wengan shi zhi gaige sifaxingzhengyuan” (Mr. Luo Wengan’s reform of the Ministry of Judicial Administration), FP, no. 432 (Jan. 24, 1932): 39; Yan, “BFZSF,” 51,

Notes to Pages 97–101

33. 34. 35.

36.

37.

38.

39. 40. 41.

42.

64, 67; Shi Taxia, “Nuyu” (Women’s jail), Guowen zhoubao (National literary weekly), no. 14.6 (Feb. 1, 1937): 81–82. Liang, JDEJBS, 2, 87L–89L, Yin preface, 2; SHAC 1049/2472, 1927; MOJ, Chinese Prisons, 7; Xiao, “HDZY,” 101; Zhang, “ZJH,” 27, 61–66; Shuai, “NDZJ,” 17–18. JPA 1047/17/531, 1928. Hua Yiwen, “Canguan de yiri” (A day of a visit), in Mao Dun, ed., Zhongguo de yiri (One day in China) (hereafter ZGDYR) (1936, repr., Shanghai: Minguo congshu, vol. 3, Shanghai shudian, 1991), 2.30. Chen, FPP, 60; Zhu, JGGJBL, 15, 38, 133, 143–144; Wang, JGJ, 84; Zhu, ZXJBL, 183; Wang, JDJB, 86; Liang, JDEJBS, 87L–89L, Yin preface, 2; RCETC, 92; Yan, “BFZSF,” 36; Wu, BHDYJB, 12; SHAC 1049/2442, 1925; SHAC 1049/2440, 1925; SHAC 1049/2443, 1925; SHAC 1049/2472, 1926–27; SHAC 1049/2641, 1927; SHAC 1049/2642, 1927; JPA 1047/17/1483, 1927; “Sifaxingzhengbu xunzheng shiqi gongzuo fenpei nianbiao shuoming shu” (Explanation of the annual charts on the Ministry of Judicial Administration work allocation in the time of political tutelage) (hereafter “SXXSGFNSS”), JZ1.1, 3; Hu Qipeng, Jianyu weisheng gaiyao (Essentials of prison hygiene) (Shanghai: Shangwu yinshuguan, 1935), 77; Tiechuang suiyue, 294, 298; Report of Jiangsu High Court order no. 1587, SFGB, no. 158 (Jan. 31, 1922), 28; FTW KSJ, 81–84, 107–109; MOJ, Chinese Prisons, 36; Shao, Jiaohui, 38; Ruth Rogaski, Hygienic Modernity: Meanings of Health and Disease in Treaty-Port China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 344; Dikötter, CPP, 89–90, 121, 130–135. Chen, “RQZH,”4; Yan, “ZJW,” 40; Yan, “BJJYJ,”46; “Beijing zaijianren chengfa tongji biao” (Beijing prisoner punishment statistical charts) (hereafter “BZCTB”), SFGB, no. 2.12 (Sept. 30, 1914): 1; JPA 1047/25/557, 1934; JPA 1047/25/582, 1933–34; JPA 1047/17/581, 1937. JPA 1047/25/582, 1933–34; Li, Jianyuxue, 120–123; Zhao Chen, Jianyuxue (Shanghai, 1931); Dikötter, CPP, 146; Yu Ni, “Jiejue fanren xingyu zhi piping” (Criticizing the solution for offenders’ sexual desire), FP, no. 534 (Feb. 4, 1934): 1–2; Gui Ren, “Qiufanmen de xingyu wenti” (The problem of prisoners’ sexual desire), Chahua (Tea talk), no. 27 (1948), repr. in Yuanyong hudiepai sanwen daxi (Great series of mandarin duck and butterfly school short essays) (Shanghai: Dongfang chuban zhongxin, 1997), 256. “BZCTB,” 1; JPA 1047/25/582, 1933–34; JPA 1047/17/581, 1936–37. Falu zhoukan, 12 (Sept. 23, 1923), 9. Yin Bingdong, Dianyu shengya sishinian (A warden’s forty-year career) (Taibei: Taiwan shangwu yinshu guan, 1970), 23–26; (Ministry order no. 1207 in 1929) JZ1.1, 10; Sifayuan, Quanguo sifa huiyi huibian (Collected reports of the National Judicial Conference) (hereafter QSHH) (Nanjing, 1935), sec. 3, 47–48; Shi, “Nuyu,” 81; Zhang Mingyuan, “Zai guomindang yuzhong” (In the KMT jail) (hereafter “ZGY”), in Gemingshi ziliao (Revolutionary history materials) (hereafter GZ), vol. 13 (Beijing, Wenshi ziliao chubanshe, 1984), 23. Yan, “ZJW,” 27–28; Caton, “Dongfang jianyu,” 3; Sun, YWDQ, 8, 39, 42–43, 48–50; Yin, Dianyu, 3–10; Zheng Yuanzou, Jianyuxue gaiyao (Essentials of penology) (Shanghai: Shijie shuju, 1929); Ni Yaokui, “Jiangsu jiu sifajie suoji” (Trivial record of

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Notes to Pages 102–107

43.

44.

45. 46.

47. 48.

49. 50.

51. 52.

53.

54. 55.

the Jiangsu old judicial circles) (hereafter “JJSS”), in Jiangsu wenshi ziliao jicui (Select collection of Jiangsu historical materials) (hereafter JWZJ) (Nanjing: Jiangsu wenshi ziliao jicui bianjibu, 1995), 279; Xu and Liu, “SNDSF,” 89–90; Xia Zhixu, “Nujian de douzheng” (The women’s ward struggle) (hereafter “NDD”), in Tiechuang suiyue, 156; Shuai, “NDZJ,” 19; Zhang, “ZJH,” 68. “Jiangsu sheng di’er jianyu zhengzhifan gao quanguo lushi gonghui shanghai lushi lianhehui shu” (Letter from the political prisoners of the Jiangsu No. 2 Prison to the National Lawyers Association and the Shanghai United Lawyers Association) (hereafter “JSDEJZG”), letter dated Mar. 30, 1933, Hoover East Asian Collection, 4270/3481; “Shanxi diyi jianyu quanqi qiufan gao gejie tongbao shu” (Letter from all the Shanxi No. 1 Prison prisoners to inform the various compatriots) (hereafter “SDJQQG”), letter dated Nov. 11, 1933, in Zhongguo luntan (China forum), no. 3.3 (Dec. 1933); SHAC 7/571, 1933; Huang, “RQ,” 60; Zhang, “ZJH,” 66; Dikötter, CPP, 88. Shenbao (Shanghai News), May 20, 1920; Shenbao, Nov. 4, 1920; Shanghai jianyu zhi (Shanghai prison gazetteer) (hereafter ShanghaiJZ), jianyu guanli renyuan zhuanlue sec., www.shtong.gov.cn, accessed Mar. 31, 2011; SHAC 2/414, 1932; FP, no. 219 (Sept. 11, 1927), 12. Sun, YWDQ, 6; Yin, Dianyu, 27; Chen, Yi fofa, 10R. Chen, “RQZH,” 2–4; “JSDEJZG”; “SDJQQG”; Ni, “JJSS,” 279; Chen, Yi fofa, 10R; Jan Kiely, “Performances of Resistance and the Imagined Moral Public: Communist Political Prisoners in China, 1928–1937,” Twentieth-Century China 29, no. 2 (Apr. 2004). “Susheng jianfan bafan wanliu yuzhang” (Jiangsu Province prisoners hunger strike to retain the warden), FP, no. 254 (1928), 127–128. SFGB, no. 86 (Jan. 30, 1918), 77–80; Zhu, JGGJBL, 5; Liang, JDEJBS, 91; Dikötter, CPP, 67, 123; JPA 1047/17/1486 (this 1927 file is included with a folder primarily of 1935 documents); “Fajie xiaoxi,” FP, no. 617 (Sept. 8, 1935): 15; (for a similar case) Ni, “JJSS,” 280. “BZCTB,” 1; JPA 1047/25/647, 1933; SHAC 7/914, 1936–37. Liang, JDEJBS, 85L; Shao, Jiaohui, 20, 75; JPA 1047/25/647, 1933; Xu and Liu, “SNDSF,” 72; Shi, “Nuyu,” 85; Zhang, “ZJH,” 64; Shi Jianqiao in Dagongbao (Tianjin), Dec. 7, 1935; Zhang, “ZGY,” 49; Huang Yaomian, Dongdang: Wo suo jinglide bange shiji (Upheavel: The half century that I have lived) (Shanghai: Shanghai wenyi chubanshe, 1987), 331. (Li Yimin account) “GSGJ,” 44. Shao, Jiaohui, 13; Liang, JDEJBS, 86L; Hu, Jianyu weisheng, 55; Sun, YWDQ, 511–512, 517–518; JPA 1047/1483, 1927; JPA 1047/25/645, 1932; JPA 1047/25/651, 1937; Li Yimin, “GSGJ,” 46; “SXXSGFNSS,” 3. Yin, “MSDJZ,” 359; Xu Bohua, Shanxi diyi jianyu jilue (A report on the Shangxi No. 1 Prison) (Taiyuan, 1924); Shanxi jianyu guanli ju, Jin zhong jianyu bainian lishi yange (A hundred years of the historical development of prisons in Shanxi), www. sx.xinhuanet.com, accessed June 17, 2011; “Fajie xiaoxi,” FP, no. 481 (Jan. 1, 1933): 23; “SDJQQG,” 17–19. “SDJQQG,” 17–19; “Fajie xiaoxi,” FP, no. 617 (Sept. 8, 1935), 15; Sun, YWDQ, 514–515. Chen, “RQZH,” 4–5.

Notes to Pages 108–119 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67.

68. 69. 70.

71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89.

Chen, “RQZH,” 6. Chen, “RQZH,” 7. Chen, “RQZH,” 7; Yin, “MSDJZ,” 360–361. Yan, “BJJYJ,” 37–44, 51; Yan, “BFZSF,” 67; Yan, “ZJW,”40–43; Li, Jianyuxue, 84–88. Yan, “BJJYJ,” 41; Yan, “BFZSF,”51. Yan, “BJJYJ,” 41–44, 51; Yan, “ZJW,” 41–43. SHAC 1049/2642, 1927. Hershatter, Dangerous Pleasures, 24–26. Yan, “BFZSF,” 66, 73; Yan, “BJJYJ,” 46–50. Yan, “BJJYJ,” 42. Wang, JDJB, 86–87, 95; Shao, Jiaohui, 30. Wang, JDJB, 93; (gongzuan sec.) SFGB, no. 2.7 (Apr. 30, 1914): 13; Li Lengyan, “Ping dashe ling” (Criticizing the general amnesty order), Fazheng xuebao, no. 4.4 (Apr. 1925): 44–45; SHAC 1049/2440, 1925; SHAC 1049/2442, 1925; SHAC 1049/2443, 1925; JPA 1047/17/1486, 1935; on failure of reformative project, Dikötter, CPP, 91. Sun, FZXYJ, 133. Sun, FZXYJ, 133; Sun, YWDQ, 134; JPA 1047/17/644, 1928. Zhu, JGGJBL, 143; SHAC 1049/2644, 1927; SHAC 1049/2709, 1927; SHAC 1049/2442, 1925; SHAC 1049/2440, 1925; SHAC 1049/2642, 1927; SHAC 1049/2472, 1926; SHAC 1049/2641, 1927. JPA 1047/25/583, 1934; JPA 1047/17/1497, 1931; JPA 1047/17/1502, 1935; JPA 1047/17/1500, 1933. JPA 1047/17/1518, 1933; Sun, YWDQ, 134. Zhu, ZXJBL, 169. Liang, JDEJBS, 2; JPA 1047/26/440, 1922; JPA 1047/17/564, 1923; “Minguo yilai xin sifa zhidu” (The new justice system since the onset of the Republic), FP, no. 244 (1928): 1. Rothman, Conscience and Convenience. SHAC 1049/2442, 1925; SHAC 1049/2641, 1927. Hua, “Canguan, ” 2.29. SHAC 1049/2641, 1927. O’Brien, Promise of Punishment; Morris and Rothman, OHP. Chen, “RQZH,” 8–13. Chen, “RQZH,” 8–9. Chen, “RQZH,” 8–9. Chen, “RQZH,” 9. Chen, “RQZH,” 9–11; Yuzhun lunke jiyao (Essentials of jade laws and cycle rules); Yuding jinke jiyao (Essentials of the jade and gold rules). Chen, “RQZH,” 1. Chen, “RQZH,” 2–5. Chen, “RQZH,” 12. Chen, “RQZH,” 12–13; “Autumn Wind Song” (Qiupingchi). Yan, “BJJYJ,” 36–45. Philip J. Ivanhoe, Confucian Moral Self-Cultivation (New York: Peter Lang, 1993), 7, 30, 54, 58–59, 69, 76; Donald J. Munro, Images of Human Nature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 123, 151–152; Chung Ying Cheng, New Dimensions

349

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Notes to Pages 119–127

90. 91.

92. 93.

of Confucian and Neo-Confucian Philosophy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), 144–148. Chen, “RQZH,” 10–13. Chen, “RQZH,” 10–13; (on Shi Cuntong 1919 article) Chow Tse-tsung, The May Fourth Movement: Intellectual Revolution in Modern China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960), 306; Wen-hsin Yeh, Provincial Passages: Culture, Space, and the Origins of Chinese Communism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). Chen, “RQZH,” 10–11. Chen, “RQZH,” 11.

c h apt er 4. r ef o r m at i o n f o r s a lva tio n 1. JPA 1047/17/644, 1928. 2. Wang, JGJ, 83–84; Zhu, ZXJBL, 169; Chen, FPP, 54; Deng Zimei, Chuantong fojiao yu zhongguo jindaihua (The Buddhist tradition and Chinese modernization) (hereafter CFYZJ) (Shanghai: Huadong shifan daxue chubanshe, 1996), 97, 109, 118; Holmes Welch, The Buddhist Revival in China (hereafter BRIC) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968), 297. 3. Wang, JGJ, 83–84; Zhu, ZXJBL, 170; Welch, BRIC, 9, 34, 123, 129, 297; Deng, CFYZJ, 50, 54–56, 83, 97, 109; Wing-tsit Chan, Religious Trends in Modern China (hereafter RTMC) (New York: Columbia University Press, 1953), 82; Shi Jing’an, Bazhi toutuo shi wenji (Collected poems of the eight-fingered Buddhist monk) (Changsha: Yuelu shushe, 2007), 337. 4. Jan Kiely, “Spreading the Dharma with the Mechanized Press: New Buddhist Print Cultures in the Modern Chinese Print Revolution, 1866–1949,” in Brokaw and Reed, eds., Woodblocks to Internet, 185–191; Welch, BRIC, 1–2, 11–12; Chan, RTMC, 60–61; Kenneth Chen, Buddhism in China (hereafter BIC) (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1964), 448; Deng, CFYZJ, 19, 23–30, 40, 49, 54, 84–85, 97–98, 156; Chan Sin-wai, Buddhism in Late Ch’ing Political Thought (Hong Kong: Chinese University of Hong Kong Press, 1985), 9, 13, 18, 30, 42, 146–147; Ge Zhaoguang, “Xihu que zi dong liulai” (The west lake is fed from a flow from the east), in Ge, GZZ, 138, 144; Ge Zhaoguang, “Fojiao lunli yu zhongguo minjian shenghuo” (Buddhist ethics and Chinese popular life), in Ge, GZZ, 86–87; Ge Zhuang, Zongjiao he jindai shanghai shehui de bianqian (Religion and the changes in modern Shanghai society) (Shanghai: Shanghai shudian chubanshe, 1999), 87–97; Mary B. Rankin, Early Chinese Revolutionaries (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), 55; Y. Y. Tsu, “Present Tendencies in Chinese Buddhism,” in T. T. Lew et al., eds., China Today (London: Student Christian Movement, 1922), 87, 90–92; Reginald Fleming Johnston, Buddhist China (1913, repr., London: Chinese Materials Center, 1976), preface, ix; Reed, Gutenberg in Shanghai. 5. Kiely, “Spreading Dharma,” 191–194, 197–199, 203–204; Deng, CFYZJ, 3–4, 29–30, 98–100; Welch, BRIC, 23, 26, 35–39; Chan, RTMC, 7–8, 55–57; Johnston, Buddhist China, preface, ix; C. K. Yang, Religion in Chinese Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 359; Red Pine and Mike O’Conner, eds., The Clouds Should

Notes to Pages 127–132

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17.

Know Me By Now: Buddhist Poet Monks of China (Boston: Wisdom Publications, 1998), 174–175; Tsu, “Present Tendencies,” 93–94. Zhu, JGGJBL, 88, 127; Yan, “BJJYJ,” 36, 39, 42; Yan, “ZJW,” 38–39; Caton, “Dongfang jianyu,” 3; Wu, BHDYJB, 33; SFBG, no. 81 (Sept. 30, 1917), 80; Lu, Ganhua jiaoyu, 37; MOJ, Chinese Prisons, 25, 35, 69, 83; SHAC 1049/2440, 1925; SHAC, 7/2642, 1932; JPA 1047/17/528, 1921; Welch, BRIC, 68; Chan, RTMC, 82–83; Deng, CFYZJ, 69, 117; Lawrence D. Kessler, The Jiangyin Mission Station (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 23; Gamble, Peking, 312; Xu Zoutong, Yuzhongren yu (The prisoner’s words) (Shanghai: Shanghai guangxue chuban, 1934) 33; Dikötter, CPP, 63, 71, 108–109. Dikötter also notes Methodists, Congregationalists, Presbyterians, and Anglicans preaching in the Beijing prisons in the late 1910s. Chen Hua, In Search of the Dharma: Memoirs of a Modern Chinese Buddhist Pilgrim, ed., with intro., Chün-fang Yü, trans. Denis C. Mair (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), 43; Welch, BRIC, 220–221, 246; James Pratt, The Pilgrimage of Buddhism and a Buddhist Pilgrimage (New York: Macmillan, 1928), 86; Arthur Wright, Buddhism in Chinese History (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1959), 115. John Blofeld, The Jewel in the Lotus: An outline of present day Buddhism in China (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1948), 58–59; Welch, BRIC, 73–76, 81, 98, 261; Chan, RTMC, 85–87; Holmes Welch, The Practice of Chinese Buddhism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), 375–378, 383; Deng, CFYZJ, 152. Jin Zhaoluan, Ganhua lu (A record of reformation) (Shanghai: Shangwu yinshu guan, 1923), juan 1, 80, juan 2, 1–4, 31–32; Xu, MRDC, 1131; FTW, KSJ, 56. Although the main sources from the 1920s refer to Huang Qinglan, I am using the name he became better known under as a lay devotee, Huang Hanzhi. Yan, “ZJW,” 26; “JGLJ,” 89; MOJ, Chinese Prisons, 11–12; Wang, Yuzheng shihua, 31, 56–57; Gamble, Peking, 307–309; Changli xianzhi (Changli gazetteer) (Changli: Zhili, 1933), 204, 381–382; Jinghai xianzhi (Jinghai gazetteer) (Jinghai: Zhili, 1934), 1265–1266; Dikötter, CPP, 127; also see Xu, TOM. Jin, Ganhua lu, juan 1, 15. “Minguo sannian jiansuo renfan taowang biao” (Chart of prisoner escapes for 1914), SFGB, no. 30 (Mar. 1915), 143–153. Jin, Ganhua lu, juan 1, 15, juan 2, 4–6, juan 1, 77–78. See Dinghai Magistrate’s speech on First Frost Day, 1922, in Tao dinghai jiang-jing hui wendu jiyao (The essential documents of Tao’s Dinghai Association for preaching on sutras in prison), in JPA 1047/17/602, 1923; Jin, Ganhua lu, juan 1, 54–56; Dikötter, CPP, 110. JPA 1047/17/602, 1923; Jin, Ganhua lu, juan 1, 54. Jin, Ganhua lu, juan 1, 54, 70; JPA 1047/17/602, 1923. JPA 1047/17/602, 1923; Jin, Ganhua lu, juan 1, 54, 58; Chan, RTMC, 65–66; Welch, Practice, 91, 100, 348; Deng, CFYZJ, 64, 170–172; Chen, BIC, 460; Yinguang, “Xiang baicu xiansheng dinghai xian jianyu jiangjing canguan ji ba” (Postscript to Mr. Xiang Baicu’s record of visiting sutra preaching at the Dinghai County Jail), in Yinguang, Yinguang fashi wenchao, ed. Xu Weiru (Collected writings of Master Yinguang) (hereafter YFW) (Suzhou: Honghua she, 1934), juan 3, 4–5.

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Notes to Pages 133–144 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

33. 34. 35.

36. 37.

38. 39. 40.

JPA 1047/17/602, 1923; Jin, Ganhua lu, juan 1, 54–55, 60, 70–74. Jin, Ganhua lu, juan 1, 55–56, 60, 63, 66, juan 2, 3; JPA 1047/17/602, 1923. Jin, Ganhua lu, juan 1, 55–56, 60, 63, 66, juan 2, 3; JPA 1047/17/602, 1923. JPA 1047/17/602, 1923; Jin, Ganhua lu, juan 1, 62–63. JPA 1047/17/602, 1923; Jin, Ganhua lu, juan 1, 55–57. Jin, Ganhua lu, juan 1, 59; JPA 1047/17/602, 1923. JPA 1047/17/602, 1923; Zhu, ZXJBL, 16, 159; MOJ, Chinese Prisons, 26; RGAPC, 20–21, 23; Chen, FPP, 74–76; MJFX, 281–283; Wang, JGJ, 126; Zhu, JGGJBL, 10. Wang, JGJ, 125; Wang, Jianyuxue, 217, 221; Li, JDYJB, 39–41; MOJ, Chinese Prisons, 14; SBBQB, 169–179; JPA 1047/17/642, 1921; SHAC 1049/2442, 1925; SHAC 1049/2440, 1925; SHAC 1049/2472, 1926; SHAC 1049/2443, 1925; MJFX, 285–286; “Sifabu shinian fen banshi qingxing baogao” (1920 report on the management situation of the Ministry of Justice) SFGB, no. 182 (1924), 177, 198; Faxue cidian (Legal dictionary) (Shanghai: Shanghai cishu chubanshe, 1985), 706–708; (Huang statement) JPA 1047/17/602, 1923; also see Yan, “ZJW,” 43. JPA 1047/17/602, 1923; Jin, Ganhua lu, juan 1, 55, 63–64, 70–71. Jin, Ganhua lu, juan 1, Jin preface, 1, 71–72, 75–76; JPA 1047/17/602, 1923. Jin, Ganhua lu, juan 1, 55, 66. Jin, Ganhua lu, juan 1, Jin preface, 1, 33, 35, 73, 81–97; MOJ, Chinese Prisons, 86; Xu, MRDC, 1082. Jin, Ganhua lu, juan 1, 33–39, 44–48, 53; FP, no. 85 (Feb. 15, 1925), 9. Jin, Ganhua lu, juan 1, 40–41. Jin, Ganhua lu, juan 1, 33–34, 37–42, 45–53, 98–109. Other texts used and distributed in the prisons included The Seven Truths Biographies (Qizhen zhuan), Record of the Consequences of Actions of a Prior State (Guobao lu), and the famed Tang era monk Xuanzang’s Verses on the Standards of the Eight Consciousnesses (Ba shi guiju song). Jin, Ganhua lu, juan 1, 38–40, 44–45, 48–49, 52. Jin, Ganhua lu, juan 1, 35–36. Lu, Ganhua jiaoyu, 37; “Beiping ganhua xuexiao jiesan” (The Beiping reform school is dissolved), JZ1.1, 9; Yen, “CRSCC,” 303; Sun, Jianyuxue, 154; Welch, BRIC, 118, 129, 295; MOJ, Chinese Prisons, 68–69; Jin, Ganhua lu, juan 1, 25–28, 81–97; SFGB, no. 71 (Jan. 1917): 93; Deng, CFYZJ, 187–188; Xu, MRDC, 797. JPA 1047/17/602, 1923; Deng, CFYZJ, 187–190; Welch, BRIC, 98, 311; Kiely, “Spreading Dharma,” 191–193, 198–199. Jin, Ganhua lu, juan 2, 7, 10–19; Xu, MRDC, 225, 1650; Welch, BRIC, 180; Chen, Yi fofa, 3L. Chen Zhao mistakenly attributes A Record of Reformation to Vice Minister Zhang Yipeng’s brother, Zhang Yilin. Jin, Ganhua lu, juan 1, Jin Zhaoluan preface, 1. Jin, Ganhua lu, juan 1, 4, 12–23, juan 2, 10–21, 25–57; Kiely, “Spreading Dharma,” 197–199. Deng, CFYZJ, 170–172; Chan, RTMC, 66, 100; Welch, BRIC, 119; Welch, Practice, 91, 100, 348; Kiely, “Spreading Dharma,” 199–203; see second preface to Ding Fubao, Foxue zhinan (Guide to Buddhist studies) and the promotional blurb on the back cover of Ding Fubao, Foxue qixin bian (Buddhist inspiration of faith), and of Shao

Notes to Pages 144–153

41.

42. 43. 44. 45. 46.

47. 48.

49. 50.

51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59.

Zhenji, Jiaohui; see Yinguang prefaces for 1) Zhou Mengyan’s Anshi quanshu (The complete works of Anshi), 2) Geyan lianbi (Collection of wise sayings), 3) Yinguo lu (A record of cause and effect)—all in Yinguang, YFW, juan 3, 12, 28, 74. Xiang Baicu, “Xiang Baicu xiansheng dinghai xian jianyu jiangjing canguan ji” (Account of visiting the preaching at the Dinghai County Jail), and “Jingshi diyi jianyu yu jiazi yuandan pushuo sangui wujie” (Generally speaking of the three refuges and five abstentions on New Year’s Day 1924 at the Beijing No. 1 Prison), in Yinguang, YFW, juan 3, 4–5, 62–63, 85; Shao, Jiaohui, 6–13. Yinguang, YFW, juan 3, 4–5, 62–63. JPA 1047/26/440, 1922; JPA 1047/17/644, 1928; Shao, Jiaohui, appendix, 14. JPA 1047/17/564, 1923; JPA 1047/26/8, 1923–46; Deng, CFYZJ, 118. FP, no. 94 (Apr. 19, 1925): 8, 24–25; JPA 1047/17/602, 1923; JPA 1047/26/8, 1923–46; Xu, MRDC, 1172; Deng, CFYZJ, 118. “Jiangsu jianyu ganhua hui pai yuan fu jian jiangyan” (The Jiangsu Prison Reformation Association sends members to the prisons to lecture), FP, no. 114 (Sept. 6, 1925): 11; SHAC 1049/2709, 1927; Sun, YWDQ, 836–837; Shenbao, Apr. 30, 1925; ShanghaiJZ. FP, no. 114 (Sept. 6, 1925): 11; Shenbao, May 24, 1925, 14; Shenbao, June 4, 1926, 6; JPA 1047/17/644, 1928. Yang, Religion, 360; Chen, BIC, 455; Chan, RTMC, 59; Welch, BRIC, 49; Wright, Buddhism in Chinese History; Guy Alitto, The Last Confucian: Liang Shu-ming and the Chinese Dilemma of Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 8; Yan, “BFZSF,” 68; Yan, “ZJW,” 38–39; Yan, “BJJYJ,” 41–42. Shenbao, June 4, 1926, 6; Chen, “Canguan jiangsu,” 12. Ge, Zongjiao, 197–198, 386; Ge, “Fojiao lunli,” 88–89; Welch, BRIC, 43, 54, 74–77, 81, 98, 311; Deng, CFYZJ, 3, 59, 171–172; Chen, BIC, 460; Xu, MRDC, 34, 616, 1595, 1614; Bryna Goodman, Native Place, City, and Nation: Regional Networks and Identities in Shanghai, 1853–1937 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 188, 208, 213; Shi and Nie, Ganying leichao, 283, 289, 290–295, 304; Wu Bao preface to Ding Fubao, Foxue qixin bian; and Mizuno Baigyo, Shina bukkyo kinseishi no kenkyu (Research on the modern history of Chinese Buddhism) (Tokyo, 1925); Yinguang, YFW, juan 2, 16. Yinguang, YFW, third preface, 1, juan 1, 99, juan 3, 4; SHAC 1049/2709, 1927; Ge, GZZ, 97; Deng, CFYZJ, 170–171. Jin, Ganhua lu, juan 2, 9; Ding Fubao, Foxue qixin bian, Foxue chujie, Foxue zhinan; Welch, Practice, 517. Yinguang, YFW, juan 1, 17. Yinguang, YFW, juan 1, 98, juan 2, 16, juan 3, 85; Jin, Ganhua lu, preface, 1. Zhu, JGGJBL, 37–38; Liang, JDEJBS, 83L; SHAC 1049/2642, 1927; SHAC 1049/2440, 1925. SHAC 1049/2642, 1927; SHAC 1049/2440, 1925; Yan, “BJJYJ,” 37, 40–42; Chen, “RQZH,” 7–9; MJFX, 370–372; FP, no. 242 (1928): 21; Lu, Ganhua jiaoyu, 38. SHAC 1049/ 2709, 1927. SHAC 1049/2709,1927; JPA 1047/17/644, 1928; Shenbao, Jan. 21, 1927. FP, no. 210 (July 10, 1927): 10; SHAC 1049/2642, 1927; SHAC 1049/2721, 1927; SHAC 1049/2644, 1927; SHAC 1049/2720, 1927; FP, no. 242 (1928): 21; FP, no. 239–240 (1928): 32; Yan, “BJJYJ,” 37; Yan, “ZJW,” 29; MJFX, 202.

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Notes to Pages 153–162 60. Yan, “ZJW,” 29; Yan, “BJJYJ,” 50. 61. Welch, BRIC, 148, 329; The Times (London), Sept. 10, 1928, 11; also see Duara, Rescuing History, 99, and Rebecca Nedostup, Superstitious Regimes: Religion and the Politics of Chinese Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). 62. Yin, Dianyu, 3. 63. “GSGJ,” 19, 27, 45–46. 64. Xu, MRDC, 935. 65. JPA 1047/17/644, 1928. 66. JPA 1047/17/644, 1928. 67. JPA 1047/17/644, 1928. 68. JPA 1047/17/644, 1928. 69. JPA 1047/17/1491, 1929; JPA 1047/17/1492, 1929; JPA 1047/25/578, 1930. 70. JPA 1047/25/582, 1933–34. 71. Deng, CFYZJ, 200–202, 221; Welch, BRIC, 65–66, 157, 210, 330; Welch, Practice, 517; Chan, RTMC, 82, 239; Chen, BIC, 456; Fohua xin qingnian (New youth Buddhification), no. 2.2 (May–June 1924): 26; Shenbao, June 4, 1926, 6; Huang Xianian, ed., Taixu ji (The collected works of Taixu) (Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe, 1995), 60, 331–332. 72. See Jiangxi High Court Chief Justice Lu Shizheng proposal at the 1935 National Judicial Conference, in QSHH, 55; Sun, FZXYJ, 114–115. 73. Chen, Yi fofa, preface, 1–3, 7–12, 16–18, 30; Zhang Hua, Shanghai zongjiao tonglan (Religion in Shanghai) (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 2004), 22. 74. MJFX, 27; QSHH, sec. 3, 53–55; Huang, Taixu ji, 308; Yin Shun, Taixu fashi nianpu (Chronicle of the life of Master Taixu) (Beijing: Zongjiao wenhua chubanshe, 1995), 203, 209, 211, 224; Wu, BHDYJB, 33; Xiandai sifa (Contemporary justice) no. 1.1 (Oct. 1, 1935): 171; Welch, BRIC, 129; Sun, YWDQ, 836–837; Li, Jianyuxue, 86. 75. JPA 1047/2/649, 1934; SHAC 7/914, 1936–37; Sun, YWDQ, 822–835. 76. JPA 1047/26/8, 1923–46; Ge, GZZ, 84–85. 77. Chen, “Xingshi zhengce,” 1. 78. Yinguang, YFW, juan 2, 65. 79. JPA 1047/17/644, 1928.

c hapt er 5 . a m ec h an i s m f o r a ll o ffe n s e s 1. Hu, YZZS, Ma preface, 2, He Minhun preface, 5–7, 9–22; Hu Yimin, “ ‘Qingdang’ zhuxi ruyu jiemi” (Revealing the secrets of the “party purge” chairman who went to prison), in Liu Qifei, ed., Jiang Jieshi de daqiutu shilu (Records of the major prisoners of Jiang Jieshi) (hereafter JJDDS) (Beijing: Tuanjie chubanshe, 1994), 2–5 (a simplified, edited version of this source and related materials are also posted at www. lantianyu.net, accessed Nov. 14, 2011); Hu Yimin, “Sanfan jianyu, sici zuolao de guomindang zhongyang jianyu zhang” (The KMT central prison warden, who built three prisons and was imprisoned four times) (hereafter “SJYSZGZ”), in JJDDS, 9–11; Ying Mingyang, Yuan guomindang zhongyang jianyuzhang miwen shilu: Ying Mingyang changpian jishi wenxue xuan (A true record of the secrets of the former KMT

Notes to Pages 163–165

2.

3.

4.

5. 6.

central prison warden: Selected full-length reportage of Ying Mingyang) (hereafter YGZJMS) (Beijing: Jingji ribao chubanshe, 1991), 18–20; Huang, “RQ,” 57. This narrative synthesizes Hu’s pre- and post-1949 accounts that differ in a number of details. Hu, YZZS, Ma preface, 2, He preface, 5–7, 9–22, 26–32, 36; Ying, YGZJMS, 1–14; Hu, “ ‘Qingdang’ zhuxi,” 2–4, 6; Hu, “SJYSZGZ,” 7–9; Xu, MRDC, 578; Sun, Jianyuxue, 80; Xue Muqiao, Huiyilu (Memoir) (Tianjin: Tianjin renmin chubanshe, 1996), 18, 26; (also on Zhejiang Army Prison, military prisons) Zhuang Qidong, “He Zou Zikan, He Jueren tongzhi yiqi zuolao de rizi” (Days in jail with comrades Zou Zikan and He Jueren), GZ, vol. 4 (1981), 156–157, 163; Brunnert and Hagelstrom, Political Organization, 306; MJFX, 523–536; ZJSH, vol. 2, 22–31. SHAC 1049/2709, 1927; SHAC 1049/2641, 1927; Yan, “BFZSF,” 49; “Fajie xiaoxi,” FP, no. 201 (May 8, 1927): 11; Nanjing yuhuatai lieshi jinianguan (Nanjing Yuhuatai martyrs’ memorial) (hereafter NYLJ), ed., Yuhuatai geming lieshi shuxin xuan (Selected letters of the Yuhuatai revolutionary martyrs) (hereafter YGLSX), vol. 1 (Nanjing: Jiangsu shaonian erzhong chubanshe, 1988), 1; Zhonggong shanghai shiwei dangshi yanjiusuo (CCP Shanghai Municipal Committee Party History Research Institute), ed., Zhongguo gongchandang zai shanghai (The Chinese Communist Party in Shanghai) (Shanghai: Renmin chubanshe, 1991), 84; Patricia Stranahan, Underground (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998), 17. These figures follow the early CCP tabulations of 5,657 arrests and 1,836 executions in Jiangsu published in Bu’ersaiweike (Bolsheveik), no. 1.26 (Aug. 20, 1928); Peng Ming, ed., Zhongguo xiandaishi ziliao xuanji (Selection of Chinese contemporary history materials) (hereafter ZXZX), vol. 3, (Beijing: Fengtai yinshuachang, 1987), 22; Harold Issacs, ed., Five Years of Kuomintang Reaction (Shanghai: China Forum, 1932); Lloyd E. Eastman, The Abortive Revolution: China under Nationalist Rule, 1927–1937 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974), 132; (on provisional courts) JPA 1047/41/697, 1928; (experience of the purge) Huang, Dongdang, 321–323; Hu, YZZS, 35; Wang Fanhsi, Memoirs of a Chinese Revolutionary, trans. and ed. Gregor Benton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 40, 162; Xue, Huiyilu, 19; YGLSX, vol. 1; (on Chen) Chen, “RQZH,” 6–7. JPA 1047/17/1483, 1927; JPA 1047/17/1484, 1928; JPA 1047/17/1485, 1929; JPA 1047/17/1486, 1927–35; Huang, “RQ,” 60; Gao Wenhua poem in Tiechuang suiyue, 294, 298; JPA 1047/17/1515, 1927; JPA 1047/17/1516, 1928; JPA 1047/17/1517, 1929; JPA 1047/41/697, 1928; (Li Yimin and others) “GSGJ,” 19, 46; Li, Jianyuxue, 7; “Fajie xiaoxi,” FP, no. 427 (Dec. 20, 1931): 20–21; JPA 1047/25/584; Wang, Memoirs, 168; JPA 1047/17/1491, 1929; JPA 1047/17/1492, 1929. Hu, YZZS, Ma preface, 2, He preface, 5–7, main text, 27–36; Hu, “SJYSZGZ,” 11; Xu, MRDC, 578. Xu, “ZJBNGZY”; “SXXSGFNSS”, JZ1.1, 2–3; Cai Shuheng, Jianyuxue jiangyi (Penology teaching materials) (Beijing, 1928), 6; “Fajie xiaoxi,” FP, no. 637–638 (Feb. 2, 1936): 43; MJFX, 20, 25, 34; Liang, “New Criminal Code,” 104; (penal reform in KMT Wuhan government) Keeton, Extraterritoriality, vol. 2, 10; (first KMT prison school in Shanghai) Nanyang gaodeng jianyu xuexiao jiangyi (Lectures of the South Sea Higher Prison School) (Shanghai, 1913), 1.

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Notes to Pages 165–168 7. “Zhongguo shishi qiufan zuidi biaozhun guize baogao” (Report on China’s implementation of the rules on the minimum standards of prisoner treatment), Xiandai sifa (Contemporary justice), no. 1.1 (Oct. 1, 1935); Thomas F. Millard, The End of Extraterritoriality in China (Shanghai: A.B.C. Press, 1931), 105–109; Li, Jianyuxue, 2–3; Sun, YWDQ, preface (faling sec.) 5, (main text) 26; Rui, JDL, forward, 1; “Fajie xiaoxi,” FP, nos. 445–446 (May 1, 1932): 29; Academia Historica (Taipei), 154/0385. 8. Kiely, “Dangerous Cities”; Lu, Ganhua jiaoyu, 2; Li, Jianyuxue, 2–5; Sun, FZXYJ, 85, 103–105, 145–146; “Luo Wengan shi,” 39; Xu and Liu, “SNDSF,” 74–79, 85–87, 91–93; Sun, Jianyuxue, 3; “Fajie xiaoxi,” FP, no. 427 (Dec. 20, 1931): 20–21; “Zui’e yuansou zhi shanghai” (Den of crime, Shanghai), FP, no. 432, (Jan. 24, 1932): 38; (the press) Deng, “Fanzui shehui,”4; Yen, “CRSCC,” 298–307; Wakeman, Policing Shanghai; Cai, Jianyuxue jiangyi, 1; Yan, “ZJW,” 25–26, 41–44; Yan, “BFZSF,” 68–73; (as social illness) Rui, JDL, 1–6; Sheldon Glueck, The International Prison Congress of 1930 (New York: National Committee for Mental Hygiene, 1931); Dikötter, CPP, 203. 9. SHAC 7/9952, 1930; SHAC 33/9, 1933; JPA 1047/17/1518, 1933; “Jianyu xiehui xiaoxi” (Prison association news), JZ1.1, 1; “SXXSGFNSS,” 2–3; Xu, MRDC, 578; Qiu Menghan, “CC shentou guomindang sifajie” (The CC infiltration of the KMT judicial circles), WZX, no. 78 (1982): 96; Wu, BHDYJB, 6, 12–14; Jiang Tiezhen, “Hebei disi jianyu canguan ji” (Report on a visit to the Hebei No. 4 Prison), FP, no. 585 (Jan. 27, 1935): 7; “Fajie xiaoxi,” FP, no. 637–638 (Feb. 2, 1936): 43; MJFX, 20, 25, 34, 81–82, 126; Zhang Bofeng, ed., Beiyang junfa (Beiyang warlords), vol. 6 (Wuhan: Wuhan chubanshe, 1990), 481; Cai, Jianyuxue jiangyi, 6; ShanghaiJZ; Sun, YWDQ, 66, 560– 561, 755; Xie Guansheng, Zhanshi sifa jiayao (Justice during the war) (Taibei: Sifayuan mishuchu, 1971), 286. 10. Officer biographies in ShanghaiJZ; Wang, Shiqu de yingxiang, 92; Dikötter, CPP, 214; (Shanghai) Wakeman, Policing Shanghai; Christian Henriot, Shanghai, 1927–1937: Municipal Power, Locality and Modernization, trans. Noel Castelino (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). 11. JPA 1047/26/440, 1922; SHAC 2/415, 1933; Xu, MRDC, 578, 775; Sun, YWDQ, including Shao Zhenji preface, Sun Xiong preface, 4–5, Chen Zhangzu preface, 1 (faling sec.) 107, (main text) 755; Sun, FZXYJ, preface, 2, 10, 167; Sun, Jianyuxue, preface, 2; JPA 1047/17/556, 1932. 12. Hu, YZZS, 33–34; Sun, YWDQ, 13–14; Sun, Jianyuxue, 7; Sun, FZXYJ, 10, 24, 57, 65–66, 82–83, 103–105, 116, 120–123, 145–146, 161–162, 167, 181–191, 194, 206, 213–230; Yan, “ZJW,” 31–34; Li, Jianyuxue, 79; MJFX, 424–485; SHAC 2/413, 1932; “Sifa xingzheng bu gailiang jiansuo fang’an” (Ministry of Judicial Administration prison reform plan), FP, nos. 447–448 (May 15, 1932): 47; Rui, JDL, 166; “Sifa xingzheng bu ershisi nian yiyue zhi bayue gongzuo gaiyao” (Outline of Ministry of Judicial Administration work from January to August 1935) (hereafter “SXEN”), FP, no. 621 (Oct. 6, 1935): 43; “Fajie xiaoxi,” FP, no. 617 (Sept. 8, 1935): 14–16; Wu, BHDYJB, 9, 34–37; “Fajie xiaoxi,” FP, no. 531 (Jan. 14, 1934): 22–23; “Fajie xiaoxi,” FP, no. 640 (Feb. 16, 1936): 24; JPA 1047/25/583, 1934; JPA 1047/25/588, 1935; JPA 1047/17/1502, 1934; JPA 1047/17/1518, 1933; JPA 1047/25/582, 1933–34; JPA 1047/25/647, 1933; JPA 1047/25/649, 1934; SHAC 7/914, 1936–37; JPA 1047/17/581, 1936–37.

Notes to Pages 169–173 13. Lu, Ganhua jiaoyu, 38–39, 53; (1932 reform) SHAC 2/413, 1932; Rui, JDL, 164; “Fajie xiaoxi,” FP, no. 617 (Sept. 8, 1935): 14; FP, no. 621 (1935): 31; Sun, YWDQ, 133, 153; JPA 1047/17/1492, 1929; JPA 1047/25/578, 1930; JPA 1047/25/582, 1933–34; JPA 1047/25/583, 1935; JPA 1047/25/588, 1935; JPA 1047/17/1497, 1931; JPA 1047/17/1524, 1935; JPA 1047/17/1498, 1932; JPA 1047/17/1502, 1934; Sun Xiong, “Proposal No. 9,” in QSHH, 56–58; (Li Xizhong) JPA 1047/17/1518, 1933; JPA 1047/25/788, 1936; Yan, “BJJYJ,” 37–40; Caton, “Dongfang jianyu,” 3; “Zhongguo shishi qiufan,” 172; Wu, BHDYJB, 33; Xu, MRDC, 611. 14. SHAC 2/415, 1933; JPA 1047/17/1515–1516, 1927–28; JPA 1047/17/1494–1495, 1928–29; JPA 1047/25/588, 1935; JPA 1047/25/788, 1935–36; JPA 1047/17/1518, 1933; JPA 1047/25/557, 1934; Hu, YZZS, 33; “Jianyu jiaohuishi, jiaoshi, yishi, yaoji chuwu guize” (Regulations for guiding prison moral instructors, teachers, medical officers, and pharmacists) (Sept. 21, 1928), in MJFX, 83; Sun, YWDQ, 67; Yan, “BJJYJ,” 41, 50; “Fajie xiaoxi,” FP, no. 617 (Sept. 8, 1935): 16; “Fajie xiaoxi,” FP, no. 613 (Aug. 11, 1935): 11; Wang, “Shicha huabei,” 30. 15. JPA 1047/25/788, 1935–36; SHAC 2/415, 1933. 16. JPA 1047/17/1518, 1933; JPA 1047/25/788, 1935–36; JPA 1047/25/582, 1933–34; JPA 1047/25/557, 1934; JPA 1047/17/581, 1936–37; JPA 1047/25/645, 1932; JPA 1047/25/647, 1933; JPA 1047/25/649, 1934; JPA 1047/25/651, 1937; SHAC 7/914, 1936–37. Also see Robert Culp, “Setting the Sheet of Loose Sand: Conceptions of Society and Citizenship in Nanjing Decade Party Doctrine and Civics Textbooks,” in Terry Bodenhorn, ed., Defining Modernity: Guomindang Rhetorics of a New China, 1920–1970 (Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan, 2002), 57–59, 68–71. 17. Sun, YWDQ, 66; JPA 1047/17/504, 1930; JPA 1047/17/1497–1498, 1931–32; JPA 1047/25/582, 1933–34; JPA 1047/25/583, 1934; JPA 1047/17/1500, 1933; JPA 1047/17/1518, 1933; JPA 1047/25/647, 1933; JPA 1047/17/1502, 1935; JPA 1047/17/581, 1936–37; JPA 1047/25/788, 1935–36; “Fajie xiaoxi,” FP, no. 445–446 (May 1, 1932): 29; Wu, BHDYJB, 33; Sanminzhuyi qianshuo (Elementary introduction to the Three Principles of the people) (Beiping: Beiping jingbei silingbu zhengzhi xunlianbu, n.d.); Chester C. Tan, Chinese Political Thought in the Twentieth Century (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor, 1971), 165–168; Ye, Shouduzhi, 617. 18. JPA 1047/25/645, 1932; JPA 1047/25/647, 1933; JPA 1047/25/649, 1934; JPA 1047/25/651, 1937; JPA 1047/25/788, 1935–36; JPA 1047/25/582, 1933–34; JPA 1047/25/557, 1934; JPA 1047/17/581, 1936–37; SHAC 7/914, 1936–37; MJFX, 12, 82; Sun, YWDQ, 260–261, 959. 19. Sun, Jianyuxue, preface, 2; Sun, FZXYJ, preface, 1, 2, 10, 24, 57, 65–66, 82–83, 103–105, 116, 120–124, 145–146, 151–155, 163, 171–172, 181–191, 194, 206, 213–230; Sun, YWDQ, 14; Xu, MRDC, 775. 20. Sun, YWDQ, 107; ShanghaiJZ; Sun, FZXYJ, 90. 21. Hu, Jianyu weisheng, Sun Xiong preface, 2, 81; Sun, YWDQ, 126–128, 152; Xu and Liu, “SNDSF,” 89–90. 22. JPA 1047/25/788, 1935; JPA 1047/25/588, 1935; JPA 1047/17/581, 1937; (1936 reform) MJFX, 88; Zhao, “GJY,” 8; Lu, Ganhua jiaoyu, 55; Hoh Chih-hsiang, “Existing Conditions in the Chekiang First Prison,” China Weekly Review, July 26, 1930, 1.

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Notes to Pages 173–177 23. Wu, BHDYJB, 33; MJFX, 88; JPA 1047/17/581, 1937; SHAC 7/914, 1936–37; Sun, YWDQ, 563–564, 798. 24. Su Keyou, Jianyu leijinzhidu chuyu fa (The prison progressive system management method) (Shanghai, 1939), 22–28, 64–71, 79–81; Sun, YWDQ, 153, 227–233, 755; Sun, Jianyuxue, 97, 128–137, 160; QSHH, sec. 3, 1, 21. 25. Sun, FZXYJ, 107, 133, 153–155; Hu, Jianyu weisheng, Sun preface, 1; Sun, Jianyuxue, 7; Sun, YWDQ, 26, 134, 755, 798–848; JPA 1047/25/788, 1935–36. 26. SHAC 7/914, 1936–37; Sun, YWDQ, 818–820. 27. SHAC 7/914, 1936–37; Sun, YWDQ, 108; Kiely, “Making Good Citizens,” 491–494; (1930s Shanghai Marxism) Joshua A. Fogel, Ai Ssu-chi’s Contribution to the Development of Chinese Marxism (Cambridge, MA: Council of East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1987), 21; D. W. Y. Kwok, Scientism in Chinese Thought, 1900– 1950 (New York: Biblo and Tannen, 1971), 193–197; Karl A. Wittfogel, “Some Remarks on Mao’s Handling of Concepts and Problems of Dialectics,” Studies in Soviet Thought 3, no. 4 (Dec. 1963): 251; Nick Knight, Mao Zedong on Dialectical Materialism (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1990), 31–33, 53–54; (on Mao) Mao Zedong, “Shixian lun” (On practice) (July 1937), and “Fandui ziyouzhuyi” (Combat liberalism) (September 1937), in Du Shiwei, ed., Mao Zedong zhuzuo xuanbian (Selected writings of Mao Zedong) (Beijing: Zhonggong zhongyang dangxiao chubanshe, 2002), 71–84, 120–122; Stuart R. Schram, The Political Thought of Mao Tse-tung (New York: Praeger, 1963), 4, 7, 44, 125–127. 28. SHAC 7/914, 1936–37; SHAC 7/1270, 1936. 29. SHAC 2/415, 1933; Sun, YWDQ, 114–123; Hu, Jianyu weisheng, 64; Sun, FZXYJ, Wang Yuanzeng preface, 1; Sun, Jianyuxue, 78; SHAC 7/1271, 1936; Shenbao, Mar. 30, 1933; ShanghaiJZ. 30. Sun, YWDQ, 79; Li, Jianyuxue, 5; Sun, FZXYJ, 152; Xu, “ZJBNGZY”; (guard corruption) Li, “Yifeng cong jianyu li lai de xin” (A letter from prison), in ZGDYR, 3.89; Zhou, “BYMNY,” 63, 82–83; (on special treatment) Du Zhongyuan, Yuzhong zagan (Miscellaneous sentiments in prison) (Shanghai, 1938), Zou Taofen preface, 2; Huang Jingwen, “Wo he Niulan fufu de jiechu” (My contact with the husband and wife Noulens), in Tiechuang suiyue, 106; Lee Feigon, Chen Duxiu: Founder of the Chinese Communist Party (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983); (Xu A’qin case) SHAC 7/2641, 1932; SHAC 7/2642, 1932; (corruption) Ni Yaokui, “JJSS,” 279–280; Chen Nongfei, “Buqude nuzhanshi guo ganglin” (The unyielding woman warrior Guo Ganglin), in Tiechuang suiyue, 31; Xia, “NDD,” 155; Li Lin, “Huiyi zai jianyu li de douzheng” (Recalling the struggle in prison), WZX, no. 70 (1980): 50; “SDJQQG,” 17–19; “JSDEJZG”; SHAC 2/414, 1932; Meng Guoxiang and Zhang Qingjun, eds., Minguo sifa heimu (The dark story of justice in the Republic) (Yangzhou: Jiangsu guji chubanshe, 1997), 45–48, 199–201; Qiu, “CC Shentou,” 87–89, 96; Jin, “Luetan Xie Guansheng,” 79–83. 31. Huang, “RQ,” 60; “GSGJ,” 17–20, 43, 46; “JSDEJZG”; (reform documents) SHAC 2/413, 1932; FP, nos. 445–446 (May 1, 1932): 29; Rui, JDL, 161–165; Sun, YWDQ, 95, 444–447, 756; JPA 1047/25/788, 1935–36; “Fajie xiaoxi,” FP, no. 631 (Dec. 15, 1935): 21;

Notes to Pages 177–179

32.

33.

34. 35. 36.

“Fajie xiaoxi,” FP, no. 693 (Feb. 21, 1937): 17; QSHH, sec. 3, 17; JPA 1047/17/1502, 1934; (officer training, reform) JPA 1047/25/588, 1935; (county jail reform) “Fajie xiaoxi,” FP, no. 702 (Apr. 25, 1937): 13; Yin, Dianyu, 4–28; Zhang Zhengfei, “Jiangsu lijinshe neimu” (The inside story of the Jiangsu Encourage Progress Society), JWZJ, 80; Ni, “JJSS,” 273–274; Xu, TOM, ch. 8; (reform, construction) “Luo Wengan shi,” 39; “Fajie xiaoxi,” FP, no. 531 (Jan. 14, 1934): 22–23; Jiang, “Hebei disi jianyu,” 7–9; Wu, BHDYJB, 43; Zhao, “GJY,” 7–8; Wang, “Shicha huabei,” 31; Zhu Guonan, “Qixing guaizhuang de jiu sifa” (The strange condition of the old justice), WZX, no. 78 (1982), 126; Cai, Jianyuxue jiangyi, appendix, 131–134; “SXEN,” 41; Sun, Jianyuxue, 77–78, 155; Sun, FZXYJ, 267–268; “Fajie xiaoxi,” FP, no. 613 (Aug. 11, 1935): 16–17; “Fajie xiaoxi,” FP, no. 666 (Aug. 16, 1936): 17–18; Shenbao, Aug. 8, 1936; William S. Tsao, “Chinese Prisons,” U.S. State Department Files on China, Enclosure #1 to Despatch #236, from the U.S. Consul General at Shanghai (May 5, 1949), 2–3; Dikötter, CPP, 282. Cai, Jianyuxue jiangyi, 125–130; Hoh, “Exisiting Conditions,” 1; Sun, FZXYJ, 267–268; JPA 1047/17/1491, 1929; JPA 1047/17/1492, 1929; Li, Jianyuxue, 7; “Fajie xiaoxi,” FP, no. 427 (Dec. 20, 1931): 20–21; JPA 1047/25/584, 1931; “GSGJ,” 19, 46; Wang, Memoirs, 168; SHAC 2/413, 1932. Edward R. Slack, Jr., Opium, State, and Society: China’s Narco-Economy and the Guomindang, 1924–1937 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2001), 4–6; Frank Dikötter, Lars Laamann, and Zhou Xun, Narcotic Culture: A History of Drugs in China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 9; Dikötter, CPP, 74, 84; Yin, “MSDJZ”; Zhang, “BSFTF,” 82; John Powell, My Twenty-Five Years in China (New York: Macmillan, 1945), 286; Sheridan, Chinese Warlord, 91; Shao, Jiaohui, 33–36, and appendix, 16; JPA 1047/17/642, 1921; Alan Baumler, “Opium Control versus Opium Suppression: The Origins of the 1935 Six-Year Plan to Eliminate Opium and Drugs,” in Timothy Brook and Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi, eds., Opium Regimes: China, Britain, and Japan, 1839–1952 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 270–276; Wakeman, Policing Shanghai, 260; Burke Inlow, “Japan’s ‘Special Trade’ in North China,” Far Eastern Quarterly 6, no. 2 (Feb. 1947); Sun, FZXYJ, 96; Xu and Liu, “SNDSF,” 75, 81–83; also see Wang Jinxiang, Zhongguo jindu jianshi (Brief history of drug suppression in China) (Beijing: Xuesi chubanshe, 1996); Zhou Yongming, Anti-Drug Crusades in Twentieth-Century China (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999); Joyce A. Madancy, The Troublesome Legacy of Commissioner Lin: The Opium Trade and Opium Suppression in Fujian Province, 1820s to 1920s (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003); Brook and Wakabayashi, Opium Regimes; Jerome Ch’en, Yuan Shih-k’ai (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1972). Zhou, “BYMNY,” 42–47; JPA 1047/17/1492, 1929; JPA 1047/17/1517, 1929. JPA 1047/17/1495, 1929; JPA 1047/17/1497, 1931; JPA 1047/17/1496, 1930; JPA 1047/17/1498, 1932; JPA 1047/17/1502, 1933. SHAC 7/2034, 1932; SHAC 7/1102, 1931–34; JPA 1047/25/582, 1933–34; Xu and Liu, “SNDSF,” 90; “JSDEJZG.” The breakdown in order is clear from the increase in infractions against the prison rules, especially for resisting guards.

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Notes to Pages 180–184 37. SHAC 7/1157, 1934–38; ShanghaiJZ. 38. SHAC 2/414, 1932; Shenbao, Sept. 1, 1932; ShanghaiJZ; SHAC 7/1157, 1934–38. The citizens’ letter is dated Feb. 27, 1936. 39. JPA 1047/25/582, 1933–34; Sun, YWDQ, 21, 819; Xu and Liu, “SNDSF,” 76–83. 40. MJFX, 302–305, 318; Sun, YWDQ, 115–116, 313, 755; JPA 1047/17/1518, 1933; JPA 1047/17/1502, 1933; (commissioners) SHAC 2/415, 1933; “Fajie xiaoxi,” FP, no. 461 (Aug. 10, 1932): 21; “Fajie xiaoxi,” FP, no. 487 (Feb. 12, 1933): 24; Rui, JDL, 163; Yu Chengxiu, “Shutong jianyu yu xiugai xingfa” (Clearing out prisons and revising the criminal law), Faxue congkan (Legal studies collection) 2, no. 2.4 (1933): 77. 41. Judu (Reject drugs), no. 23 (July 1928): 22; SHAC 2/1392, 1929–32; Sun, YWDQ, 310– 311, 384, 576–579; “Fajie xiaoxi,” FP, no. 371 (Nov. 23, 1930), 26; SHAC 2/1376, 1931–36; SHAC 2/415, 1933; Xu and Liu, “SNDSF,” 90; FP, no. 414 (Sept., 20, 1931): 15; Zwia Lipkin, Useless to the State: “Social Problems” and Social Engineering in Nationalist Nanjing, 1927–1937 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 54, 68, 176, 184, 225–226. 42. Xu, XSH, 40–41; Wu, “Xu Shiying,” 10; Ji Shouwen, “Sifa zhidu chuyi” (Preliminary opinions on the justice system), Faxuehui zazhi (Legal Studies Association magazine), no. 1.1 (July 1, 1921): 54–55; Li, Jianyuxue, 17–18, 60–64; Hu, YZZS, 33–34; Hu Pu-yu, A Brief History of the Chinese National Revolutionary Forces (Taipei: Chung Wu Publishing, 1971), 72, 75; (ministry plans) “SXXSGFNSS,” 3, 6–7; “Fajie xiaoxi,” FP, no. 404 (July 12, 1931): 27. 43. Chen Fumin, “Jianyu kenzhi jihuashu” (A plan for prison land reclamation), Faxue pinglun (Legal studies critic) (1930): 33–34; (1932 plan) “Fajie xiaoxi,” FP, no. 461 (Aug. 10, 1932): 21; “Fajie xiaoxi,” FP, no. 480 (Dec. 25, 1932): 36; FP, no. 487 (Feb. 12, 1933): 24; (regulations) MJFX, 275, 279; Huang Kai, “Wo de tegong shengya” (My career as a special agent) (hereafter “WDTS”), in Zhonghua wenshi ziliao wenku (China historical materials collection) (hereafter ZWZW), vol. 8 (Beijing: Zhongguo wenshi chubanshe, 1996), 377. 44. SHAC 7/932, 1934; Slack, Opium, State, Society, 107–109, 152; Dikötter et al., Narcotic Culture, 126; Lipkin, Useless to the State, 53; Baumler, “Opium Control,” 286–287; Wakeman, Policing Shanghai; Wu Xiaoqing, “Chen guofu zhuzheng jiangsu he tade CC bandi” (Chen Guofu’s rule of Jiangsu and his CC group), JWZJ, 72–73; SHAC 12/2/346, 1936–40. 45. Wu, “Chen guofu,” 72–73; SHAC 12/2/346, 1936–40. 46. SHAC 12/2/346, 1936–40; Xu, TOM, 106–111, 144. Those who may observe similarities between my account of this Jiangsu prison crowding and that found in Dikötter, Laamann, and Zhou, Narcotic Culture (2004), 126–30, should be aware that my original, far more extensive version of these events was available already in my 2001 dissertation, “Making Good Citizens,” 524–554. 47. Wu, “Chen guofu,” 72–73; Zhang, “Jiangsu lijinshe,” 80; SHAC 294/312, 1935–37; “Gesheng sifa zhuangkuang” (The situation of justice in the various provinces), FP, no. 622 (Oct. 13, 1935): 36; SHAC 7/7634, 1935; JPA 1047/17/1503, 1935; Sun, FZXYJ, 267–268; MJFX, 288–289; “Fajie xiaoxi,” FP, no. 617 (Sept. 8, 1935): 14; “SXEN”; JPA 1047/17/1486, 1935; JPA 1047/17/1524, 1935; JPA 1047/25/583, 1934; JPA 1047/25/588, 1935;

Notes to Pages 185–187

48.

49. 50.

51.

FP, no. 681 (Nov. 29, 1936): 16; Li, Jianyuxue, 7; Hu, Jianyu weisheng, 81; JPA 1047/25/587, 1935. Wu, “Chen guofu,” 72–73; Zhang, “Jiangsu lijinshe,” 80; SHAC 7/7634, 1935; JPA 1047/17/1486, 1935; Ye, Shouduzhi, 627; Li, Jianyuxue, 6; “Fajie xiaoxi,” FP, no. 640 (Feb. 16, 1936); JPA 1047/17/1487, 1936–37; SHAC 12/775, 1936–37; Xu, MRDC, 406. The noted KMT committee was Chen Gongbo’s Opium Suppression General Committee (20th Plenum). Hu, “SJYSZGZ,” 12; Ying, YGZJMS, 21–24. Frederic Wakeman, Jr., Spymaster: Dai Li and the Chinese Secret Service (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 147, 157–165, 207; Yin Qi, Pan Hannian zhuan (Biography of Pan Hannian) (Beijing: Zhongguo renmin gong’an daxue chubanshe, 1991), 115–116, 212; Bu, “Li yu” (Leaving prison), in ZGDYR, 4.42–4.43; Zheng Chaolin, An Oppositionist for Life: Memoirs of the Chinese Revolutionary Zheng Chaolin, trans. Gregor Benton (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1997), 222; Xu Binru, Liushinian lishi fengyun jishi (Actual record of sixty years of stormy history) (Beijing: Zhongguo wenyi chuban gongsi, 1991), 73–75; Zhang, “ZGY,” 22; Zhang Songjia, Caolan fengyu (The Caolan storms) (Beijing: Qunzhong chubanshe, 1986), 81; Bo, QFYS, 121–127; Zheng Chaolin, Huaijiu ji (Remembering past times) (Beijing: Dongfang chubanshe, 1995), 294; Wang, Memoirs, 157, 164; Xiao, “HDZY,” 100–101; Zhang Kezeng, “Jianfang gebuduan women douzheng lianxi” (Prison cells could not break our struggle communications), in Tiechuang suiyue, 193; Luo Jingsong, “Nanyou qingzhang” (The deep feelings of the friends in adversity), in Tiechuang suiyue, 278; Dou Zhijing, “Liaokao suo buzhu douzhi” (Fetters and locks cannot stop the will to struggle), in Tiechuang suiyue, 48–51; Huang, “RQ,” 55–58; Shang Yue, “Qiuri” (Prisoner days), in GZ, vol. 4, 170; Chen Tan, “Qinian tiechuang” (Seven years of iron windows), in Tiechuang suiyue, 61–65; Wang Kai, “Tiechuang nuhao” (Iron-window fury), in Tiechuang suiyue, 40–41; Tao Zhu, “Beibu hou de douzheng” (Struggle after arrest) (1967), in Tiechuang suiyue, 123–131; Tao Zhu, “Chentong de aidao” (Deeply felt lament) (1942), in Tiechuang suiyue, 203; Chen Yongqing, “Yuzhong huiyi pianduan” (Memoir fragment of imprisonment), in Tiechuang suiyue, 189–190; Huang, Dongdang, 287–291, 317–318, 330, 341; “GSGJ,” 66-70, 93–99; Chen Nongfei, “Zai zui hei’an nianyueli de zhandou” (The battle in the darkest years), in Tiechuang suiyue, 217, 229; Hao Zaijin, Zhongguo mimi zhan (China’s secret war) (hereafter ZMZ) (Beijing: Jincheng chubanshe, 2010), 10–13, 66; Stranahan, Underground, 109; also see Xu Enzeng, Xishuo zhongtong juntong (A detailed account of Zhongtong and Juntong) (Taibei: Zhuanji wenxue she, 1992). SHAC 2038/15, 1940–44; SHAC 2038/215, 1944; Mu Xin, Yinbi zhanxian tongshuai Zhou Enlai (The covert frontline commander Zhou Enlai) (Beijing: Zhongguo qingnian chubanshe, 2002), 96–109, 382; “ ‘Yuwai huaijiu lu,’ qiren Bao Junfu yihou de diandi jiushi” (“Reminiscences of beyond the boundaries”: A bit of old matters in the aftermath of the unusual figure Bao Junfu), www.edubridge.com/stories, accessed Oct. 26, 2010; “Zhonggong ‘qingbao sijie’ zhi yi Bao Junfu: Qianfu shanghai tan lujian qigong” (One of the Chinese Communists, “four outstanding spies” Bao Junfu: Repeated outstanding contributions undercover in the Shanghai circles), in Renmin zhengxie bao (People’s CPPCC news), May 22, 2009, www.people.com.cn, accessed

361

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Notes to Pages 188–189

52.

53.

54.

55.

Oct. 26, 2010; “Bao Junfu de diehai shengya” (Bao Junfu’s spy-world career), http:// www.njsw.gov.cn/site/swww/lsgs-mb_a3909030627036.htm, accessed Dec. 2, 2011; Hao, ZMZ, 161; Huang, “WDTS,” 371. Qiu, “CC shentou,” 89; Peng, ZXZX, 26; Zhu Hanguo, Nanjing guomin zhengfu jishi (A record of the events of the Nanjing national government) (Hefei: Anhui renmin chubanshe, 1993), 47–50, 181–183; (abolition of Special Criminal Courts on November 21, 1928) Zhongguo di’er lishi dang’an guan (Second Historical Archives of China), Guomindang zhengfu zhengzhi zhidu dang’an shiliao xuanbian (Edited selections of archival historical materials of the KMT government political system) (hereafter GZZZDSX), vol. 2 (Hefei: Anhui jiaoyu chubanshe, 1994), 619–620; “GSGJ,” 35, 41; Wang, “Tiechuang nuhao,” 42; (abolition of Nanjing Special Criminal Court spring 1929; cases sent to Jiangsu Provincial High Court in Suzhou) Gu Fusheng, “Zhendong guomindang sifajie de suzhou danaojian” (The big Suzhou prison trouble that shook the KMT justice circles), JWZJ: Geming douzheng juan (1995), 69; Meng Guoxiang introduction to Tiechuang suiyue, 2; Zheng, Huaijiu ji, 301; Dikötter, CPP, 208; Stranahan, Underground, 62; (1931 executions in Guangdong, military tribunals in Zhejiang and Anhui) GZZZDSX, 632–633, 638–640, 655–656; Wang, Memoirs, 162; Yan, “BFZSF,” 44, 49; Yen, “CRSCC,” 307–308; “GSGJ,” 14; Huang, “RQ,” 57; Chen Nongfei and Mai Naisong, “Zhuoyue de gongchanzhuyi zhanshi Deng Zhongxia” (The outstanding Communist warrior Deng Zhongxia), in Tiechuang suiyue, 2; (court exonerations) SHAC 7/696; (designations of political offender) JPA 1047/25/582, 1933– 34; JPA 1047/17/1487, 1936–37; JPA 1047/25/651, 1937. On pre–1927, see Kiely, “Making Good Citizens” and Waley-Cohen, “PSMQLC,” 340; Han, Zhongguo jindai jingcha, 317–332. Xiaoqun Xu has also made the point about the KMT creation of the category of political crime. Xu, TOM, 92; Aryeh Neier, “Confining Dissent: The Political Prison,” in Morris and Rothman, OHP, 400–409. Also see Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). Hao, ZMZ, 44–48; “Fajie xiaoxi,” FP, no. 629 (Dec. 1, 1935): 27; Brunnert and Hagelstrom, Political Organization, 306; Sun, YWDQ, 360; MJFX, 523–536, 542–543, 553; ZJSH, vol. 2, 22–31; Huang, “RQ,” 58–60; Meng Guoxiang, “Shinian neizhan zhong de nanjing jianyu” (Nanjing prisons during ten years of civil war), Chunqiu 11 (1994): 10; Dou, “Liaokao suo,” 52–54; Chen, “Qinian tiechuang,” 65–66, 74–79; “GSGJ,” 5–10, 20–21, 51–56, 73, 77; Zhuang, “He Zou Zikan,” 157–164; Tao, “Beibu hou,” 133–134; Wang Heshou and Liu Ningyi, “Liangci jueshi” (Two hunger strikes), in Tiechuang suiyue, 164; Chen, “Zai zui hei’an,” 247, 264–270; He Luo, “Chongchu hei’an de junlong” (Breaking out of the darkness of the military cage), in Tiechuang suiyue, 143–145; Zheng, Huaijiu ji, 294; Wang, Memoirs, 5, 169–170; Wang, “Tiechuang nuhao,” 43–45; Xue, Huiyilu, 15, 19, 22; also see Kiely,“Performances of Resistance.” JPA 1047/17/1495, 1929; JPA 1047/17/1497, 1931; Sun, FZXYJ, 267–268; Yin, “MSDJZ,” 359; Li, “Huiyi zai jianyu,” 28; Xu, Liushinian lishi, 71; Bo, QFYS, 92; Xia, “NDD,” 158; Shuai, “NDZJ,” 17–19; Chen, “Buqude nuzhanshi,” 28–30; Huang, “Niulan fufu,” 106; Luo, “Nanyou qingzhang,” 278–279. Du, Yuzhong zagan, 2, 23–25; Jinian Song Qingling wenji (Collection commemorating Song Qingling) (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 1993), 132; “JSDEJZG”;

Notes to Pages 190–194

56.

57.

58. 59. 60. 61. 62.

63. 64.

Li, Jianyuxue, 24; Zheng, Huaijiu ji, 157; Feigon, Chen Duxiu, 221; (Noulens) SHAC 7/3002, 1934; Wakeman, Policing Shanghai, 147–150; Wakeman, Spymaster, 151–153; also see Kiely, “Performances of Resistance”; JPA 1047/17/644, 1928; Sun, FZXYJ, 54–55; (for a critical view) Weng Zannian, “Fanzui yu jiaoyu” (Crime and education), FP, no. 390 (Apr. 5, 1931): 1–2; Xu and Liu,“SNDSF,” 73, 79. Yen, “CRSCC,” 308; Agnes Smedley, The Great Road: The Life and Times of Chu Teh (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1956), 239, 258; Liu Pocheng, Recalling the Long March (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1978), 66; Tao, “Beibu hou,” 123–131, 134; Wang and Liu, “Liangci jueshi,” 166; Hans Van de Ven, From Friend to Comrade: The Founding of the Chinese Communist Party, 1920–1927 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 89; (early CCP prison strategies) JPA 3/6, 1923; Zhuang, “He Zou Zikan,” 156, 163–164; also see Anne E. Gorsuch, Youth in Revolutionary Russia: Enthusiasts, Bohemians, Delinquents (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000); “GSGJ,” 8–10, 42, 49, 54–55, 84; Chen, “Qinian tiechuang,” 74–82; Hu, YZZS, 15; Huang, “RQ,” 59; Stranahan, Underground, 12; Chen, “Zai zui hei’an,” 265; He, “Chongchu hei’an,” 143; also see Kiely, “Performances of Resistance.” Wang, “Tiechuang nuhao,” 43, 46; Xia, “NDD,” 159; Huang, “RQ,” 56, 58; Chen, “Qinian tiechuang,” 69, 73, 76; Shuai, “NDZJ,” 21; Zheng, “Oppositionist,” 106; Yao Weidou, “Yun Daiying zhuanlue” (Brief biography of Yun Daiying), Jiangsu dangshi ziliao, vol. 4 (1985), 215; Hu, YZZS, 19, 35; Dou, “Liaokao suo,” 51, 53; Xue, Huiyilu, 15–27; Yen, “CRSCC,” 308; “GSGJ,” 9, 19, 71; “JSDEJZG”; “SDJQQG”; Wang and Liu, “Liangci jueshi,” 166; Zhuang, “He Zou Zikan,” 157–162; Xu, Liushinian lishi, 76–77; Bo, QFYS, 174–175; NYLJ, Yuhuatai geming lieshi shichao (Poetry of the Yuhuatai revolutionary martyrs) (Nanjing: Jiangsu shaonian erzhong chubanshe, 1990), 6, 21, 32, 38, 66; Hao Mingjian, ed., Geming lieshi yiwen dadian (Collected bequeathed writings of revolutionary martyrs) (Shanghai: Shanghai wenhua chubanshe, 2001), 4–5, 37; He, “Chongchu hei’an,” 144, 148; Chen, “Zai zui hei’an,” 220, 234, 239, 265, 267–269; Shi Ming, “ ‘Tebie liuzhisuo li’ ” (Inside “the special detention center”), in ZGDYR, 3.86–3.88; Gao Wenhua, in Tiechuang suiyue, 297–298; Wang, Memoirs, 167; Tao, “Beibu hou,” 126–128, 132; Chen Yi, “Yuzhong huiyi ji” (Prison memoir), published originally in Zhongliu magazine, Nov. 1936, in Tiechuang suiyue, 177. “GSGJ,” 18–20, 46–49, 76; Yao, “Yun Daiying,” 214; Zhang, “ZGY”; Xu, Liushinian lishi, 72, 77; Stranahan, Underground, 101. Gu, “Zhendong guomindang,” 70–72; “GSGJ,” 18–20, 47–49; SHAC 7/2653, 1929. SHAC 7/2653, 1929; Wang Ruowang, Hunger Trilogy, trans. Kyna Rubin with Ira Kasoff (London: M. E. Sharpe, 1991), 18. Li, “Huiyi zai jianyu,” 20; Zhang, “ZGY,” 25; “JSDEJZG.” “JSDEJZG”; “Zhongguo minquan baozhang tongmeng fu jing daibiao baogao” (Chinese League for the Protection of Civil Rights representatives’ trip to the capital to report), in Shenbao, Apr. 14, 1933, reprinted in Tiechuang suiyue, 335. (1932 order/petition) Sun, YWDQ, 448–449; QSHH, sec. 3, 1. Sun, YWDQ, 11, 223, 551, 514–515; QSHH, sec. 3, 1, 29; “Fajie xiaoxi,” FP, no. 617 (Sept. 8, 1935): 15; Chen, “Buqude nuzhanshi,” 30–31; Shuai, “NDZJ,” 19–21; Xiao, “HDZY,” 101–103; Luo, “Nanyou qingzhang,” 278–279; Zhang, “ZJH,” 65–67; Huang,

363

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Notes to Pages 194–199

65. 66. 67. 68. 69.

70. 71.

72.

73. 74.

75.

76. 77. 78.

“Niulan fufu,” 106–107; Xia, “NDD,” 155–158; also see Kiely, “Performances of Resistance.” JPA 1047/17/1487, 1936; SHAC 7/466, 1936; JPA 1047/17/1503, 1935. JPA 1047/25/651, 1937; JPA 1047/25/649, 1934. JPA 1047/17/508, 1932–33. QSHH, 59–63. “Fajie xiaoxi,” FP, no. 659 (June 28, 1936): 17; “Shanghai juban erqi zhengzhifan jiaohui gongzuo” (Shanghai holds the second term of political prisoner moral instruction work), FP, no. 676 (Oct. 25, 1936): 17. QSHH, 59–63; Xu, MRDC, 55, 1192. “Fajie xiaoxi,” FP, no. 241 (1928): 36; “Zhesheng sheli fanxingyuan” (Zhejiang establishes a self-examination institute), FP, no. 254 (1928): 128; R. Keith Schoppa, Blood Road: The Mystery of Shen Dingyi in Revolutionary China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 198–200; Dikötter, CPP, 231; Zhu Decheng, Hubei jindai jianyu (The modern prisons of Hubei) (Wuhan: Hubei sheng xinwen chubanbian, 1987), 6; Zhuang, “He Zou Zikan,” 159; Xue, Huiyilu, 23; (Jiangsu ganhuayuan) JPA 1047/17/606, 1928; “Fajie xiaoxi,” FP, no. 256 (1928): 137; GZZZDSX, 626–628; “Quanguo fanxingyuan zhoushe qingxing” (the national plan to establish selfexamination institutes) (originally a radio report), FP, no. 420 (Nov. 1, 1931): 39–40. Zhuang, “He Zou Zikan,” 159, 164; Xue, Huiyilu, 23–28; also see Bo, QFYS; Zhang, “ZGY”; Xu, Liushinian lishi; Zhang, Caolan fengyu; Shi Xiaoyan, “Songwang caolanzi jianyu de liangfeng xin” (Two letters sent to the Caolanzi prison), GZ, vol. 6 (1982); “Fajie xiaoxi,” FP, no. 370 (Nov. 16, 1930): 25; also see Pamela Lubell, The Chinese Communist Party and the Cultural Revolution: The Case of the Sixty-One Renegades (New York: Palgrave, 2002); C. W. H. Young, New Life for Kiangsi (Shanghai: China Publishing, 1935), 104–107. Young notes large military camps that claimed to carry out reform of large numbers of captured CCP guerrillas in Jiangxi. Chen, Yi fofa, 3; (Ni Bi) Sun, YWDQ, 347, 596–600; JPA 1047/17/508, 1932–33; “Fajie xiaoxi,” FP, no. 367 (Oct. 25, 1930): 15; “Fajie xiaoxi,” FP, no. 383 (Feb. 15, 1931): 24–25. “Fajie xiaoxi,” FP, nos. 447–448 (May 15, 1932): 23; Rui, JDL, 165; SHAC 2/415, 1933; JPA 1054/2/34, 1932; Wang, JDJB, 6; Zhu, ZXJBL, 172; Yen, “CRSCC,” 303–304; Lu, Ganhua jiaoyu, 1–5, 13–24, 36–60; “Fajie xiaoxi,” FP, no. 417 (Oct. 11, 1931): 28; Ye, Shouduzhi, 618; Wang, “Shicha huabei,” 35. See the Analects of Confucius 16.7; “SXXSGFNSS,” 3; MJFX, 505–519; JPA 1047/25/791, 1936; Zhu, Hubei jindai jianyu, 7; ZJSH, vol. 2, 72–73; Sun, YWDQ, 334; Zhu, Nanjing guomin, 283, 293, 304; Sun, Jianyuxue, 81; GZZZDSX, 658–660, 666–673; Dikötter, CPP, 280; Wu, “Chen guofu,” 73. A subsequent revision of self-examination regulations was promulgated in July 1935. Shandong fanxingyuan gongzuo baogao (Work report of the Shandong SelfExamination Institute) (hereafter SDFXYGZBG), (Jinan, 1934), intro., 2; sec. 1, 5; sec. 2, 1; sec. 4, 5; sec. 5, 1–4. Huang, “WDTS,” 377–378. SDFXYGZBG, sec. 1, 5; sec. 3, 4, 16; sec. 4, 1–4; Sun, YWDQ, 356–357. Chen, “Qinian tiechuang,” 84–86; Wang and Liu, “Liangci jueshi,” 165; Xiao, “HDZY,” 103; Xia, “NDD,” 158–159; JPA 1047/17/1487, 1936–37; Sun, FZXYJ, 267–268;

Notes to Pages 199–206

79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85.

86. 87. 88.

89. 90. 91.

92. 93.

94. 95. 96.

97. 98. 99.

A Le, “Zai shoudu fanxingyuan de yiduan douzheng” (The life of struggle in the Capital Self-Examination Institute), Tiechuang suiyue, 283–285; Zhu, Nanjing guomin, 188; Meng, “Shinian neizhan,” 11. Sun, YWDQ, 596–600. QSHH, 59–63. SDFXYGZBG, intro., 2; sec. 1, 4–5; sec. 3, 1–16; Sun, YWDQ, 356–357. SDFXYGZBG, sec. 3, 1–8, 16–28. SDFXYGZBG, sec. 1, 4–5; sec. 3, 4, 26. Fanxingyuan yuekan (Self-examination monthly), Anhui Self-Examination Institute, nos. 22–23 (Aug. 1936), 71. SDFXYGZBG, sec. 2, appendix, 26; sec. 3, 4; Sun, YWDQ, 356–357; (military small group / Soviet-Leninist) Richard B. Landis, “Training and Indoctrination at the Whampoa Academy,” in F. Gilbert Chan and Thomas H. Etzold, eds., China in the 1920s (New York: New View Points, 1976), 88. Fanxingyuan yuekan, 63–67; SDFXYGZBG, sec. 1, 3; sec. 3, 3, 11; Sun, YWDQ, 356–357. Fanxingyuan yuekan, 63–64, 70. SDFXYGZBG, sec. 3, 9–10; Fanxingyuan yuekan, 1–2, 47–62; also see M, “M fanxing ji” (M’s self-examination diary), Guowen zhoubao (National Literary Weekly), 1934, no. 11.1, 16–17, no. 11.2, 10. Fanxingyuan yuekan, 67–68; SDFXYGZBG, intro., 2; sec. 1, 5; sec. 2, 1; sec. 4, 5; sec. 5, 1–4. Jin Baiyong, “Zai fanxingyuan” (In the self-examination institute), in ZGDYR, 4.38–4.40. SHAC 7/657, 1936; Zhang, “ZJH,” 69–70; Xiao, “HDZY,” 103; A Le, “Zai shoudu,” 283– 285; Xia, “NDD,” 158–159; Xu, MRDC, 1343; Wang, Memoirs, 193–198; (on Bao Junfu) SHAC 2038/15, 1940–44; “Zhonggong ‘qingbao sijie’ ”; SHAC 2038/215, 1944; She Wen, “Wangwei tegong zongbu nanjing qu shimo” (The whole story of the Wang puppet secret agent headquarters Nanjing District), JWZJ: Zhengzhi juan (1995), 256–257; “ ‘Yuwai huaijiu lu,’ qiren Bao Junfu”; “Bao Junfu de diehai shengya”; Hao, ZMZ, 161. Zhang, “ZJH,” 69–70; Chen, “Buqude nuzhanshi,” 1, 32. Chen, “Qinian tiechuang,” 68, 82–87; Wang and Liu, “Liangci jueshi,” 165; Xia, “NDD,” 159; Zheng, “Oppositionist,” 195; Huang, “RQ,” 60; Huang, “Niulan fufu,” 107; Tao, “Beibu hou,” 134; also see Chen Xiaojin, Wode wenge suiyue (My cultural revolution years) (Xianggang: Dagongbao chubanshe, 2009), 143, 147. Chen, “Qinian tiechuang,” 84–87; Xia, “NDD,” 159. SDFXYGZBG, sec. 1, 66–67. Ch’en Li-fu, The Storm Clouds Clear over China: The Memoir of Ch’en Li-fu, 1900– 1993, ed. Sidney H. Chang and Ramon H. Myers (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institute, 1993), 68. SDFXYGZBG, sec. 1, 6, 29–40; sec. 4, 5; “M fanxing ji,” Guowen zhoubao, no. 11.1, 16, no. 11.3, 13; JPA 1047/17/508, 1932–33. Huang, “WDTS,” 378; SDFXYGZBG, sec. 1, 41–64; sec. 4, 3; sec. 5, 1; SHAC 7/2656, 1936. SDFXYGZBG, sec. 1, 65, sec. 2, 41–64; Fanxingyuan yuekan, 68.

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Notes to Pages 207–212 100. Lu Xun, Sanwen, 22–23. 101. “M fanxing ji,” Guowen zhoubao, no. 11.1, 12–18, no. 11.2, 10, 14, no. 11.3, 11–14, no. 11.4, 12–15. 102. Wang, Memoirs, 170; Shuai, “NDZJ,” 19; Zhang, “ZGY,” 39; Xue, Huiyilu, 28, 34. 103. (Sun Tan case) JPA 1047/25/723, 1934; (family manipulations / confessions) SHAC 294/167, 1935; (guarantor releases) SHAC 2/420, 1934–35. 104. JPA 1047/25/723, 1934. 105. Hu, “SJYSZGZ,” 13; Ying, YGZJMS, 28; Wang, “Tiechuang nuhao,” 45; Chen, “Qinian tiechuang,” 66–68, 72; Chen, “Zaizui hei’an,” 265–266; Li, Jianyuxue, 11; Sun, Jianyuxue, 80; Zhang, “Jianfang gebuduan,” 194; Huang, Dongdang, 324, 328; “GSGJ,” 60. 106. (CCP 1932 report) “Jianyu shenghuo, Zhongguo geming huji zonghui” (Prison life: Chinese Revolutionary Relief Assocation) (May 1, 1932) in Tiechuang suiyue, 326– 327; Cao Ying, “Baizhan guilai ren ci shen” (Coming to myself in returning from a hundred battles), in Tiechuang suiyue, 138–139; Xiao Ping, “Yi nanjing zuolao ersan shi” (Recalling a few things about being in jail in Nanjing), in Tiechuang suiyue, 162; Chen, “Yuzhong huiyiji,” 168–170, 174, 179, 182–186, 191–192; Zhuang, “He Zou Zikan,” 163–165; He, “Chongchu hei’an,” 142–143; Hu, YZZS, 30–31; Chen, “Qinian tiechuang,” 66–80, 89; Xu, MRDC, 915; “GSGJ,” 5–10, 19–22, 54–55, 59–62; Wang and Liu, “Liangci jueshi,” 164; Liu Hansheng, “Sinian laoyu shenghuo” (Four years of prison life), in Tiechuang suiyue, 187–188; Zhang, “Jianfang gebuduan,” 195–198; Huang, Dongdang, 320–321, 328, 338–339; Zheng, Huaijiu ji, 109, 294; Stranahan, Underground, 12, 63–83; Li, Jianyuxue, 66; Tao, “Beibu hou,” 132–134; Chen, “Zai zui hei’an,” 265–271; Sun, YWDQ, 362–363; Wang, “Tiechuang nuhao,” 45–46; Huang, “RQ,” 59–60, 330, 339; Yu Zongyan, “Jianyu zhong de jinbu huodong” (Progressive activities in prison), in Tiechuang suiyue, 281. 107. Ch’en, Storm Clouds, 93, 150, 157; Peake, Nationalism and Education, 96, 117; Jiaoyu yu minzhong (Education and the masses) 9, no. 8 (1937): 1341–1374; Wakeman, Spymaster, 120; Hu Pu-yu, A Brief History, 79; Chen Guofu, Suzheng huiyi (Remembering governing Jiangsu) (Taibei: Zhengzhong shuju, 1951), 1–7, 82; see Julia C. Strauss, “Strategies of Guomindang Institution Building: Rhetoric and Implementation in Wartime Xunlian,” in Bodenhorn, Defining Modernity. 108. Lei preface, in Yan, YJLJ, 1–2. 109. Chen, “Yuzhong huiyiji,” 181. 110. Yu, “Jianyu zhong,” 280–281; Zheng, Oppositionist, Gregor Benton preface, xii–xiii; Zheng Chaolin, “Chen Duxiu and the Trotskyists” (1932), in Gregor Benton, China’s Urban Revolutionaries: Explorations in the History of Chinese Trotskyism, 1921–1952 (Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1996), 177–182; Wang and Liu, “Liangci jueshi,” 166; Liu Shunyuan, “Yuzhong jianji” (Simple notes from prison), in Tiechuang suiyue, 210; Xu, MRDC, 1358, 1471. 111. Hu, “SJYSZGZ,” 12–14; Ying, YGZJMS, 38–43; Hu Yimin, Hulao yinxiao (Cries from the tiger’s pen) (Xianggang: Xianggang shanghai shuju, 1978), prefaces by Jiang Kanghu, Hu Yimin, 44; Ma Lie, Nonggong xianqu-Deng Yanda (Pioneer for the peasants and workers, Deng Yanda) (Lanzhou: Lanzhou daxue chubanshe, 2000), 231–236.

Notes to Pages 213–220 112. Hu, “SJYSZGZ,” 14–16; Ying, YGZJMS, 44, 53–65; Hu, Hulao, 71; Bianxie zhu (Editorial group), ed., Fang Zhimin zhuan (Biography of Fang Zhimin) (Nanchang: Jiangxi renmin chubanshe, 1982), 63–66, 254, 280; Fang Zhimin, Fang Zhimin wenji (Collected works of Fang Zhimin) (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1985), 101–104, 122–135, 380, 418–425; Gregor Benton, Mountain Fires: The Red Army’s Three-Year War in South China, 1934–1938 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 197– 198, 206–208; Kamal Sheel, Peasant Society and Marxist Intellectuals in China: Fang Zhimin and the Origin of a Revolutionary Movement in the Xinjiang Region (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 136–168.

c hapter 6 . t h e i n d i s pen s ab l e r e g i m e 1. SHAC 8/1101, 1936–38; He, “Chongchu hei’an,” 145; Chen, “Qinian tiechuang,” 81; Wang and Liu, “Liangci jueshi,” 165. 2. SHAC 8/1101, 1936–38. 3. Du, Yuzhong zagan, 24–25; Song Qingling, 134; He, “Chongchu hei’an,” 145; Zheng, Huaijiu ji, 80; Zhang, “ZGY,” 45; Chen, “Qinian tiechuang,” 73; Sun, YWDQ, 562, 607. 4. SHAC 294/323, 1936–37; (Shanghai) Li, “Yi feng cong jianyu li de xin” (A letter from prison), ZGDYR, 3.89–3.90; (Suzhou) Wuxian Ribao (Wu County daily news), Nov. 13, 1936; Chen, “Yuzhong huiyi pianduan,” 192; “GSGJ,” 74–75, 84; Chen, “Qinian tiechuang,” 81, 87; Wang and Liu, “Liangci jueshi,” 166; Lubell, Chinese Communist Party, 53–93; also see Kiely, “Performances of Resistance.” 5. Chen, “Buqude nuzhanshi,” 33–34; “GSGJ,” 74–75; Wang, “Tiechuang nuhao,” 46; Xiao, “HDZY,” 103; Cao, “Baizhan guilai,” 140; Xia, “NDD,” 160; A Le, “Zai shoudu,” 287–291; Li Zhiying, Bo Gu zhuan (Biography of Bo Gu) (Beijing: Dangdai zhongguo chubanshe, 1994), 217, 265–266; Liu, “Sinian laoyu,” 188; Chen, “Zai zui hei’an,” 273–274; Jiang Zhong, “Gang li jianyu de qiutu” (A just-released prisoner), originally published in Dikang sanri kan (Resistance three-day report), Sept. 19, 1937, repr. in Tiechuang suiyue, 332–333; Tao, “Beibu hou,” 135; He, “Chongchu hei’an,” 150–153; Zhang, Caolan fengyu, 32; Wakeman, Shanghai Badlands, 6–7; Herbert Bix, Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (New York: HarperCollins, 2000), 333. 6. Hu, “SJYSZGZ,” 16; Hu, Hulao, 80–81; Ying, YGZJMS, 70; Shen Zui, Shen Zui huiyi zuopin quanji (Complete collection of Shen Zui’s memoirs and writings), ed. Shen Meijuan, vol. 4 (Beijing: Jiuzhou tushu chubanshe, 1998), 235; Shen Zui, “Guofangbu baomiju neimu” (The inside story of the Security Bureau of the Ministry of National Defense), ZWZW, vol. 8, 528; Fang, Fang Zhimin wenji, 426; Li Haisheng, Dieku laomo: Mao Renfeng (The old demon of the spy cave: Mao Renfeng) (Shanghai: Shiji chubanshe jituan, 2010), 31–32, 52; Lin Kuo, Mao Renfeng quanzhuan (Complete biography of Mao Renfeng) (Beijing: Zhongguo wenshi chubanshe, 2001), 144–146; Chen Xueqi and Jiang Feng, Juntong jiaofu: Mao Renfeng (Juntong godfather: Mao Renfeng) (Kaifeng: Henan renmin chubanshe, 1995), 77–79. 7. John Pal, Shanghai Saga (London: Jarrolds, 1963), 153–154; Wang Zhen biographical preface; Lei preface to YJLJ, 2; www.hudong.com/wiki, Hudong baike (Hudong web encylopedia), accessed May 21, 2011.

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Notes to Pages 220–228 8. Sun, FZXYJ, 10, 24, 57, 65–66, 82–83, 103–105, 116, 120–123, 145–146, 167, 181–191, 194, 206, 213–230. 9. SHAC 7/1157, 1934–38; Shenbao, Dec. 16, 1939; ShanghaiJZ; SHAC 2044/617, 1941. 10. Tsao, “Chinese Prisons,” 9–14; SHAC 7/8649, 1945–47; Jianyu gailiang, 4. 11. SHAC 2044/152, 1942. 12. SHAC 2044/152, 1942. 13. Zhou Zhanyuan, Beijing diyi jianyu baogao (Report of the Beijing No. 1 Prison) (Beijing, 1941). 14. SHAC 2044/604, 1942; SHAC 2044/84, 1942; SHAC 2044/81, 1943. Timothy Brook, Collaboration: Japanese Agents and Local Elites in Wartime China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005). 15. SHAC 2044/619, 1942; SHAC 2044/81, 1943. 16. SHAC 2044/619, 1942; SHAC 2044/618, 1941. 17. SHAC 2044/81, 1943. 18. Wen Wen, Wo suo qinli de songhu huizhan: Yuan guomindang jiangling koushu huiyilu (My personal experiences of the Battle of Shanghai: Oral memoirs by former high ranking KMT military officers) (Beijing: Zhongguo wenshe chubanshe, 2005), 93; SHAC 2044/84, 1942; also see Chen Yung-fa, Making Revolution: The Communist Movement in Eastern and Central China, 1937–1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986) and David P. Barrett and Larry N. Shyu, eds., Chinese Collaboration with Japan, 1932–1945: The Limits of Accommodation (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001). 19. SHAC 2044/423, 1943; also see Wakeman, Shanghai Badlands. 20. Xu Jiajun, “100 nian lai Shanghai jianyu guanli zhidu de fazhan bianhua ji bijiao fenxi” (The development, change, and comparative analysis of the Shanghai prison management system of the last hundred years), in Xia and Zhu, ZJZBYW, 237; SHAC 2044/6, 1945; (very modern) Captain James I. Norwood and Captain L. Sheck, “Ward Road Jail, China,” in Prisoner of War Camps in Areas Other Than the Four Principal Islands of Japan, Washington, Liaison and Research Branch, American Prisoner of War Information Bureau, July 31, 1946, www.northchinamarines.com, accessed Oct. 22, 2010. 21. SHAC 2044/611, 1944; www.economy.guoxue.com, accessed Nov. 28, 2011. 22. Hu, “SJYSZGZ,” 16; Hu, Hulao, 21, 23, 54, 57; Ying, YGZJMS, 70; Xu, MRDC, 578; Mencius 4.3. 23. SHAC 2044/598, 1945; Zhang Quan, Zhuang Zhiling, Chen Zhengqing, eds., Rijun zai shanghai de zuixing yu tongzhi (The crimes and rule of the Japanese military in Shanghai) (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 2000), 345; ShanghaiJZ; Norwood and Sheck, “Ward Road Jail.” 24. SHAC 2044/598, 1945; ShanghaiJZ; SHAC 2044/6, 1945; Zhao, “Shanghai jiu jianyu,” 284. 25. SHAC 2044/619, 1942. 26. Henry F. Pringle, Bridge House Survivor: Experiences of a Civilian Prisoner-of-War in Shanghai & Beijing, 1942–1945 (Hong Kong: Earnshaw Books, 2009), 9, 17–18, 44; also see Wakeman, Shanghai Badlands.

Notes to Pages 228–238 27. Brook, Collaboration, 213; Ramon H. Myers and Mark R. Peattie, eds., The Japanese Colonial Empire, 1895–1945 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 40; Prasenjit Duara, Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchukuo and the East Asian Modern (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003), 2; (thought war) Zhang et al., eds. Rijun zai shanghai, 218, 222, 345; (Yenching professors) Jan Kiely, “The Yenching Professors Case: Intellectual Victims and the Mechanisms of Police State Power in Japanese Occupied Beijing, 1937–1945,” Research Seminar Paper, University of California at Berkeley, Spring 1995; Zhao Chengxin, Dazhong, no. 1.7 (1946): 50; Zhao Zichen, Xiyu ji (On imprisonment) (Xianggang: Jidujiao wenyi chubanshe, 1947), 56. 28. Pan Min, Jiangsu riwei jiceng zhengquan yanjiu 1937–1945 (Research on the Japanese and puppet regime basic-level governmental power in Jiangsu 1937–1945) (Shanghai: Renmin chubanshe, 2006), 68–69, 80–81, 94–96; Yu Zidao, Liu Qikui, and Cao Zhenwei, eds., Wang Jingwei guomin zhengfu “qingxiang” yundong (The Wang Jingwei national government “rural pacification” movement) (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 1985), 368–407, 416, 419–420, 436. 29. Wang Jingwei, “Xin guomin yundong yu jingshen zongdongyuan” (The new citizens movement and spiritual general mobilization) (originally in Zhengzhi yuekan [Politics monthly] 3.2 (1942): 8–10), in Yu, Liu, and Cao, eds., Wang Jingwei guomin zhengfu, 376. 30. SHAC 2038/15, 1940–44; SHAC 2038/215, 1944; She Wen, “Wangwei tegong,” 256–257; Huang Kai, “WDTS,” 380; “ ‘Yuwai huaijiu lu,’ qiren Bao Junfu”; “Zhonggong ‘qingbao sijie’ ”; “Bao Junfu de diehai shengya”; Hao, ZMZ, 161. 31. SHAC 2038/171, 1943; Wakeman, Spymaster, 66–97. 32. SHAC 2038/171, 1943. 33. SHAC 7/1123, 1938. 34. Jianyu gailiang, 1947, 1–2. 35. SHAC 7/1123, 1938; SHAC 7/915, 1937–38. 36. SHAC 7/8649, 1945–47; SHAC 7/9639; Jianyu gailiang, 3–4; Wang Jibao, Minguo sifazhi (Gazetteer of justice in the Republic) (Taibei: Zhengzhong shuju, 1954), 93; Dikötter, CPP, 298–334. 37. SHAC 7/1131, 1940; SHAC 7/1134, 1941; SHAC 7/1942, 1942. 38. SHAC 7/1134, 1941; Jianyu gailiang, 1–2; SHAC 7/1426, 1941–42; SHAC 7/1427, 1941–42. 39. SHAC 7/1134, 1941. 40. SHAC 7/1134, 1941; Jianyu gailiang, 3. 41. SHAC 7/8649, 1945–47; Xie, Zhanshi sifa jiayao, 363; Jianyu gailiang, 3; Wang, Minguo sifazhi, 93. 42. Jianyu gailiang, 4. 43. Lin Yutang, The Vigil of a Nation (New York: John Day, 1945), 137–140; Dong Wanlu, “Wo zai xibei qingnian laodongying” (My time in the Northwestern Youth Labor Camp), ZWZW, vol. 8, 903–906. 44. Wakeman, Spymaster, 217; Zhang Peizhi, Dai Li yu kangzhan (Dai Li and the war of resistance) (Taibei: Guoshiguan, 1999), 274–292. 45. Feng Xuefeng, “ ‘Shangrao jizhongying,’ de zhenshixing” (The factuality of the “Shangrao concentration camp”), Xin guancha (New Observer), 3.1. (Aug. 1, 1951): 28; Feng Xuefeng, Xuefeng wenji (Collected works of Feng Xuefeng), vol. 1 (Beijing:

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Notes to Pages 239–245

46.

47. 48.

49.

50. 51. 52.

53.

54. 55. 56.

57.

Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 1985), 171–173; Yang Li, A Biographical Dictionary of Modern Chinese Writers (Beijing: New World Press, 1994), 75; Zhonggong shangrao diwei dangshi bangongshi (CCP Shangrao Municipal Party Committee Party History Office), Lianyu zhi huo: Shangrao jizhongying jishi (The fires of purgatory: A record of the Shangrao concentration camp) (Beijing: Xinhua chubanshe, 1989), 45–47, 55. Huang Kangyong (as told to Zhu Wenchu), Wo suo zhidao de juntong xingshuai: Yuan guomindang juntong shaojiang de huiyi (What I know of the rise and fall of Juntong: Memoir of a former KMT Juntong major general) (Beijing: Zhongguo wenshi chubanshe, 2005), 62–63; Wakeman, Spymaster, 473. SHAC 7/1268, 1938. Dong, “Wo zai xibei qingnian,” 903; Zhu, Hubei jindai jianyu, 67–70; Enshi zhou shizhi ban (Enshi Historical Studies Office), Zhongguo gongchandang enshi tujiazu miaozu zizhiqu zhou lishi diyi zhuan (The history of the Chinese Communist Party in the Enshi Tujia and Miao Nationality Self-Administered Prefecture, section one), http://www.eszsz.com/dsgz/dssj/2011–04–07/218.html; Badong xian gongqingtuan qingnian yundong shi (History of the Badong County Communist Youth League youth movement), http://www.cjbd.com.cn/bdgqt/2006–03/27/cms315578article.shtml, both accessed Jan. 24, 2012. Luo Xuan, Jiang Jingguo Jiangxi chuanqi (The Jiangxi stories of Jiang Jingguo) (Xianggang: Nanyue chubanshe, 1988), 204–206; Thomas A. Marks, Counterrevolution in China: Wang Sheng and the Kuomintang (London: Frank Cass, 1998), 44–52; Jiang Jingguo, Gannan zaji (Southern Jiangxi miscellany) (Shanghai: Qianfeng chubanshe, 1946), 15. Jiang, Gannan zaji, 5–11, 15–16, 23–30, 40, 65, 83–84; Chen, Suzheng huiyi, 82. Chiang Kai-shek, China’s Destiny, trans. Wang Chung-hui (1943, New York: Macmillan, 1947), 40, 167. Ch’en, Storm Clouds, 157; George Fitch, My Eighty Years in China (Taipei: Mei Ya Publications, 1967), 200–201; Liu Gong, “Wo suozhidao de zhongtong” (The Zhongtong that I knew), ZWZW, vol. 8, 347; Strauss, “Guomindang Institution Building,” 204–206. Zhongguo gongchandang jiluyuqu weiyuanhui (CCP Ji-Lu-Yu Area Committee), Sixiang fanxing xuanji (Selected collection of thought self-reflections) (Washington, DC: Center for Chinese Research Materials, 1943) 1; David S. G. Goodman, “JinJiLuYu in the Sino-Japanese War: The Border Region and the Border Region Government,” China Quarterly, no. 140 (Dec. 1994): 1007–1010, 1017–1018; Dagfinn Gatu, Village China at War: The Impact of Resistance to Japan, 1937–1945 (Copenhagen: NIAS Press, 2007), 28–29, 51, 242–245. Sixiang fanxing xuanji, 1–29. Sixiang fanxing xuanji, 1–2; Gatu, Village China, 242–244. Yun Daiying, “Dapo zhongguo de jianyu” (Smash China’s prisons), Hongqi (Red flag), no. 45 (Sept. 16, 1929), in Yun Daiying wenji (Collected works of Yun Daiying), vol. 2 (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1984), 1052–1053. Lei Shengsheng, “Woguo laogai zhidu de kaiduan: Di’erci guonei geming zhanzheng shiqi genjudi de laodong ganhuayuan” (The start of our nation’s reform-through-labor

Notes to Pages 246–251

58.

59. 60.

61. 62.

63.

64. 65.

66. 67. 68.

69.

system: The labor reformatory of the second national revolutionary war period base area), QMGJZ, 386–392; Patricia Griffin, The Chinese Communist Treatment of Counterrevolutionaries (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976), 34–37, 83–85; Guo, XZYHZ, 157; Shao Mingzheng, Zhongguo laogai faxue lilun yanjiu zongshu (A summary of research on China’s reform-through-labor law and theory) (Beijing: Zhongguo fazheng daxue chubanshe, 1992), 11. “Jin-cha-ji bianqu xingzheng weiyuanhui gongzuo baogao, 1938–1942” (Jin-Cha-Ji border area administrative committee work report, 1938–1942), originally reprinted in Zhonghua renmin gongheguo shenpanfa cankao ziliao huibian (People’s Republic of China judicial law reference documents compilation) (hereafter ZRGSCZH), vol. 1 (Beijing: Zhengfa xueyuan, 1956), 114–116, reprinted in QMGJZ, 300; Yang Diansheng, Laodong gaizao faxue (Reform-through-labor legal studies) (Beijing: Beijing faxue chubanshe, 1991), 30–45; Griffin, Communist Treatment, 103, 109–113, 123–128; Frank Dikötter, “The Emergence of Labour Camps in Shandong Province, 1942–1950,” China Quarterly, no. 175 (Sept. 2003): 803–807. Yang, Laodong gaizao, 30–45; Griffin, Communist Treatment, 103, 109–113, 123–128. “Sifa gongzuo baogao” (Judicial work report) (hereafter “SFGZBG”), Report of High Court Chief Justice Wang at the Border Area Judicial Conference, March 1944, excerpts originally in ZRGSCZH, vol. 1, 168, 183–184, reprinted in QMGJZ, 312; also see Dikötter, “Labour Camps,” 803–807. “Jin-cha-ji bianqu,” QMGJZ, 299. Zhang Zhen, “Zixinxueyisuo shixing leijin jianxing zhi” (Self-renewal work-skills education centers carry out the progressive reduced sentence system), Jiefang ribao (Liberation daily), May 8, 1944, “SFGZBG,” “Jin-cha-ji bianqu”—all in QMGJZ, 299–301, 312, 370–371; Yang, Laodong gaizao, 30–45; Griffin, Chinese Communist Treatment, 103, 109–113, 123–128. Chen Yongfa, Yan’an de yinying (Shadows of Yan’an) (Taibei: Zhongyang yanjiuyuan jindaishi yanjiusuo, 1990), 134–135; also see Chen Yung-fa, “Suspect History and Mass Line” in Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, ed., Twentieth-Century China: New Approaches (London: Routledge, 2003). “Jin-cha-ji bianqu” and Zhang, “Zixinxueyi,” in QMGJZ, 299–301, 370–371. He Fang, Cong Yan’an yilu zoulai de fansi: He Fang zishu (Reflections all along the way from Yan’an: The autobiography of He Fang), as recorded and ed. by Xing Xiaoqun, vol. 1 (Xianggang: Mingbao chubanshe, 2007), 3, 9–16, 24–25, 30–36, 40–41, 73–75, 120. He, Cong Yan’an, 96–97, 101, 105; Gao, “ ‘Xinren,’ ” 177–178, 183–184. He, Cong Yan’an, 97, 102; Mark Selden, China in Revolution: The Yenan Way Revisited, (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1995), 152–154. He, Cong Yan’an, 105–106; Gao, Hongtaiyang, 397; Peter J. Seybolt, “Terror and Conformity: Counterespionage Campaigns, Rectification, and Mass Movements, 1942–43,” Modern China 12, no. 1 (Jan. 1986): 45–47; Sixiang fanxing xuanji, 20–29, 34–42, 52, 54–56; Gao, “ ‘Xinren,’ ” 182; Martin King Whyte, Small Group and Political Rituals in China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), 23–24, 35. He, Cong Yan’an, 106–108.

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Notes to Pages 252–261 70. He, Cong Yan’an, 109–110, 113–119, 124, 127; Jean-Luc Domenach, Chine: L’Archipel Oublié (China: The forgotten archipelago) (Paris: Fayard, 1992), 42; Seybolt, “Terror and Conformity,” 40–41, 51–60; Chen, Yan’an de yinying, 82–89; Gao, Hongtaiyang, 495–507; Hao, ZMZ, 241–286. 71. He, Cong Yan’an, 121; Seybolt, “Terror and Conformity,” 64. 72. Hao, ZMZ, 284–285. 73. The following works contributed to this reflection: Bertrand Russell, Why Men Fight: A Method of Abolishing the International Duel (New York: Century, 1917) and Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the College de France, 1975–76, trans. David Macey, ed. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana (New York: Picador, 2003), 15. 74. He, Cong Yan’an, 131.

c hapt er 7 . r ev o l u t i o n ar y t h o u g ht r e fo r m 1. Hu, Hulao 1–5, main text, 2, 8, 21, 31, 40, 47, 73, 80–81, 85–88; Hu, “SJYSZGZ,” 16–17; Ying, YGZJMS, 70; Nanjing shi dang’anguan (Nanjing municipal archives), Shenxun Wangwei hanjian bilu (Wang puppet Chinese traitors’ inquest records), vol. 1 (Nanjing: Fengyang chubanshe, 2004), 324–325, 357; Mu, Zhou Enlai, 383. 2. Diana Lary, The Chinese People at War: Human Suffering and Transformation, 1937– 1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 170–173. 3. ShanghaiJZ; Xinwenbao, Nov. 15, 1946; Shenbao, Feb. 24, 1947; Wang, Shiqu de yingxiang, 11, 74–75; (traitor cases) SHAC Ministry of Judicial Administration files, 7; Jianyu gailiang, appendix 6, 33. 4. Jianyu gailiang, appendix 2, 31, appendix 6, 33; Tsao, “Chinese Prisons,” 3–14. 5. Hu, Hulao, 9, 77–78, 83. Buddhist preachers were also active in Shanghai and Suzhou prisons. See Xu Zhonggang and Zhou Bingyuan, Suzhou fojiao siyuan (Suzhou’s Buddhist monasteries and temples) (Suzhou: Suzhou wenshiziliao bianjibu chuban, 1997), 28. 6. Hu, Hulao, Hu preface, 5, main text, 4, Zhou Zuoren afterword (unpaginated). 7. Hu, Hulao, Zhou afterword. 8. Tsao, “Chinese Prisons,” 3–14. Yin, Dianyu, 1; ShanghaiJZ; (Xia Jiahuan April 1947 proposal) SHAC 7/1008, 1947; SHAC 7/8643, 1948; Jianyu gailiang, 1, 4–19, 25–26; (Xuancheng / labor camps) SHAC 7/8649, 1945–47; Wang, Minguo sifazhi, 93. 9. Jianyu gailiang, 18–20. 10. SHAC 7/5833, 1947. 11. (Liaoning) SHAC 7/1135, 1948; (Shanghai) SHAC 7/1129, 1948; Zhao, “Shanghai jiu jianyu,” 284. 12. SHAC 7/8649, 1945–47; Jianyu gailiang, 1, 5–17, 20–24, 27, 32. 13. SHAC 7/9917, 1946. 14. Zhu, Hubei jindai jianyu, 71–72; also see Luo Guangbin and Yang Yiyan, Hongyan (Red crag) (Beijing: Zhongguo qingnian chubanshe, 1961); Yang, Biographical Dictionary, 212–213; Joe C. Huang, Heroes and Villains in Communist China: The Contemporary Chinese Novel as a Reflection of Life (London: C. Hurst Co., 1973), 87–90.

Notes to Pages 261–265 15. Lei Jieqiong, “Xiaguan bei’ou” (Beaten up at Xiaguan), June 1946, in Lei Jieqiong, Lei Jieqiong wenji (Collected works of Lei Jieqiong), vol. 1 (Beijing: Kaiming chubanshe, 1994), 199–204; Lei Jieqiong, “Zhenzang zai jiyi shenchu de wangshi” (Past things in the treasure vault deep in memory), in Lei Jieqiong wenji, vol. 2, 744–748; Lei Jieqiong, “Nanwang de huiyi” (Unforgetable memory), in Lei Jieqiong wenji, vol. 2, 864–865; Chu Yin, “Zhongguo fanzuixue yanjiu de xianqu Jingyue” (China’s criminology research pioneer Jingyue), Xinhua wenzhai (New China literary selections), no. 5 (2000), http://www.laomu.cn/wxzp/ydzx/wenxueqikan/xhwz2000/xhwz20000542–1.html, accessed Mar. 24, 2012; Hong Peilin, Jianxiao shicheng: Guomindang lao chaofu mie qianhou (The swordsman stone city: The course of the destruction of the KMT’s old nest) (Beijing: Qunzhong chubanshe, 1991), 608. On Taiwan, see George H. Kerr, Formosa Betrayed (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1966). On late 1940s civil war, see Odd Westad, Decisive Encounters: The Chinese Civil War, 1946–1950 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003); Suzanne Pepper, Civil War in China, 1945–1949 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978); Lloyd Eastman, Seeds of Destruction: Nationalist China in War and Revolution, 1937–1949 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1984); also see Jan Kiely, “Third Force Periodicals in China, 1928– 1949: Introduction and Annotated Bibliography,” Republican China 23, no. 1 (Nov. 1995). 16. He, Cong Yan’an, 161–162, 183–184, 191; Xin Guo’en, Mao Zedong gaizao fanzui lilun yanjiu (Research on Mao Zedong’s theory of criminal reform) (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 2006), 26–27; Dikötter, “Labour Camps,” 811–816; Commission Internationale Contre Le Régime Concentrationnaire, White Book on Forced Labour in the People’s Republic of China (hereafter CICRC) (Paris: Centre International d’Edition et de Documentation, 1957–58), vol. 2, 215–216; Whyte, Small Groups, 60–61; Hao, ZMZ, 330–331; Shao Kai, Gaizao sixiang de dianxing baogao (Typical report on reforming thought) (n.p.: Dongbei shudian, 1947). 17. SHAC 7/7164, 1948; ShanghaiJZ; Dagongbao, Feb. 17, 1948; Shenbao, Mar. 9, 1948; Dagongbao, Oct. 2, 1948; Tsao, “Chinese Prisons,” 3–14. 18. ShanghaiJZ; Shenbao, Dec. 8, 1948; Shenbao, Jan. 21, 1949; Shenbao, Feb. 10, 1949; SHAC 7/8201, 1949; Dagongbao, Jan. 22, 1949; Zhao Xuezhang, Jiefang: 1948nian–1951nian gongheguo chengli shimo: Chengshi jiyi, lao baozhi (Liberation: The story of the founding of the Republic from 1948 to 1951: Urban memories, old newspapers) (Beijing: Zhongguo dang’an chubanshe, 2006) 78–79; Hu, “SJYSZGZ,” 17–18. 19. Hu, “SJYSZGZ,” 18; Ying, YGZJMS, 2; ShanghaiJZ; Xu, “100 nian lai,” 238. 20. SHAC 7/8560, 1949. 21. Tsao, “Chinese Prisons,” 3–14; Yu, “Jianyu zhong,” 280–281. 22. Guo Bingchang, Jianyu xingxing fa (The prison’s carrying out of penal law) (Taibei: Qianhua chuban gongsi, 1998), 31–32; SHAC 7/8670, 1949; SHAC 7/8671, 1949. 23. Dagongbao, Mar. 22, 1950, article reprinted in Zhao, Jiefang, 280–281; Xinwen ribao (Mar. 22, 1950), Jiefang ribao (Sept. 26, 1949), in ShanghaiJZ. The Xinwen ribao reports 2,515 prisoners in the group, while Dagongbao reported 2,514.

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Notes to Pages 265–270 24. Dagongbao, Mar. 22, 1950, article reprinted in Zhao, Jiefang, 280–281; Xinwen ribao (Mar. 18, 1950), Xinwen ribao (Mar. 22, 1950), Wenhuibao (Mar. 20, 1950)—all in ShanghaiJZ. 25. Xinrencun (New People Village) (dir. Gao Weijin, 1950), v.youku.com/v_show/id_ XMTU1MTk4NzA0.html, accessed Mar. 5, 2012; Yomi Braester, Painting the City Red: Chinese Cinema and the Urban Contract (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 158–159; Yin, Pan Hannian, 306–307; Frederic Wakeman, Jr., “ ‘Cleanup’: The New Order in Shanghai,” in Jeremy Brown and Paul G. Pickowicz, eds., Dilemmas of Victory: The Early Years of the People’s Republic of China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 47–53; Mao Yonghuai, Shanghai nongchang, Haifeng nongchang de jianzhi yange (The course of the construction of the Shanghai Farm, Haifeng Farm), www.dfshzq.cn/jng, accessed Apr. 29, 2010. 26. Yin, Pan Hannian, 351; Xinwen ribao (Mar. 22, 1950) and administration biographies in ShanghaiJZ; Xia, “100 nian lai,” 100, 233–235; Mao, Shanghai nongchang. 27. Xinrencun; Mao, Shanghai nongchang; Chen, Guilty of Indigence, 219–220; CICRC, vol. 2, 56–60. The International Commission was founded in 1950 by French Trotskyite writer and Buchenwald Concentration Camp survivor David Rousset to have prominent former inmates of Nazi German concentration camps investigate the existence of concentration camps in other parts of the world. See Susan Lisa Curruthers, Cold War Captives: Imprisonment, Escape and Brainwashing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 126. 28. Rogaski, Hygienic Modernity, 289; Frank Dikötter, “Crime and Punishment in PostLiberation China: The Prisoners of a Beijing Gaol in the 1950s,” China Quarterly, no. 149 (Mar. 1997); F. Olin Stockwell, With God in Red China: The Story of Two Years in Chinese Communist Prisons (New York: Harper and Bros., 1953), 73–75; Quentin K. Y. Huang, Now I Can Tell: The Story of a Christian Bishop under Communist Persecution (New York: Morehouse-Gorham, 1954), 13–18; Chen Guangxiang, Miao Sheng, and Dong Hengfeng, Huadong da jiaofei jishi (A record of the great suppression of bandits in eastern China) (Beijing: Zhongguo renmin jiefangjun chubanshe, 2009), 139–142; Tao Siju, Xin zhongguo diyi ren gong’an buzhang: Luo Ruiqing (New’s China’s first minister of public security: Luo Ruiqing) (Beijing: Qunzhong chubanshe, 1996), 72–73, 92–94. 29. Renmin ribao (May 26, 1949), in Zhao, Jiefang, 140; Wei Xiangru, “Jianguo qianxi jieguan Beiping jiu jingshu” (On the eve of construction of the nation at the takeover of Beiping’s old police force), www.chinaqw.com, accessed Apr. 29, 2010; Wang Kai, “ ‘Feidi’ Qinghe: Gongheguo diyi zuo laogai nongchang de lishi yu xianshi” (The Qinghe ‘enclave’: The real situation and history of the Republic’s first reform-throughlabor farm), Liaowang dongfang zhoukan (Oriental Outlook), no. 14 (Apr. 8, 2010), http://history.stnn.cc/collection/201004/t20100407_1301085.html, accessed April 30, 2010; Zhu Shi, “Xiaomie wan’e de yinbi diren” (Eliminating the extremely evil concealed enemies), Xin guancha, no. 1.4 (Aug. 16, 1950): 12. 30. Wang, “ ‘Feidi’ Qinghe”; Jiang Fang, Kuqi de beidahuang: Wo zai jizhongying de rizi (The weeping of the great northern wilderness: My days in concentration camps) (Taibei: Shangzhou wenhua faxing, 1996), 146; Raja Hutheesing, The Great Peace: An

Notes to Pages 270–274

31. 32. 33. 34.

35. 36.

37.

38.

Asian’s Candid Report on Red China (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1953), 187–189; (Mao) Tao, Xin zhongguo, 116; Wang Xuefeng, “Xinzhongguo jiaoyu gaizao de lishi fazhan yu guannian gengxin” (A revised conception and the historical development of new China’s education reform), in Xia and Zhu, ZJZBYW, 72. Jiang, Kuqi de beidahuang, 146; Hutheesing, Great Peace, 187; P. C. Yu, “Devils into Men,” People’s China, no. 4.9 (Nov. 1, 1951): 20–24; CICRC, vol. 2, 193–195, 292–293. Tao, Xin zhongguo, 117–118; Guo, XZYHZ, 157; Xin, Mao Zedong, 355. Zhejiang Provincial Archives (hereafter ZPA), 243.4/20, 1951–52. Zhu Shi in Xin guancha, 12; “Jiefangjun guoqu yinian lai xiaomie dijun erbaiwan” (The liberation army eliminated two million enemy troops in the past year), Liaoxi ribao (western Liaoning daily), Sept. 26, 1950, in Zhao, Jiefang, 325 (this article reports the elimination of 964,410 bandits between October 1949 and October 1950); Anhui sifazhi (Anhui judicial gazetteer), http://61.191.16.234:8080/was40, accessed Apr. 29, 2010; Tao, Xin zhongguo, 117–118. Su Weiquan, Shanbei nuzhiying (North Shaanxi slave camp) (Xianggang: Yazhou chubanshe, 1954), 8–13; CICRC, vol. 2, 226–233. (testimony of former PLA officer Yuan Mei) CICRC, vol. 1, 110–111; Li Baiying, Huiyi wode gaizao shenghuo (Recalling my life of reform) (Beijing: Qunzhong chubanshe, 1984), 8–12, 17–18, 26–29. Mao Zedong, “Lun renmin minzhu zhuanzheng” (On the people’s democratic dictatorship) (1949), in Mao Zedong zhuzuo xuanbian (Selected works of Mao Zedong) (Beijing: Zhonggong zhongyang dangxiao chubanshe, 2002) 375–376; Li Chengyun, “Lun Mao Zedong gaizao zuifan lilun de xingcheng lishi” (On the historical formation of Mao Zedong’s theory of reforming offenders), in Xia and Zhu, ZJZBYW, 4; Shao, Zhongguo laogai, 15, 76; Wang, “Xin zhongguo jiaoyu gaizao,” 72; Jiang, Kuqi de beidahuang, 53; Liang Minli, “Xin zhongguo laodong gaizao zuifan gongzuo huigu” (Looking back at prisoner work and reform-through-labor in New China), in Xia and Zhu, ZJZBYW; (on resistance to CCP violence) Zhonggong zhongyang guanyu jianguo yilai ruogan lishi wenti de jueyi zhushi (The CCP Center’s annotated resolution of certain historical problems since the contruction of the nation) (Beijing: Zhongguo zhengfa daxue chubanshe, 1992), 206; Li Lu, Jianguo chuqi ‘zhenfan’ xingshi zhengce shishi yanjiu, 1950–53 (Research on the implementation of penal policy of the “counterrevolutionary suppression” at the outset of the construction of the nation) (Beijing: Zhongguo zhengfa daxue chubanshe, 2011), 18–26. Hong, Jianxiao shicheng, 116–117, 132, 356, 378, 392–393, 596–619 (Hong was a PSB officer involved in the events); Mu, Zhou Enlai, 382–383; “Zhonggong ‘qingbao sijie’ ”; “ ‘Yuwai huaijiu lu,’ qiren Bao Junfu”; “Bao Junfu de diehai shengya”; (Luo Ruiqing quote) Tao, Xin zhongguo, 47; Zhonggong Nanjing shiwei dangshi gongzuo bangongshi (CCP Nanjing Municipal Party Committee Party History Work Office) (hereafter ZNSDGB), Nanjing kangmei yuanchao yundong (The Resist America– Support Korea Movement in Nanjing) (Beijing: Zhonggong dangshi chubanshe, 2002), 177–178, 205–209; ZNSDGB, Zhonggong Nanjing difang shi, 1949–1979 (The local history of the Communist Party in Nanjing) (Beijing: Zhonggong dangshi chubanshe, 2009), 132–149, 164; Liang, “Xin zhongguo laodong gaizao,” 27.

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Notes to Pages 275–276 39. Fadong qunzhong zhenya fangeming (Mobilizing the masses to suppress counterrevolution) (Beijing: Qunzhong shudian, 1951), 137–139; Harold Rigney, Four Years in Red Hell: The Story of Father Rigney (Chicago: H. Regnery, 1956), 48; Peter Lum, Peking, 1950–53 (London: Robert Hale, 1958), 85; CICRC, vol. 1, 64; Li, Huiyi, 30; Hutheesing, Great Peace, 185; Clifford, Presence of My Enemies, 38–39; Alfred Kong, The Making of a Vagabond (Hong Kong: China Viewpoints, 1958), 59–60; Yang Kuisong, “Reconsidering the Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries,” China Quarterly, no. 193 (Mar. 2008): 102–121; Yang Kuisong, “Xin zhongguo ‘zhenya fangeming’ yundong yanjiu” (Research on New China’s “Suppressing Counterrevolutionaries” campaign), Shixue yuekan (Historical studies monthly) 2006, 1; Yang Kuisong, “Xin zhongguo gonggu chengshi zhengquan de zuichu changshi: Yi Shanghai zhenfan yundong wei zhongxin de lishi kaocha” (New China’s attempt to consolidate power over the cities: A historical investigation focusing on the counterrevolutionary suppression campaign in Shanghai), Huadong shifan daxue xuebao (Journal of East China Normal University), 2004, 9; also see Li, Jianguo chuqi ‘zhenfan.’ 40. Yin Jiabao, Xin zhongguo fanzuixue yanjiu zongshu 1949–1995 (A summary of criminology research in the new China, 1949–1995) (Beijing: Zhongguo minzhu fazhi chubanshe, 1997), 2–3; Shao, Zhongguo laogai, 252; Konno Jun, “Jinmin kyowakoku kenkoku shoki ni okeru seijiteki boryoku to shakai chitsujo” (Political violence and social order in the early period of the construction of the nation), Rekishi hyoron (Historical review), no. 681 (Jan. 2007): 47; (Tilanqiao wardens) ShanghaiJZ; (Wu Zhongqi) “Hushifu juxing tanbai jianju dahui” (The Shanghai government holds a confession and accusation big meeting), Dagongbao (Hong Kong), Feb. 3, 1952, www. takungpao.hk/history/history_news_content.asp?news_id=166398, accessed Mar. 1, 2012; (the arrested) Zhao, Jiefang, 295; Jia Zhifeng, Yuli yuwai (In and out of prison) (Shanghai: Shanghai yundong chubanshe, 1995), 165, 167, 180; CICRC, vol. 2, 250– 251; Mark Tennien, No Secret Is Safe: Behind the Bamboo Curtain (New York: Farrar, Straus and Young, 1952), 16–17, 31. 41. Amnesty International Report, Political Imprisonment in the People’s Republic of China (London, 1978), 2–9; Yu Xingzhong, “Legal Pragmatism in the People’s Republic of China,” Journal of Chinese Law 3 (1989): 36; Li, Huiyi, 65. 42. Yang, “Reconsidering Campaign,” 101–102; (3 million) Lin Yunhui, ed., 1949–89 nian de zhongguo: Kaige xingjin de shiqi (China, 1949–1989: The time of marching forward in victorious song) (Henan: Henan renmin chubanshe, 1991), 144; Shao, Zhongguo laogai, 15; (prison population) Liu Shi’en, “Guanyu woguo jianyu diaofan gongzuo lishi de sikao” (Reflecting on the history of our nation’s prisons transporting prisoners work), in Xia and Zhu, ZJZBYW, 215. 43. Xin, Mao Zedong, 29–30, 354; Wang, “Xin zhongguo jiaoyu gaizao,” 72–73; Shao, Zhongguo laogai, 521; Yang Musong,“Fujian jianyu 50 nian buju tiaozheng tanxi” (An analytical discussion of fifty years of the overall arrangement and adjustments of Fujian prisons), in Xia and Zhu, ZJZBYW, 119; CICRC, vol. 2, 269; Tennien, No Secret Is Safe, 99; Li, Huiyi, 42. 44. Anhui sifazhi.

Notes to Pages 277–281 45. Huaiyin gong’anju (Huaiyin Public Security Bureau), Huaiyin gong’an zhi (Huaiyin public security gazetteer) (n.p.: Jiangsu guji chubanshe, 1993), 164–165. 46. Xin, Mao Zedong, 52, 354; Yang, “Fujian jianyu,” 119–120; Yunnan sheng jianyu guanliju jianyu zhiban (Yunnan Province Prison Management Bureau prison records office) (hereafter YSJGJZ), “Xin zhongguo Yunnan jianyu gongzuo licheng huimou” (Glancing back on the course of Yunnan prison work in new China), in Xia and Zhu, ZJZBYW, 100; Shao, Zhongguo laogai, 76. 47. James D. Seymour, “Sizing up China’s Prisons,” in Crime, Punishment, and Policing in China, ed. Børge Bakken (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), 142; Shao, Zhongguo laogai, 521–524; Tao, Xin zhongguo, 136; Huaiyin gong’an zhi, 164–165; Anhui sifazhi; CICRC, vol. 2, 197–198, 220–221, 273, 399. 48. Wang, “ ‘Feidi’ Qinghe”; “ ‘Cenlaiming,’ youguo yisuo daxing liudong jianyu” (“Cenlaiming” had a large-scale mobile prison), www.jsjy.gov.cn/zwgk/html/2006– 07/6041.html, accessed Mar. 16, 2012; Xin, Mao Zedong, 355; (Xinjiang) “Bingtuan jianyu xuehui ketizu” (The military construction and production corps prisons-studysociety discussion group), “Bingtuan jianyu fazhan yange yu tedian” (The characteristics and evolution of the development of the military construction and production corps prisons), in Xia and Zhu, ZJZBYW, 111–114; Liu, “Guanyu woguo,” 216. 49. Liang, “Xin zhongguo laodong gaizao,” 28; James J. Du, Punishment and Reform: An Introduction to the Reform-through-Labor System in the People’s Republic of China (Hong Kong: Lo Tat Cultural Publishing, 2004), 117–118. 50. Gu Kezhong, You “laogai duiyuan” dao “jijifenzi” (From “reform-through-labor unit member” to “activist”) (Xianggang: Yazhou chuban youxian gongsi, 1954), 37–44. Gu also produced a shorter version of his account in a report to the International Commission against Concentration Camp Practices, see CICRC, vol. 2, 282–283. 51. In addition to sources cited above, see the following laogai accounts: Bao Ruo-wang (Jean Pasqualini) and Rudolph Chelminski, Prisoner of Mao (New York: Penguin, 1976); Zhang Xianliang, Grass Soup, trans. Martha Avery (Boston: David R. Godine, 1995); Xu Hongci (as recorded by Hu Zhanfen), Chongchu laogaiying (Breaking out of reform-through-labor camps) (Xianggang: Wenhua yishu chubanshe, 2008); Wu Ningkun, A Single Tear: A Family’s Persecution, Love, and Endurance in Communist China (New York: Atlanta Monthly Press, 1993); Wumingshi (Pu Ning), Red in Tooth and Claw: Twenty-Six Years in Chinese Communist Prisons (New York: Grove Press, 1994); Harry Wu, Bitter Winds: A Memoir of My Years in China’s Gulag (New York: J. Wiley, 1995); Yang Xiguang, Captive Spirits: Prisoners of the Cultural Revolution (Hong Kong, New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); fictionalized treatments include: Zhang Xianliang, Half a Man Is Woman, trans. Martha Avery (New York: W.W. Norton 1980); Yang Xianhui, Woman from Shanghai: Tales of Survival from a Chinese Labor Camp (New York: Pantheon, 2009); Er Tai Gao, In Search of My Homeland: A Memoir of a Chinese Labor Camp, trans. Robert Dorsett and David Pollard (New York: Ecco Press, 2009). 52. Shao, Zhongguo laogai, 521–524; Li, Huiyi, 42; CICRC, vol. 2, 167, 197–198, 221, 213, 263; Rigney, Four Years Red Hell, 165. 53. Tao, Xin zhongguo, 119–120, 123–127.

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Notes to Pages 281–289 54. CICRC, vol. 1, 47–48; 104, 106–107; CICRC, vol. 2, 221–222; Li, Huiyi, 30, 44; Tennien, No Secret Is Safe, 119; Rigney, Four Years Red Hell, 176. 55. CICRC, vol. 2, 202; Su, Shanbei nuzhiying, 11, 27, 33–35; Dries van Coillie, I Was Brainwashed in Peking (Netherlands: Boekdruk Industrie, 1969), 262–265. 56. CICRC, vol. 2, 220–221; Gu, “Laogai duiyuan,” 39; Huang, Now I Can Tell, 72. 57. Su, Shanbei nuzhiying, 10, 35; CICRC, vol. 2, 165–166, 221; Huang, Now I Can Tell, 40–41, 64; van Coillie, Brainwashed, 8, 19, 66; Clifford, Presence of My Enemies, 100, 117–118; Rickett, Prisoners of Liberation, 91–92, 158; Rigney, Four Years Red Hell, 30, 110. 58. Tao, Xin zhongguo, 131; Huang, Now I Can Tell, 70, 81, 104–105; CICRC, vol. 1, 54–56, 102–103, 106–107; CICRC, vol. 2, 181, 202–203, 261; Li, Huiyi, 30, 49, 74; van Coillie, Brainwashed, 9–10, 27, 69, 123, 178–179, 182, 226, 258; Tennien, No Secret Is Safe, 134, 146; Rigney, Four Years Red Hell, 50–52, 156. 59. Yu, “Devils into Men,” 24. 60. Gu, “Laogai duiyuan,” 40–46. 61. CICRC, vol. 2, 190, 261, 264–265, 270, 272, 402; Shen Lixing, Wo de tiechuang shenghuo (My life of iron windows) (Shanghai: Sanlian shudian, 1998), 13–14; Jia, Yuli yuwai, 178; Eric Chou, A Man Must Choose (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1963), 176, 186; van Coillie, Brainwashed, 74; Rigney, Four Years Red Hell, 37–39, 82, 168. 62. CICRC, vol. 2, 183, 199, 220, 405; CICRC, vol. 1, 113–114; van Coillie, Brainwashed, 183, 243; Clifford, Presence of My Enemies, 110; Shen, Tiechuang shenghuo, 108. 63. Tao, Xin zhongguo, 119; “ ‘Cenlaiming’ ”; ZPA 243.4/ 20, 1951–52; YSJGJZ, 100; CICRC, vol. 2, 402; Shao, Zhongguo laogai, 523. 64. Chou, Man Must Choose, 52; Tao, Xin zhongguo, 132; Su, Shanbei nuzhiying, 79–89. 65. Gu, “Laogai duiyuan,” 44; Shen, Tiechuang shenghuo, 10, 31, 52, 60, 64, 105, 113–116; Rigney, Four Years Red Hell, 31, 38–39; Jia, Yuli yuwai, 181, 188. 66. Shen, Tiechuang shenghuo, 39, 41, 64, 113; Tennien, No Secret Is Safe, 114. 67. Shen, Tiechuang shenghuo, 22, 31, 58–60, 63–66, 103, 108. 68. Rigney, Four Years Red Hell, 31–32, 92, 135; van Coillie, Brainwashed, 120; Gu, “Laogai duiyuan,” 43; Huang, Now I Can Tell, 104; Shen, Tiechuang shenghuo, 45. 69. CICRC, vol. 2, 264, 274; CICRC, vol. 1, 45, 61; van Coillie, Brainwashed, 304–305, 314. 70. Shen, Tiechuang shenghuo, 11, 45. 71. Xinrencun. 72. Gu, “Laogai duiyuan,” 2–5, 19–21, 30–32, 48; CICRC, vol. 1, 11, 48, 109; CICRC, vol. 2, 267–268, 274. 73. Liu Shaw-tong, Out of Mao’s China: The Inside Story of Present-Day China, trans. Jack Chia and Henry Walter (New York: Popular Library, 1960), 11–15, 20–22, 28–29, 39–40, 85; (original Chinese version) Liu Shaotong, Hongse zhongguo de pantu (Traitor of Red China) (Taibei: Zhonghua ribao congshu chuban weiyuanhui, 1951); F. Olin Stockwell, With God in Red China, 1953), 59; “Farewell to Revered Publisher,” Taipei Times, Feb. 24, 2000, http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/local/archives/2000/02/24/ 25365, accessed Mar. 31, 2012. 74. Liu, Out of Mao’s China, 87.

Notes to Pages 290–291 75. Kong, Making of a Vagabond, 6–10, 14–22, 28–30, 35, 39, 41, 45. 76. Eddy U, “The Making of Chinese Intellectuals: Representations and Organization in the Thought Reform Campaign,” China Quarterly 192 (2007): 971–989 (especially 987–989); Theodore, H. E. Chen, Thought Reform of the Chinese Intellectuals (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1960), 10–18; Franklin W. Houn, To Change a Nation: Propaganda and Indoctrination in Communist China (New York: Free Press, 1959), 55–61; Charles N. Li, The Bitter Sea: Coming of Age in China before Mao (New York: Harper Perennial, 2008), 207–212; Chou, Man Must Choose, 31, 68; for sample campaign texts, see Xia Zhengnong, Sixiang jiaoyu de yili: Ruhe zai xuexiao zhong kaizhan sixiang gaizao yundong (One kind of thought education: How to launch a thought reform movement in school) (Jinan: Shandong renmin chubanshe, 1952); Zhongguo xin minzhu zhuyi qingnian tuan xinan gongzuo weiyuanhui xuanchuan bu (Propaganda Department of the Southwest Working Committee of the China New Democracy youth group), Zenmo gaizao sixiang (How to reform thought) (Chongqing: Qingnian chubanshe, 1952); Huadong yiwu shenghuo she (East China medical life society), Yiwu gongzuozhe bixu jinxing sixiang gaizao (Medical workers must carry out thought reform) (Shanghai, 1952); also see Merle Goldman, China’s Intellectuals: Advise and Dissent (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981); Yu Fengzheng, Gaizao: Dangdai zhongguo zhishifenzi lishi mingyun sanbuqu zhi yi (Reform: One of the trilogy of historical fates of contemporary China’s intellectuals) (Zhengzhou: Henan renmin chubanshe, 2001). 77. Wu Lan, Ziwo piping shili (Cases of self-criticisms) (Xianggang: Wengong chubanshe, 1950); Xie Yong, “Sixiang gaizao yundong de qiyuan ji dui zhongguo zhishifenzi de yingxiang” (The origin of the thought reform campaign and its influence on China’s intellectuals), http://history.news.163.com/09/0629/02/5CUMT7JN00013FM4.html, accessed Mar. 24, 2012; Li Honglin, Zhongguo sixiang yundong shi (History of thought movements in China) (1949–1989) (Xianggang: Tiandi tushu youxian gongsi, 1999), 46–48; Zhongguo minzhu tongmeng xinan zongzhibu (China Democratic League southwest general branch), Xuanchuan xuexi ziliao disanji: Zhongshi zhengzhi xuexi, jiaqiang sixiang gaizao (Third issue materials for propoganda and study: Pay attention to political study, strengthen thought reform) (n.p., 1951); Zhou Jingwen, Fengbao shinian: Zhongguo hongse zhengquan de zhen mianmao (Ten years of storms: The true face of China’s red state power) (Xianggang: Shidai piping she, 1959); Lyman P. Van Slyke, Enemies and Friends: The United Front in Chinese Communist History (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1967); Qian Jiaju, “Cong lianhe zhengfu dao yi dang zhuanzhi” (From coalition government to one party dictatorship), Mingbao yuekan (Mingpao monthly), May 1989, 55–58. 78. Elizabeth J. Perry, “Studying Chinese Politics: Farewell to Revolution?” China Journal, no. 57 (Jan. 2007): 10–11; Chen Yung-fa, Making Revolution, 11; Chen, Thought Reform, 10–11, 30, 59; Frederick C. Teiwes, Politics and Purges in China: Rectification and the Decline of Party Norms 1950–1965, 2nd ed. (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1993), 27–30; Liu Shaoqi and Wu Yuzhang, Xuexi Mao Zedong sixiang: Gaizao congshu (Study Mao Zedong Thought: Reform collection) (n.p.: Gaizao shenghuo chubanshe, 1949); Long Qiang, Fayang dangnei minzhu he jiaqiang piping yu

379

380

Notes to Pages 292–297

79.

80. 81. 82. 83. 84.

85. 86.

ziwo piping (Promote democracy within the party and increase criticism and selfcriticism) (Guangzhou: Huanan renmin chubanshe, 1952); Yang Fu, Tantan piping yu ziwo piping (Discussing criticism and self-criticism) (Beijing: Qingnian chubanshe, 1952); Lun piping yu ziwo piping (On criticism and self-criticism) (Beijing: Xinhua shudian, 1950). Whyte, Small Groups, 13; Xiulu shiliao bianji weiyuanhui (Editorial committee for historical materials on building the highway), Kang-zang gonglu xiujian shiliao huibian (Collection of historical materials on the construction of the Kang-Zang Highway) (Neibu wenjian [internal document], 1955), 170, 438; Hutheesing, Great Peace, 175– 177; Gong Shangyu, Yinggong-shangyezhe de gaizao (The reform of salaried workers and merchants), vol. 2 (Beijing: Caizheng jingji chubanshe, 1955); Liu Shaomei (as told to Hao Min, Nie Bin recorded), Wo de sixiang shang de geming (The revolution in my thought) (n.p.: Hubei renmin chubanshe, 1957), 1–20; Kong, Making of a Vagabond, 54. Bai Yongda, Wangjiu suoyi (Trivial memories on the expectation of turning ninety) (Jinan: Shandong huabao chubanshe, 2007), 236. Hutheesing, Great Peace, 118. Xie, “Sixiang gaizao”; Gu Jiegang, Gu Jiegang riji (Diary of Gu Jiegang) vol. 7 (Taibei: Lian jing chuban shiye gufen youxian gongsi, 2007), 238–243, 254, 269. Chen Quan, “Mingfang” xuancui, di’er ce (Selections from the “airing out”), vol. 2, (Xianggang: Ziyou chubanshe, n.d.), 284. Lei preface to YJLJ, 3; Chiang Yin-en, “Yenching—the Rebirth of a University,” People’s China, 3.10 (May 16, 1951): 19–20; Yan, Zhongguo de fanzui, appendix list of Yan’s writings, 220–222; Xie, “Sixiang gaizao”; Xu Jialu, “Mianhuai Yan Jingyue xiansheng” (Recalling the memory of Mr. Yan Jingyue), Minzhu (Democracy), no. 7 (2005): 4–6; Chu, “Xianqu Jingyue.” Hu, “SJYSZGZ,” 18–20; Ying, YGZJMS, 73–80. Hu returned to his hometown in the 1980s. Gu, “Laogai duiyuan,” 55, 66.

conclusion 1. Mao Zedong, “Jiejian sinuo de tanhua” (Visiting with Edgar Snow) (1961), cited in Xin, Mao Zedong, 116; Frank Dikötter, Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958–62 (London: Bloomsbury, 2010), 287–291; Anhui sifa zhi; Zheng Xin, “Gansu yuzheng guanli gongzuo de fazhan yu zhanwang” (Development and prospects for Gansu prison administration management work), in Xia and Zhu, ZJZBYW, 242; “Bingtuan jianyu fazhan,” 113; Shen, Tiechuang shenghuo, 32–35, 163– 164, 168–169, 176; Jia, Yuli yuwai, 158–159, 164–165, 176; Wu, A Single Tear, 100; Zhang, Grass Soup, 121, 154, 184; Wu, Bitter Winds, 101–102; YSJGJZ, 101; Lai Ying, The ThirtySixth Way: The Story of a Young Woman Who Escaped from Red China, trans., adapt., and ed. Edward Behr and Sydney Liu (Garden City: Doubleday, 1969), 48, 88–90; Xu, Chongchu laogaiying, 28–29; Shao, Zhongguo laogai, 523; “ ‘Cenlaiming.’ ” 2. Yin, Dianyu, 1.

Notes to Pages 302–308 3. Garon, Molding Japanese Minds, 6–10. 4. Gao, “ ‘Xinren,’ ” 179. 5. Jin Yuan, Yue Maohua, Xu Zhangrun, eds., Cong zhanzheng kuangren dao pengyou: Gaizao riben zhanfan de chenggong zhi lu (From war maniacs to friends: The successful route to the reform of Japanese war criminals) (Beijing: Qunzhong chubanshe, 1986), 5–6, 36–39, 45; Tao, Xin zhongguo, 117, 128–129, 134–137; Fyfield, Re-Educating, 13–21, 38, 53, 62, 74–79, 83; also see Liang, “Xin zhongguo laodong gaizao”; People’s China, July 14, 1956. 6. Hunter, Brainwashing in Red China; Snow, Other Side of the River, 374–375. 7. Fyfield, Re-Educating, 12, 24, 52; Xiao Chong, Mao Zedong qindian de yibailingba ming zhanfan de guisu (The destination of Mao Zedong’s 108 hand-picked war criminals) (Xianggang: Xiafei’er chuban youxian gongsi, 2003), 374–385. 8. Li, Huiyi, 92. 9. Ezra Vogel, Deng Xiaoping and the Tranformation of China (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011), 49–51, 60–61. 10. Gao, “ ‘Xinren,’ ” 182–184. 11. Mu, Zhou Enlai, 383; He, Cong Yan’an, vol. 2, 477–519; Chen, Wode wenge suiyue, 17; (1958–76 laogai) Mao, Shanghai nongchang; Anhui sifazhi; Wang, “Xin zhongguo jiaoyu gaizao,” 73; Shen, Tiechuang shenghuo, 187, 192–193, 197; “Bingtuan jianyu fazhan,” 114; Yang, “Fujian jianyu,” 120; Zhang Shurong, “Hebei sheng jianyu xitong zuzhi guanli shezhi yange” (The course of the arrangement of Hebei Province’s prison system organizational management), in Xia and Zhu, ZJZBYW, 128; “ ‘Cenlaiming.’ ” 12. Li, Zhongguo sixiang, 263–412. 13. Tianlong Yu, In the Name of Morality: Character Education and Political Control (New York: Peter Lang, 2004), 10–15. 14. Jiangsu sheng laogai gongzuo ju, Jiangsu wenhua yishu congshu bianjibu (The Jiangsu Province reform-through-labor work office and the Jiangsu cultural arts series editorial department), Zuotian, jintian, mingtian: Linggui zai daqiang nei fusu (Yesterday, today, tomorrow: Resuscitating the spirits from inside the big wall) (Zhenjiang: Jiangsu wenyi chubanshe, 1992), 9, 12. 15. Li Zhongxiao, Jianyu zhi lu: Wo zhidao de zhongguo jianyu (Prison tour: The Chinese prisons I know) (Beijing: Zhongguo wenlian chubanshe, 2004), 29.

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INDEX

abortion, 88 adultery, 88, 94 Aesop’s Fables, 54 Ai Siqi, 175 air raids, 233 Aizenberg, A., 175 Alco, Julian H., 259 Amitabha Buddha, 117, 129, 132, 140, 154, 156, Amitabha Sutra, 140, 154 amnesty, 34, 94, 96, 111, 138, 181, 217–218, 260, 263 An E, 186 An Lin, 269–270 An Qishan, 153 Analects of Confucius, 198 Ancha, 137–138 Andong, 262 Anhui, 24, 47, 102, 177, 191, 193, 196–198, 218, 230, 231, 259, 276, 278, 294 Anhui No. 1 Prison, 31, 153 Anhui No. 2 Prison, 223, 227 Anhui Self-Examination Institute, 201–202, 206 Annam, 68 Anqing, 153 Anti-Japanese Resistance University, 231, 249 Anti-Rightist Campaign, 294

Anti-Secret Society, 274 Ao Zhenxiang, 102 A.P.C. Pills, 284 arson, 218 assize, 6, 138 Auburn Prison, 14, 25 Austria, 12, 25 Bai Mansion, 237–238, 261 Bai Yongda, 292 Bancang Village, 225 Bandit Suppression Law, 35 Bao Junfu (Yang Dengying), 186–187, 203, 230–231, 239, 256, 263, 273–274, 294, 308 Bao’an, 272 Baoding, 11, 19, 31, 101, 214, 216 baojia, 229; village baojia chiefs, 241 Baoshan Airport, 224 Baotou, 183 bare-stick (guanggun), 62 Battle of Shanghai (1932), 168 Battle of Shanghai (1937), 218, 224, 232 Baumler, Alan, 178 Baxianqiao YMCA, 219 beggars, 11, 25, 88, 89, 267–268, 273, 291 Beijing (Beiping), 4, 7, 9, 11, 14, 18–19, 24–27, 29–31, 34, 43, 47–51, 55, 57, 59–63, 67, 70–71, 85, 88, 91–94, 97, 99, 115, 124–127, 130, 133, 139, 141–142, 151,

383

384

Index Beijing (Beiping) (Continued) 153, 158, 178–179, 197, 214, 222, 228, 232, 243, 261, 268–270, 272, 277, 281, 289, 292, 294–295, 308 Beijing Academy of Politics and Law, 294 Beijing Municipal Locally-Administered State Qinghe Farm (Qinghe Prison Farm), 269–270, 272, 280, 283 Beijing No. 1 Prison, 6, 7, 14, 25, 27, 29, 31–35, 45–46, 51–52, 57–58, 60, 70–72, 74, 88–89, 93, 97, 99–100, 104, 109–115, 125, 127, 144–145, 153, 203, 222 Beijing No. 1 Prison Periodical, 58–59 Beijing No. 2 Prison, 30, 46, 55, 57, 74, 77–78, 104, 111–113, 127, 151 Beijing No. 3 Prison, 30, 101 Beijing Party Committee, 269 Beijing Reform School, 142 Beijing University, 154, 203, 243, 256, 289 Beiyang government, 43, 61, 93, 124, 176, 222, 306 Beiyang University, 95 Beloved China, 213 Bentham, Jeremy, 14–15 beriberi, 99, 162, 172, 184, 222, 268, 284 bingtuan (Military Production and Constructions Corps), 278 Blue Shirts, 230, 232, 252 Bo Gu, 218 Bo Xiyu, 263 Board of Punishments, 19, 24, 78, 93 Board of Punishments Jail, 14, 125 Bonger, Willem A., 85 Book of Changes (Yijing), 20 Book of History (Shijing), 20 Border Area Resist Japan Democratic Government, 246 Borneo, 290 Boxer War (1900), 9, 19, 24 brainwashing (xinao), 1, 229, 313 brawling, 92 bribery, 79, 106, 121, 162, 176 British, 9, 11, 15, 59, 186, 219, 225–227, 290, 295

British India, 188 Brussels, 268 Buddha’s Birthday, 134 Buddhification (fo hua) 123, 141, 144, 148, 151, 154–158, 160 Buddhism/Buddhist, 13, 40, 48–56, 59, 72, 82, 96, 108–109, 115–118, 123–160, 163, 169–170, 173, 184–185, 195, 210, 219, 223, 232–234, 257, 263–264, 299, 301 Buddhist Children’s Education Center, 219 Buddhist lay associations, 55, 128, 139, 142, 148, 159, 301 Buddhist lay elites, 3, 131, 133, 140, 142, 144, 148, 158 Buddhist monks, 3, 17, 88, 116, 124–126, 129, 132–133, 135, 137, 140, 142, 144–146, 148, 159, 250, 257, 273, 301 Buddhist Preaching Cultivation Bureau, 124 Buddhist texts, 39, 53–54, 59, 108, 126, 128–129, 139–140, 142, 145, 151–152, 157–158 bullying, 100, 101, 162, 208, 252–253, 283 Burma, 68 cage-heads (longtou), 100–102, 169, 177, 192, 248, 257, 282, 304 Cai Hesen, 44 Cai Yuanpei, 125 Cairo Hotel, 295 California State Prison system, 259 Camel Xiang Zi, 115 Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries (1951–52), 273–274 canine units, 184 Cao Yuanqing, 106 Caohejing, 42, 146, 156, 180, 221 Caohou village, 225 Caolanzi, 197 Capital Education Bureau, 173 Capital High Court, 255 capital punishment, 9–10. See also execution

Index Capital Self-Examination Institute, 197, 200, 203, 218, 230 cause and effect (yinguo), 50, 51, 53–54, 109, 133, 140, 143, 145, 150–152, 157, 234 CC Clique, 230, 252 CCP East China Bureau, 266 CCP Northwest Bureau, 262 CCP Social Bureau, 251 CCP Traitor Elimination Bureau, 251 Central Bank, 263 Central Military Prison, 209–211, 214, 218 Central Party Academy, 199 Central Police Officers School, 259 Central Popular Movements Executive Committee, 195 Central Propaganda Committee, 200 Chahar, 182, 259 Changsha, 44, 167, 196–197 Changsha Local Court Detention Center, 167 Changshu, 230, 261 Changzhou, 133, 182 charity/charitable, 55, 89, 91, 125–126, 128, 147–149, 157, 181–182, 184–185, 301 Chen, Janet, 268 Chen Cheng, 240 Chen Deji, 259 Chen Duxiu, 28, 189–190 Chen Fumin, 182–183 Chen Geng, 186, 274 Chen Gongbo, 195, 226, 256 Chen Guofu, 183, 242 Chen Hong, 46–47, 55, 74, 77, 80–81, 151 Chen Hongmou, 53 Chen Huanzhang, 49 Chen Junsan, 159 Chen Lifu, 186, 200 Chen Mingshu, 263, 295 Chen Tan, 204, 209 Chen Xiangming, 221 Chen Xunzheng, 131 Chen Yi, 266

Chen Youtian, 47, 54 Chen Yuansheng, 263 Chen Yung-fa, 248, 252, 291 Chen Yunqi, 199 Chen Zhao, 158 Chen Zhixi, 84–87, 91–92, 96, 99, 102, 105–109, 114, 115–121, 151, 163, 204, 243–244, 249 Chengdu, 272, 281 Chenghan Primary School, 207 Chengji, 140 China Buddhist Association, 125 China Critic, The, 193 China Merchants Steam Company, 265 China’s Destiny, 242 Chinese Association for Promoting Democracy (CAPD), 261 Chinese Communist Party (CCP), 4, 28, 41, 73, 101–103, 105–106, 124, 153, 161–164, 166–167, 174–175, 186–197, 199–200, 202–206, 208–214, 217–219, 221, 229–232, 237–254, 256–257, 260–264, 266–269, 272–275, 278–279, 281–286, 288–290, 292, 294–295, 300–305, 307–308 Chinese Democratic League, 303 Chinese League for the Protection of Civil Rights, 189, 193, 211 Chinese medicine, 64, 164 Chinese New Year, 89, 92 Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), 270, 281, 294 Chinese traitors (hanjian), 244, 249, 256, 260, 263 Chongming, 47 Chongqing, 218, 219, 230, 232–234, 236–240, 255, 258, 302 Chongqing Self-Examination Institute, 239 Christian/Christianity, 9, 26, 39–40, 47–48, 50, 52, 54, 56, 63, 72, 74, 79, 84, 124, 126–127, 146, 151, 173, 184–185, 210, 251, 257, 264, 301 Citizens Required Reading, 60

385

386

Index civic morality (gongde), 66–68 civics, 32, 47, 54, 58, 60, 63, 67–69, 73, 120, 145, 157, 170, 174, 233, 234, 299 Civil Affairs Bureau, 266–267, 272, 277 Civil Affairs Bureau Reformatories, 267 “clarifying punishments to assist education” (mingxing bijiao), 20–21 collaborators, 228, 239–240, 244, 255–257, 263, 266, 275, 305 Collected Writings of Master Yinguang, The, 132, 142, 144, 152 collective/choral singing, 32, 63, 68, 72–73, 134, 170, 173, 190–191, 240, 281 Comintern, 189 Commercial Press, 60, 142 common knowledge (changshi), 59–60 Commoner Education Movement (pingmin jiaoyu yundong), 58–59 Communist Youth League, 101 Complete works of Anshi (Anshi quanshu), 53, 152 concubine/concubinage, 65, 93, 180, 212, 218 Confucian, 8, 17, 19–20, 22–23, 28, 32–33, 38–40, 44–47, 49–52, 54–56, 60, 62–63, 65–66, 68, 76–77, 82, 93–94, 108, 120–121, 127–128, 130–131, 134–136, 138, 143, 149–150, 157, 170, 196, 223, 229, 241, 297–299 Confucian classics, 20, 52, 63, 108, 119, 150, 174 Confucian statecraft, 10–12, 20, 44, 49, 62, 89 Confucius, 17, 198 Congregationalists, 84 conjugal visits, 100 convict education center, 241 convict work training house (zuifan xiyisuo), 25, 32 corruption, 11, 23, 34, 64, 77, 82, 92, 97–99, 101–103, 105–107, 113–114, 120–121, 135, 137, 167, 169, 176–181, 184, 192–193, 202, 220–223, 246, 258, 262, 271, 293, 299–301

counterrevolutionary, 161, 187–188, 190–191, 193, 195, 199, 202, 245, 270, 273–276, 293, 303 county jails, 6, 54, 73, 104, 129, 131–132, 136, 139–141, 143–145, 151, 159, 164, 167, 177, 193, 217, 245 county magistrate, 6, 49, 94, 136, 138, 145–146, 158 crime, 8, 12, 14, 16–18, 20, 26, 30, 33, 37, 42–43, 53, 55, 62–65, 71, 75–76, 78–79, 82, 85–86, 89–95, 97, 106, 108–109, 111, 117, 129–131, 140, 152, 165, 173, 178, 187–188, 194, 198, 200–202, 204, 224–225, 233–235, 256, 258–259, 268, 274–275, 279, 299 criminals, 8, 15–16, 20–23, 25–26, 32–34, 36–38, 41, 53, 69, 76, 79, 88–93, 107, 111, 123, 125, 128, 135, 143–144, 150, 152, 156, 168, 172, 185, 221, 231, 244, 257, 259, 263, 265, 266, 267, 280, 288, 294, 299, 303 criminology/criminologist, 14, 16, 61, 62, 70, 85, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 97, 100, 109, 124, 147, 165, 168, 172, 219, 220, 301 Cultural Revolution, 204, 294, 306–308 Dai Hongci, 13, Dai Li, 218, 230, 237 Daoist/Daoism, 55, 88, 128, 178, 195, 273 Dashengguan Prisoner Farm, 225, 235 Dazhongzhen, 267 December 9th Movement, 211 Democracy, 261 Deng Jichang, 146–148 Deng Xiaoping, 306 Deng Zhongxia, 188 Detention Centers (kanshousuo), 35, 97, 167, 191, 212, 217, 238, 241 Diamond Sutra, 108, 154 Dikötter, Frank, 3, 30, 92, 246 Ding Fubao, 143, 150 Ding Mocun, 256 Ding Quanfa, 95–96 Dinghai County, 128, 131, 137–139, 146, 263

Index Dinghai County Jail, 132–134, 137–139, 142, 144, 152 diphtheria, 98 divorce, 53, 80, 91, 286 “dog beating” squads, 204 Dong Kang, 14, 20, 188, 222 Dongtai County, 265–266 Drug Offender Work Training Brigades (yanfan xilaodui), 184 Drug Prohibition Committee, 182 drug user workshops, 184 drugs, 64, 88–89, 92–93, 95, 111, 166, 174–185, 189, 209–210, 217, 226, 235, 241–242, 257, 260, 262–264, 266, 273, 274, 288, 295, 302–303 drug-suppression centers, 176, 179, 260 drug-suppression hospitals, 182 Du Yuesheng, 178 Du Zhongyuan, 189 Duan Qirui, 34, 96, 111 Duan Yunpeng, 268 dysentery, 179, 184 East China District Huai River Control Reform-Through-Labor Brigade, 278 Eastern Miscellany, 12, 14 Eastern Orthodox, 127 Eastern Penitentiary, 14, 25 Egypt, 68 Eighth Route Army, 231, 246 Ellwood, Charles A., 85 Elmira Reformatory, 14, 25–26 Emergency Law for the Suppression of Crimes that Endanger the Republic, 187–188 Engels, Friedrich, 251 Enshi, 240 escapes, 48, 102, 104, 113, 130, 131, 137, 164, 216, 249, 257, 263, 265, 270, 285, 288, 295, 297 Essentials of the Jade and Gold Rules, 117, 120 Europe/European, 1, 8, 11–16, 22, 25, 56, 58–60, 68, 89, 100, 126, 128, 172, 258

examinations, 24, 44, 46, 58, 139, 162, 192, 196, 200, 208, 234, 247, 250, 256, 259 execution, 2, 8, 10, 22, 27, 35, 137–138, 145, 156, 162–163, 186, 213, 238, 244, 246, 252, 260–262, 273–275, 286, 295, 309. See also capital punishment exhortations and admonitions, 53, 54, 143. See also morality books extraterritorial rights, 9, 13, 19 extraterritoriality, 9, 10, 27, 28, 58, 59, 88, 165, 166, 192, 225, 299 factories, 90, 93, 169, 241, 255, 265, 277, 291–292, 297 family instructions, 53, 54, 107 Fan Qi, 180 Fancheng, 145 Fang Zhenfu, 222 Fang Zhimin, 212–213 Fayu Monastery, 132 February 28 Incident (1947), 257 Fei Xiaotong, 261, 290 Feng Chao, 151 Feng Lanting, 270 Feng Qinzai, 295 Feng Xuefeng, 238 Feng Youlan, 290 Feng Yuxiang, 47, 63, 70 Fengtian, 24, 25, 46 Fengtian No. 1 Prison, 92, 127 Fengxiang, 234 Fengyang, 141 Fenyang, 84 Fifth War Zone Command, 240 Fifty-third Army, 215 fight/fighting, 64, 92, 100, 104, 129 filial piety, 39, 55, 79–83, 94, 108, 118, 120, 150, 170, 195, 284, 299 films/movies, 1, 40, 72, 96, 150, 173–174, 210, 220, 229, 237–238, 259, 261, 266–267, 288, 290 fines, 9, 31, 35, 88, 175, 178, 244 First Frost Day, 134

387

388

Index First National Judicial Conference (1950), 270 Fitzgerald, John, 63 Five Anti Campaign, 274 Five Varieties of Posthumous Instructions (Wuzhong yigui), 53 “Foolish Old Man Who Moved the Mountain, The,” 232 forcible abduction (lüeyou), 79, 92–93 Foucault, Michel / Foucaultian, 30, 56, 75, 203 Four Books, 108 Four Forked River (Sichahe), 266–267 Fragrant Hills, 142 Franklin, Benjamin, 63 fraud, 88, 102, 111, 176 French Concession Mixed Court, 166 French/France, 11, 15, 19, 25, 59, 166, 173, 220 Friday Dinner Party Association, 219 Fu Xiao’an, 222 Fu Zuoyi, 269 Fujian, 34, 91, 138, 197, 238, 277 funerals, 92, 161 Fushun Prison, 280 Fuyang County, 212 Fuyin Hospital, 208 Fuzhou, 53 gambling, 64, 91, 100, 174, 180, 220, 257, 264 ganhua, 3, 6, 7, 12, 16, 20, 21, 22, 23, 26, 34, 36–41, 52, 114, 130, 140, 142, 146, 151, 166, 168, 184, 199, 229, 234, 239, 240, 242, 245, 246, 247, 252, 258, 264, 265, 292, 297, 308. See also reformation Gansu, 182, 235, 278 Ganzhou, 174 Gao Hua, 3, 251–252, 303, 306 Gao Mingfu, 106 Gao Tao, 134 Gao Weijin, 266 Gao Wu, 104 Gaoxiong, 264

Gaoyou County, 261, 267 Garon, Sheldon, 302 Gate of Fairness, The, 173 Gatu, Dagfinn, 243 Ge Zhaoguang, 54–56 General Amnesty (1925), 36, 111 German/Germany, 15, 16, 25, 32, 172, 188, 238 ghosts and spirits, 49, 50, 51, 53, 55, 57, 140, 150, 223 Gillin, John L., 85 Gong Yunji, 203 Goodman, David, 243 Grand Canal, 267 grave robbing, 88 Great Compassion Chant, 140 Great Leap Forward, 297, 307 Great Learning, The (Daxue), 23, 56, 118, 120, 150 Great Sound, The, 208 Great Wall, 182, 232 Greater Third Branch River, 269 Green Gang, 92, 95, 178, 244 Griffin, Patricia, 246 Gu Jiegang, 293, 304 Gu Shunzhang, 187 Gu Zhenglun, 185 Guan Jiongzhi, 143, 146, 148–50 Guangdong, 27, 91, 98, 152, 162, 197, 198, 256, 257, 281, 284 Guangdong Self-Examination Institute, 197 Guanghua County, 240 Guangxi, 281 Guangxu Emperor, 6 Guangzhou, 20, 25, 40, 196, 278, 284, 295 Guanyin, 125, 128 guarantor release (baoshi), 176–177, 179, 181, 184–185, 208, 227, 232, 234, 245, 260, 263 guards, 3, 6, 29–30, 45, 61, 63, 75, 79, 100–104, 106, 114, 133, 153, 162–163, 167, 172, 176–177, 180–181, 190–192, 194, 203, 207–208, 211, 214– 217, 221–222, 225, 237,

Index 263, 265, 268–270, 276, 277, 282, 285, 295–296 guerrilla warfare, 217, 227, 229–231, 238, 240, 243, 245–247, 254, 260, 262, 271–272, 277, 300 Guiyang, 154, 236, 238 Guizhou, 236, 238, 259 Guo Ganglin, 203 Han dynasty, 20 Han River, 240 Han Wudi, 118 handicrafts, 31, 89, 245, 280 Hangzhou, 33, 96, 128, 132–133, 138–139, 146, 153, 161–163, 166, 189, 196–197, 213, 223, 263 Hankou, 231, 233 Hankou Military Prison, 213 Hao Detang, 232 Harbin, 262 He County, 218 He Fang, 249–252, 254, 261–262, 308 Heart Sutra, 140 Hebei, 198, 214, 217, 218, 243, 248, 256, 257, 260, 261, 269, 281. See also Zhili Hebei No. 1 Prison, 182 Hebei No. 3 Prison, 101, 104 Hebei No. 4 Prison, 214 Hefei County Jail, 193 Hefei Prison, 102 Heilongjiang, 182, 278 Henan, 196, 197, 199, 240, 243, 266 Henan Self-Examination Institute, 199, 206, 230 Henan-Hubei Branch Wartime Youth Instruction Brigade, 240 herbal medication, 98, 164 heroin, 178, 185 Hershatter, Gail, 93 Hexi County, 268 High King Sutra, 140 Himalayas, 291 Historical Documents Collection (Wenshi ziliao), 306

homosexuality, 100 Hong Kong, 1, 26–27, 289, 295 Hongkou District, 219 Hozumi Nobushige, 15 Hsiung, Ping-chen, 80 Hu Bing, 231–232 Hu Junhe, 266 Hu Qipeng, 172, 175 Hu Renqing, 184 Hu Shi, 35, 59 Hu Yimin, 95, 161–162, 164, 166, 168–169, 182, 186–187, 190, 196, 209–213, 218–219, 225, 255–258, 263, 295 Hu Zhinong, 206 Hu Ziying, 213 Huai River, 278 Huaiyin, 277 Huang, Philip, 92–93 Huang Hanzhi, 129–131, 136–137, 142, 146, 149 Huang Jinglin, 194 Huang Kai, 195–196, 199, 206, 230 Huang Xuzhou, 266 Huang Yaqiang, 220, 275 Huang Yuede, 264 Huang Zunxian, 72 Huanggang County, 291 Huangpu Military Academy, 161 Huangpu River, 265 Huanren, 262 Huaqing Springs, 249 Hubei, 11, 47, 79, 139, 197, 231, 240, 259, 281, 291 Hubei Expeditionary Police Brigade, 240 Hubei No. 1 Prison, 233 Hubei No. 2 Prison, 233 Hubei Youth Prison, 221 Huizhou, 263 Hulianggang, 264 human trafficking / trafficking brokers, 48, 65, 90–93, 178 Hunan, 11, 44–45, 131, 139, 167, 191, 197, 240, 259, 263, 281 Hunan Public Law School, 167

389

390

Index Hunan Self-Examination Institute, 197, 239 hunger, 98, 105, 135, 137, 238, 249, 285, hunger strike, 102, 103, 106, 179, 190–194, 197, 207, 209, 217–218, 257, 270, 301 Huzhou, 19, 141 hygiene, 47, 55, 59, 64, 66, 68, 75, 143, 170, 171, 172, 177, 183, 197, 199, 210, 233, 235, 242, 247, 258, 284 illicit consensual sex, 88, 92 Imperial Capital Law School, 14 imperialists, 9, 10, 13, 15, 19, 23, 62, 64, 68, 69, 170, 211, 214 India, 68, 188, 226, 292 individualized treatment, 16, 26, 33, 76, 247 injury-assault, 88, 91, 92, 216, 257 inmates, 3, 11, 14, 16–17, 29–31, 33, 35–36, 42–44, 52–53, 55, 57–61, 63–66, 69–82, 84, 86–89, 91, 94–106, 109–112, 114–115, 118–119, 122, 129–137, 139–141, 147, 152, 155, 162–164, 167–169, 171, 173, 175–180, 182–184, 189–191, 195, 197–207, 209, 211–212, 214–227, 230–241, 247–250, 252, 256–265, 267–270, 276–283, 285–288, 300–304, 307–308 Inner Mongolia, 214, 278 intellectuals, 45, 58–59, 62–63, 123, 144, 165, 175, 190, 205, 208, 211, 219, 236, 250, 261–262, 281, 286, 290–291, 304 International Commission Against Concentration Camp Practices, 268 International Commission on Extraterritoriality in China, 28, 59 International Prison Congress: Eighth International Prison Congress, 24; Fifth International Prison Congress, 15; Seventh International Prison Congress, 12 Internationale, The, 191 Introduction to the Three Principles of the People, 156, 170

Italy, 16, 25, 188 Ivanhoe, P. J., 119 Japan-China Buddhist Association, 223 Japan/Japanese: Imperial Japanese Central China Area Army, 218; Kenpeitai, 228; Meiji, 11, 13–15, 18, 32, 33, 37, 39, 72, 125, 298; Navy, 226; prison, 8, 12–18, 49, 217; rural pacification campaigns, 224, 231 Ji Xian, 179–180 Jia Liaotou, 6–9, 111, 113, 117, 244 Jia Qihua, 215–216 Jiading, 8, 13, 261 Jian Yujie, 149 Jiang Bocheng, 161 Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai-shek), 153, 161, 164–166, 172, 186, 209, 211–214, 217–221, 230, 233–234, 236, 240, 242, 255, 263, 283, 297, 302 Jiang Jingguo (Chiang Ching-kuo), 240–241, 260, 303 Jiang Kanghu, 255, 258 Jiangnan, 46, 147, 152, 165 Jiangshan, 239 Jiangsu, 3–4, 8, 37, 46–48, 54, 57, 60, 67, 71–73, 88, 90–92, 99–100, 123–124, 127, 130, 132, 138, 141, 144–147, 149, 151–152, 157–158, 160, 163, 165, 167–171, 181, 183–189, 191, 194, 196–198, 207, 211, 217–218, 221, 230–231, 242, 257, 260–261, 263, 265–266, 268, 277, 288, 301, 303 Jiangsu Chief High Procurator, 113 Jiangsu Chief Procurator 147–148 Jiangsu Experimental District, 231 Jiangsu High Court, 156, 160, 169, 179, 191, 198 Jiangsu High Procurate, 130 Jiangsu Military Prison, 189, 217, 218 Jiangsu No. 1 Normal School, 155 Jiangsu No. 1 Prison, 45, 47, 71, 88, 92, 95, 97–98, 100, 102, 104–105, 111–112, 114, 146, 152, 155, 159, 162, 164, 167, 171–172, 181, 184, 189, 194, 203, 224, 255, 257, 308

Index Jiangsu No. 2 Branch Prison, 47, 104, 167, 171, 177, 180 Jiangsu No. 2 Prison, 42, 45, 47–48, 53, 60–61, 64, 69, 71–72, 76–77, 95, 97, 99–100, 102–103, 105, 112, 123, 145–147, 152–154, 156, 160, 164, 167, 171, 176, 179, 181–182, 184, 189, 191, 193, 195, 221, 259 Jiangsu No. 3 Branch Prison, 146, 151, 191, 208, 224 Jiangsu No. 3 Prison, 31–32, 46–47, 53–54, 71, 87–88, 100, 103, 112–113, 146, 151, 169, 173, 177–178, 184, 189, 224 Jiangsu No. 4 Prison, 71, 88, 102, 104, 146, 151, 167–168, 171, 182, 194, 222–224 Jiangsu No. 5 Prison, 177, 184, 221, 224 Jiangsu No. 6 Prison, 177 Jiangsu Peace Preservation Command, 260 Jiangsu Prison Reformation Association, 145–148, 159 Jiangsu Provincial Procurate, 102 Jiangsu Reformatory, 196, Jiangsu Self-Examination Institute, 197–199, 202, 207–208 Jiangsu Shanghai 2nd Special District Prison, 112, 158, 166, 172, 182, 210 Jiangsu 1st Special District Prison, 180 Jiangsu-Zhejiang War, 61 Jiangxi, 128, 174, 197–198, 212, 238, 240–241, 263, 293, 303, 306 Jiangxi No. 2 Prison, 46, 235 Jiangxi Provincial Party Committee, 276 Jiangxi Soviet, 174, 188, 245 Jiangxi Youth Residential Instruction Center, 240 Jiangyin, 207–208 Jianyang County, 238 jiaohua (transformation through education), 20, 33–34, 38–40, 50, 54–56, 64–65, 67, 76, 82, 135, 145, 170, 223, 228, 233, 242, 259, 299 jiaohua moralism, 64, 67, 82, 145 Jiashan, 138–139 Jiaxing, 139

Jiayi, 264 Jilin, 182, 262 Ji-Lu-Yu Base Area, 243, 251 Jin Baiyong, 202 Jin Ding, 169 Jin Zhaoluan, 129, 142–143 Jinan, 177, 198–199, 221, 268 Jin-Cha-Ji Base Area, 245–249 Jing’an, 125 Jinhua, 255 Jiujiang, 128 Ju’de, 144 Judicial Yuan, 187 Juexian, 124–125, 158 Juntong (the Military Affairs Commission Bureau of Investigation and Statistics), 218, 230, 237–240, 252, 270 Kang Fengshan, 102 Kang Sheng, 250–253, 304, 307 Kang Wu’er, 106 Kang Youwei, 49, 72, 125 Kantogun, 214 karma/karmic, 39, 50–52, 125, 128–129, 136, 138, 140–143, 148, 150, 152, 158–159 Katz, Paul, 51 Ke Qingshi, 274 kidnapping, 88, 91, 93, 104, 168 KMT Central Training Department, 197, 199–200, 203 knowledge education (jiaoyu), 16, 32, 58 Kong, Alfred (Yeo-leong), 290, 292 Korea, 68, 262 Korean War, 2, 272–273 Kowloon, 295 Kropotkin, 190 Ku Hak-chung, 278, 284, 287–288 Kuandian, 262 Kuhn, Philip A., 21 Kunming, 281, 290, 292 labor camp, 182–183, 236–237, 253, 259–260, 263, 267, 272, 275–276, 284, 294–295, 308

391

392

Index Land Reform Campaign, 272, 274 Lantern Festival, 92 Lanzhou, 239 Lao Naixuan, 19 Lao She, 35, 115 Lao Zi, 48 laundry, 88–89 lay devotee, 127–129, 132, 139, 143, 145–149, 152, 155, 159, 257 Lean, Eugenia, 80, 94 ledgers of merit and demerit, 53, 77, 118, 137 Legal Critic, The, 34, 159 Legal Reform Commission (Republic), 27 Legal Revision Commission, 10–11, 19, 94 Legalist, 20 leg-irons, 30–31, 78, 102, 106, 115, 209, 283–284 Legislation Drafting Bureau, 139 Lei Jieqiong, 219, 261 Lei Zhongjiang, 175 Lenin, 175, 190, 251, Leninist, 124, 162, 175, 190, 201, 210, 241, 244, 248, 251, 281, 291, 298, 302, 304, 307 Lhasa, 291 Li Bai, 108 Li Baiying, 272, 275 Li Da, 175 Li Dazhao, 163 Li Dingyu, 133, 139 Li Honglin, 308 Li Jianhua, 109 Li Junji, 103 Li Kenong, 252 Li San (“Li the Swallow”), 91, 268 Li Shengwu, 268 Li Wanfu, 113 Li Wei, 227 Li Weicai, 47, 172, 174 Li Xizhong, 167–169, 171–172, 174, 194 Li Yimin, 105, 153–154, 164, 209 Li Yuwen, 102 Li Zhenquan, 215–217 Li Zhimin, 105

Li Zun, 209 Lian Desheng, 186 Lian Luotuo, 115 Liang Gongchen, 53 Liang Hongzhi, 222 Liang Jinhan, 30, 78, 113, 165 Liang Qichao, 36, 38, 44, 72, 125 Lianxi, 132 Liao Weifan, 203 Liaoming, 132 Liaoning No. 1 Prison, 259 lice, 176 Lifton, Robert Jay, 1–2 Lin Boqu, 245 Lin Qirui, 201 Lin Yutang, 236–238 Lin’an, 141 Lin’an County Jail, 141 Ling Fupeng, 11–12, 20 Ling Zhaokan, 240 Lintong, 249 literacy, 32, 57, 60, 61, 67, 73, 87, 168, 169, 195, 247, 260; training, 32, 59, 61, 110, 168, 200, 212, 247 lithography, 31, 96, 202 Liu Aiqun, 191–192 Liu Bolong, 161 Liu Fuchun, 232 Liu Kunyi, 9–10, 22 Liu Le, 231 Liu Qingyu, 90 Liu Quanyun, 180–181 Liu Shaomei, 291–292 Liu Shaoqi, 250, 252, 261 Liu Shaotong, 289 Liu Shengquan, 180–181 Liu Yaozhen, 89, 91, 93 Liu Yun, 195–196, 199 Liu Yuwen, 215–216 Liu Yuxin, 214–216 Liuhua Bridge, 295 Liuyang, 44 London, 26 London School of Economics, 211

Index Long March, 188 Long Shu’s Pure Land Scripture, 152 Longhua Garrison Command Jail, 163, 192 Longxing Monastery, 133 loudspeaker broadcast system, 158, 173, 210, 274 Lower Yangzi, 4, 127, 153, 160, 218, 222, 224, 228, 303 Loyal and Patriotic National Salvation Army, 230 Lu Chaoran, 47, 72 Lu Fenglai, 269–270 Lu Lu, 230 Lu Renji, 95 Lu Xun, 28, 35, 189, 202, 207, 210–211, 213, 219, 256, 301 Lugou Bridge Incident, 217, 232 Luo Liliang, 163 Luo Ruiqing, 270, 273, 276, 280, 281, 285, 308 Luo Shiyi, 212 Luo Wengan, 26–27, 35, 97, 100, 166, 193 Ma A’san, 221 Ma Lin, 105 Ma Shixiong, 215 Ma Xulun, 261 Ma Yinchu, 290 Manchukuo, 178, 214, 305 Manchuria, 8, 68, 217, 260 Mao Renfeng, 219 Mao Rongguang, 264 Mao Zedong, 1, 33, 44, 175, 221, 232, 244, 248, 250, 261, 262, 267, 270, 273, 276, 291, 304 Mao Zedong Thought, 281 Maoist/Maoism, 2, 4, 17, 75, 168, 278, 305–308 Maritime Customs, 290 Marxist, 85, 109, 174, 191, 205, 212, 262 Marxist-Leninist/Marxism-Leninism, 175, 291 Master Xing’an, 116

Master Zhu’s Family Instructions (Zhu zi jiaxun), 53–55 Matsui Iwane, 218 May Seventh Cadre School, 308 medical officer, 99, 164, 172, 175–176 Mei Guangfu, 157 Mei Guangxi, 142–143, 150 Mencius, 17, 116, 119, 226 mental illness, 105, 208, 232 Miao, 236, 240 Miao Yunxiang, 201 migrants, 88–90 Military Affairs Commission, 230 military courts, 162–163, 187, 206, 270 military prisons, 35, 163–164, 186, 188–189, 209–211, 213–214, 217–218, 228, 242, 269 military training, 40, 73, 81, 210, 234–235, 237, 239, 242, 272, 289 Min Mountains, 235 Ming dynasty, 38, 53, 130 Mingyi Middle School, 84, 86 Ministry of Interior, 271 Ministry of Judicial Administration, 43, 99, 105, 165, 170, 177, 180–182, 189, 193, 197–198, 220, 221, 223, 225, 232, 233, 235, 236, 239, 258 Ministry of Justice, 14, 24, 29, 31, 34–35, 37, 43, 45, 53, 58–61, 63, 70, 85, 124, 130–131, 136–137, 141–143, 151, 176 Ministry of Military Administration, 209, 232 Ministry of Public Security, 277, 280, 297 misappropriation, 88, 99, 102 mismanagement, 34, 97, 99, 105–106, 169, 177, 179, 193, 197, 202, 222, 246, 301 missionaries, 1, 9, 19, 26, 39, 84, 126–127, 140, 251, 281, 291 Mitin, Mark, 175 Miyazaki Hiroshi, 305 moral instruction (jiaohui), 20, 23, 32, 33, 57, 60, 169, 233, 259 morality books (shanshu), 50, 55, 56, 63, 64, 108, 120. See also exhortations and admonitions

393

394

Index morphine, 53, 64, 178, 185, 220, 222. See also drugs Moscow, 205, 211 mothers, 7, 53, 66, 78–81, 83, 96, 208, 213, 249, 264, 286, 295, 300, 308 Mount Tiantai, 140 Mu Ouchu, 40 murder, 85, 88, 91–92, 94, 95, 100, 115, 119, 157, 218, 221, 268 Nanchang, 127, 212 Nanchang Detention Center, 212 Nanjing, 29, 40, 46–47, 88, 92, 98, 101–102, 104–105, 146, 152, 155, 161–164, 166–167, 182–185, 187, 189, 193, 196, 198, 200, 209, 212, 218–222, 224–225, 229–231, 239, 255–257, 259, 261, 263, 267, 271, 273–274, 292–293, 295 Nanjing Decade, 114 Nanjing Garrison Command, 184–185 Nanjing Massacre, 218 Nanshi, 67, 89 Nantong, 88, 102, 146, 151, 167–168, 172, 174, 178, 182, 222–224 Nantong No. 1 Detention Center, 217 Nanyang Tobacco, 149 nanyou (friends in adversity), 96, 103, 107, 114, 122, 249, 255, 279, 304 National Central University, 212 national humiliation, 32, 62, 68–69, 170, 178 National Judicial Conference (1913), 50; (1915), 139; (1935), 158, 173, 193, 195–196 National Lawyers Association, 179, 193 National Literary Weekly, 207 National Prison Conference (1915), 51 National Reformatory (ganhuayuan), 230, 256 National Relief Association, 191 National Revolutionary Army (NRA), 154, 161–162 National Salvation Association, 213, 244,

National Salvation Movement, 189, 213–214, 217 national shame, 68–69 nationalism, 62, 67, 126, 205, 220, 299 Nationalist Party (KMT), 3, 40, 95, 123–124, 152–158, 160–166, 169–173, 175–207, 209–213, 218, 220–222, 225–226, 232–234, 236–242, 246, 248, 250–252, 256–257, 259–264, 266, 269, 272–273, 275, 280, 282–283, 295, 298, 300–307 Nazi German, 172, 238 Neo-Confucian, 20–24, 33–34, 38, 48, 77, 135, 298–299 New China News Agency, 289 New Culture / New Culture Movement, 28, 35, 84, 128 New Fourth Army, 231, 238, 266, 278 New Life Movement, 64, 170–171, 174, 234, 302 New Moral Cultivation (Xin xiushen), 54, 60 New Observer, 293 New People Village, 265–268 New People Village, 267, 288 New People’s Schools (xinren xuexiao), 241 New Universal Cultivation Hall, 145, 176 New York, 25, 236 newspapers/press, 62, 94, 103, 106, 113, 148, 154, 165, 179, 190, 193, 208, 210, 220, 222, 248, 262, 270, 281, 290 Ni Bi, 197–199 Nie Qijie, 149 Nie Rongzhen, 269 1911 Revolution, 8, 24, 46, 130, 167 Ningbo, 48, 128, 129, 131–132, 138–139, 143, 146 Ninghe County, 269 Ningxia, 182–183 Niu Fuqi, 171 NKVD, 251 No. 1 Army Prison, 189, 209 Northern Expedition, 162 Northwestern Youth Labor Camp, 236 Noulens, 189

Index Ogawa Shigejiro, 12–18, 20–21, 23, 26, 28–30, 33, 37, 45, 49, 57, 76, 80, 173 On the Cultivation of a Communist, 250 “On the People’s Democratic Dictatorship,” 273 One Day in China, 98, 202 Ono Shuzo, 15 opium / opium smoking, 25, 46, 64, 75, 88, 91, 95, 102, 157, 178, 180–183, 185, 191. See also drugs Opium Wars, 68, 69 orphans/orphanages, 55, 89, 125, 148, 241, 266, 271 Outer Chaoyang Gate, 89 Pan Min, 3, 228 Pan Zinian, 212 Paoju Military Prison, 228, 269–270 Paris, 15 parole, 7, 17, 26, 86, 95, 96, 106, 111, 113, 114, 115, 118, 136–138, 143, 146, 177, 181, 184, 206, 225, 227, 234, 241, 245, 260, 263, 300 Party Purge Judicial Committee, 161 patriotism, 59, 67, 68, 69, 73, 81–82, 170, 217–219, 228, 233, 249, 299, 302 Peace Preservation Command, 260, Peace Preservation Committee, 263 Peace Preservation units, 226, 228 peasant farmers, 88, 197, 205, 291 Peng Dehuai, 167 Peng Zhen, 101, 252 Penology (Jianyuxue), 14 penology/penologist, 3, 8, 13–16, 62, 85, 97, 124, 157, 164–165, 168, 172, 255, 301 people’s communes, 267, 294 People’s Court Prison (Tilanqiao), 264 People’s Liberation Army (PLA), 263, 268, 272, 278, 289–290 People’s Republic of China (PRC), 2, 173, 237, 261, 271, 275, 279, 284, 291–292, 303 Perry, Elizabeth, 291 phonograph, 199, 203 physical education, 32, 58, 60, 200 pickpockets, 89, 266

Pingba County Outdoor Labor Prison, 236–237, 259 Pinghu, 139 Pingjiang, 167 Pingwu County Outdoor Labor Service Prison, 235, 237, 259 Pingzhen, 259 Poland, 68 police, 7–11, 13–15, 24–25, 31, 35, 47–48, 53, 62, 81, 89, 91–92, 94, 132–133, 148–149, 151, 163, 165–167, 169, 178, 180, 184–186, 188, 191, 207, 214, 217, 230, 237, 240, 253, 259, 266, 268–269, 272, 304 police lockups, 35, 163, 188 political offender (zhengzhifan), 188–189, 194–196, 210, 230, 237, 274, 288, 302, 303 political prisoners, 84, 95, 97, 103, 105, 114, 153–155, 163, 166, 188–190, 193–196, 200, 207–212, 214, 218, 226, 232, 239–240, 257, 263, 269, 272, 275, 303 Poor Richard’s Almanac, 63 Presbyterian, 127 primary school, 32, 44, 47, 57, 59, 68, 84, 155, 194, 207, 230, 239, 249, 290 Prince Asaka, 218 Prison Affairs Research Institute, 177 Prison Bureau, 8, 15, 29–30, 72–73, 85, 165, 174, 176–177, 183, 191–192, 223, 259 Prison Code (1913), 8, 29, 76 prison labor/work, 17, 31–32, 113, 164, 235, 238, 259, 267, 302–303 Prison Magazine, 84–86 prison officers/guards, 15, 17, 29, 30, 33, 58–59, 61–63, 70, 79, 101–102, 143, 153, 166–167, 169, 176, 180, 182, 192, 264 prison workshops, 7, 16, 29–31, 54, 78, 106, 181, 209–210, 223, 279 Prisoner Education Plan (1924), 59, 61, 73 processions to greet gods (saihui), 92 Progressive Stage system, 17, 173, 258 propaganda/propagandist, 40–41, 73, 81, 154, 156, 183, 190, 193, 195, 200, 210, 228–229, 238, 240, 242, 248, 266–267, 272, 281, 283, 288–289, 290, 294, 305–306

395

396

Index prostitutes, 25, 64, 88, 89, 91, 241, 266, 267, 271, 273, 274, 288, 303; prostitution, 55, 65, 89, 93, 220, 242 Protestants, 127, 132 Provisional Law for the Punishment of Counterrevolutionaries (1928), 187 public health, 64 public hygiene (gonggong weisheng), 66, 68, 210, 242 public moralist, 3, 43, 47, 54–57, 63, 67, 118–120, 124, 301–302 Public Security / Public Security Bureau (PSB), 153, 215–216, 230, 265–267, 270, 272–274, 276–277, 280, 285, 295, 297, 308 public welfare (gongyi), 56, 66 Pure Karma Society, 143, 145–146, 148 Pure Land Buddhism, 52–53, 108, 116, 128, 132–133, 135, 140, 144–145, 149, 151–152, 301 Pure River (Qinghe) Training Brigade, 269 Putuoshan Island, 128, 131–132, 137, 144 Puyi, 305 Puyi (Bouyei), 236 Qi Sizhou, 139–141, 146–148 Qian Duansheng, 290 Qian Guozhen, 222 Qian Mu, 34, 38 Qianlong Emperor, 20–21 Qiao Xunru, 154–155, 157 Qincheng Prison, 294, 308 Qing Dynasty, 12–13, 22, 24, 37, 53, 92, 104, 125, 130, 162, 178, 298 Qing Legal Revision Commission, 10–11, 19 Qing Ministry of Justice, 14, 24 Qing New Policies, 8–11, 14, 22, 27, 46, 126 Qing-British Treaty (1902), 9–10 Qinghai, 182, 278 Qingjiang, 277 race, 39, 68, 174, 204, 217, 232 radio, 148, 202, 210, 228, 262

Radio XMHB Shanghai / Sound of Buddha Radio Station, 148, 158, 173 rape, 218, 228 recidivism/recidivists, 88, 97, 109, 111, 114, 164, 223–224 reciting Buddha’s name (nianfo), 108, 128, 132, 134, 139, 140–141, 146, 148, 152, 223, 257 Record of Exhortations and Admonitions, A (Quanjie lu), 53–54 Record of Reformation, A (Ganhua lu), 54, 142–145 Record of Shame and Self-Correction (Chige lu), 54 Rectification Campaign (1942), 204, 243–244, 248, 250, 282, 303, 306, 308 Red Circle, 92 Red Crag, 273 redemptive societies, 49, 55 reform through labor (laodong gaizao), 17, 246, 265, 270, 273, 279 reformation, 3–4, 6–7, 12, 20, 22–23, 26, 28, 30, 32–34, 36–38, 40– 41, 43–44, 48, 51–52, 54, 57, 59, 68–71, 74, 76, 80, 82–83, 86–87, 90, 95, 101, 102, 107, 110–115, 117–119, 122–124, 127, 133–136, 138–151, 157–160, 164, 166, 169–171, 174–175, 181–182, 184–186, 194–196, 200–202, 208–210, 218, 220–221, 223–225, 227–229, 232–234, 236, 239–242, 244–245, 248, 251–253, 258–260, 264, 273, 279, 281, 286, 291–293, 297–299, 301–304, 306–309. See ganhua reformation education (jiaoyu), 59, 168, 227, 234, 240, 246–247, 258, 265 reformation regiments (ganhua dui), 233 Reformation Section (ganhuamen), 223 reformationism (ganhuazhuyi), 36, 38, 52, 146, 147, 199, 245, 300 reformatory, 14, 25, 219; (ganhuayuan), 196, 227, 230–232, 239, 246, 256, 259, 261, 273 Rehe, 182

Index Ren Yi, 179 Resist America and Aid Korea Campaign, 274 retribution/recompense (baoying), 50–51, 53–56, 82, 108–109, 133, 145, 150, 152, 223, 234, 299 Revised Self-Examination Institute Regulations, 198 Revolutionary Alliance (tongmenghui), 26 Rites of Zhou, 22 robbery, 6, 65, 88–89, 91, 95, 131, 137, 168, 194, 224, 226, 235, 257, 260, 262, 268 Roman Catholic, 127, 132, 184 Rothman, David, 113 Rowe, William, 38 Rugao County, 145, 159, 261 Ruijin County, 174 Russia/Russian, 11, 13, 25, 68, 88, 127, 224 Ryukyu Islands, 68 Sai Jinhua, 24 Salvation Army, 48, 127, 184 Salvation Movement (qiangjiu yundong), 251–254, 262, 283, 304 Saturday Dinner Party Association, 219 schoolteacher/teacher, 15, 44–48, 58–59, 70, 72, 78, 81, 84, 88, 151, 155, 159, 167, 194, 205–208, 227, 229–230, 231, 249, 253, 262, 290, 299 Scott, James, 15 scurvy, 179 2nd Ministry Directly Administered Prison at Beixinjing, 177 Second National Reform-through-Labor Criminal Work Conference (1954), 285 Selden, Mark, 250 self-cultivation, 20, 32, 48, 52, 59–60, 68, 76–77, 79–80, 82, 108, 116, 118–120, 171, 174, 196, 229, 298–299, 307 self-examination, 77, 82, 108–110, 116–117, 171, 174 self-examination (fanxing), 183, 201–202, 225, 241–242, 272

self-examination institutes (fanxingyuan), 196–205, 207–211, 218, 221, 229–230, 239, 248, 251, 302 Self-Examination Monthly, 206 self-renewal work-skills education centers, 246–247 sense of shame (chi), 68, 109, 120–121, 171, 286 Seven Gentlemen, 189 Seybolt, Peter, 253 Seymour, James, 277–278 Shaan-Gan-Ning Base Area, 232, 245 Shaanxi, 73, 84, 209, 214, 234, 246, 249, 264, 272, 281 Shaanxi No. 1 Prison, 234, 246 Shaanxi No. 2 Prison, 234, 246 Shaanxi No. 3 Prison, 232, 234, 246 Shaanxi No. 5 Prison, 234–235, 246 Shaanxi Self-Examination Institute, 203 Shandong, 47, 142, 189, 197–198, 205–206, 243, 246, 260, 263, 268, 281 Shandong prisons, 113, 142, 199–200 Shandong Self-Examination Institute, 199–202, 204–206, 221 Shandong Youth Prison, 221 Shanghai, 4, 8, 29, 42, 45, 47–48, 54, 60, 64–68, 79–80, 85, 87–93, 95, 97, 100–102, 104, 111–112, 123, 125–126, 127, 129, 139, 142–150, 152, 154, 156–159, 163, 165–169, 172–173, 175–180, 182, 184, 186–188, 192–195, 207, 210–211, 213, 218–220, 224–226, 230–232, 256–257, 259, 261–268, 271, 275, 281, 286, 288, 290–291, 293, 301, 308; The Bund, 68; Nanshi, 67, 89; Shanghai International Settlement, 67, 146, 211, 219, 224–225, 227; Zhabei, 67, 89 Shanghai Buddhist Association, 184 Shanghai Buddhist Preservation Association, 148 Shanghai Lawyers Union, 193 Shanghai Local Court, 129, 176 Shanghai Mixed Court, 143, 146

397

398

Index Shanghai Motion Picture Education Society, 173 Shanghai Municipal Land Reclamation Area Labor Production Administration, 266 Shanghai Political Prisoners Instruction Committee, 195 Shangrao, 237–238 Shangrao Concentration Camp, 238 Shangyu, 141 Shanxi, 11, 63, 73, 84, 106, 167, 196–197, 245 Shanxi No. 1 Prison, 60, 85, 92, 96, 105–106, 127, 142, 151, 153 Shanxi provisions department, 106 Shanxi Sojourners Middle School, 167 Shao Yunwen, 222 Shao Zhenji, 42–49, 53–56, 63–69, 77–81, 99, 102, 108, 112, 117, 120, 139, 144–145, 150, 165, 167, 169–170, 172, 174, 220, 224 Shaoxing, 91, 139, 146 Shen Bingquan, 211–212 Shen Chenqi, 145 Shen Congwen, 35 Shen Guanghua, 106 Shen Guanquan, 226, 256, 275 Shen Hui, 146, 148 Shen Jiaben, 10, 12–14, 18–24, 28, 37, 41, 50, 76–77 Shen Jiayi, 33 Shen Lixing, 286–288 Shen Weihan, 239 Shen Zhiyuan, 175 Shenbao, 148 Sheng County, 163 Shenyang, 25 Shi Cuntong, 120 Shi Jianqiao, 91, 94 Shi Qingshan, 100 Shirokov, M., 175 Short History of National Shame, A, 68 Shu Songsheng, 200 Shu Tong, 293

Shuangcheng, 262 Sichuan, 139, 158, 218, 233–235, 240, 246, 257, 272, 275 Sichuan Provincial Court, 235 Sikh, 225 Sixth War Zone Wartime Youth Instruction Brigade, 240 Siyang County, 159 Siyang County Jail, 159 slogans, 64, 72– 74, 153, 183, 190–191, 201, 203, 207, 215, 217, 235, 265, 290 Smiles’ Self-Help, 54 Snow, Edgar, 297 social Darwinism, 27, 64, 68 Social Science Institute, 219 sociologist/sociology, 16, 85, 95, 110, 175, 211, 219, 290, 294 Sociology Circles, 85 solitary confinement, 75–76, 78, 96, 102, 105, 116, 203, 209 Song Lin, 46 Song Qingling, 189, 193 Song Tianshun, 221–222 songs/singing, 49, 63–64, 68, 72–73, 77, 134, 148, 168, 170, 173–174, 183, 190–191, 203, 220, 233, 240, 281, 290 Songs to Exhort the People, 63, 73 Soochow University Law School, 219 South Asia/Asian, 225 Southeast Asia, 133 Southern Anhui Incident, 238, 240 Soviet Union / Soviet Russia, 40, 152, 172, 175, 182, 186, 188, 190, 204, 206, 217, 241–242, 245, 250–253, 271, 291, 297–298, 300, 302–305 Speaking of Repentance and Self-Renewal (Huiguo zixin shuo), 54 Special Services Department (CCP), 186 Stalin/Stalinism, 2, 212, 250–251, 305 Stuart, John Leighton, 294 students, 13–15, 17, 28–29, 44, 58, 65, 78, 84–85, 88–90, 109, 115, 118, 121, 139, 159, 162, 188, 192, 197, 205–206, 211–212, 219,

Index 237–240, 243, 246–247, 249, 253, 257, 261–262, 281, 284–285, 289–290 Su County, 294 Su Qing, 256 Subei Fourteenth Red Army, 191 Subei People’s government, 266 Sugamo Prison, 14, 49 suicide, 105, 116, 137, 285, 293, 308 Suiyuan, 182 Sun Chuanfang, 94 Sun Sun Department Store, 219 Sun Tan (Wang Shouyun), 207–208, 211 Sun Xiong, 92, 111–112, 157, 166–168, 171–174, 176–177, 184, 195, 210, 220 Sun Yat-sen, 26, 40–41, 123, 156, 162, 171–172, 204–206, 220, 223, 226, 237 Supreme Court, 31, 33, 94, 113, 148 sutras, 52, 108, 125, 128–129, 131, 133–134, 139–142, 144, 148, 152, 154, 250 Suzhou, 29, 31, 47, 71, 87–88, 102–103, 127, 146, 151–152, 163, 167, 178–179, 189, 191–192, 197, 202, 207, 218, 224, 230, 256, 261, 263, 271 syphilis, 181 Taft, William Howard, 26 Taibei County, 266 Taibei Prison, 257, 264 Taihang Mountains, 245, 262 Taihe County, 240 Tainan, 264 Taiping County, 191 Taiping Rebellion, 10, 125 Taiwan, 16, 257, 259, 261, 264, 277, 289, 297 Taixing County, 73, 261 Taixing County Jail, 73, 217 Taixu, 142, 157, 257 Taiyuan, 85, 106, 127, 153, 163 Tan Keping, 204–205 Tan Sitong, 44, 125 Tan Yankai, 139 Tang Caichang, 44 Tang dynasty, 108 Tao Sizeng, 139–141, 143, 146

Tao Xingzhi, 59 Tao Xisheng, 242 Tao Yong, 131–139, 143, 146, 150, 152 Tao Zhu, 209 temples/monastery, 67, 106, 108, 125–128, 132–133, 140, 145–146, 148, 155, 276 Ten Goods and Five Abstentions, 140 Text of the Secret Blessings, The, 54 textbooks, 14, 54, 59–61, 63, 66–68, 120, 170, 174, 200 theft, 62, 65, 79, 88–91, 97, 99–100, 131, 157, 189, 224–226, 256–257, 264, 266, 268, 273 Third National Public Security Conference (1951), 276 Third War Zone Command, 238 Thought Reform Campaign, 288–290, 293 Thought War, 228 Three Anti Campaigns, 274, 278, 288 Three Principles of the People, 123, 153, 155–157, 160, 170, 194, 199, 204–205, 229, 232, 237 Three Principles of the People Youth Corps, 231 Tian Enpei, 179–180 Tian Jinghua, 30, 165, 179 Tian Lixun, 179 Tianjin, 11–12, 27, 29, 31, 94, 99–101, 178, 186, 197, 232, 268–269, 281 Tianqiao, 89 Tibet/Tibetan, 235 Tilanqiao Prison (Ward Road Jail), 225–227, 256–257, 259, 262–265, 275, 308 Tilling Together Farm Village (binggeng nongzhuang), 225–226 Tokyo, 14–15, 30, 49 Tonghua, 262 training (xunlian), 40, 183–184, 238–239, 242, 260 transform through teaching (jiaohua), 20, 33–34, 38–40, 50, 54–56, 64–65, 67, 76, 82, 135, 145, 170, 223, 228, 233, 242, 259, 299

399

400

Index Treatise of the Most Exalted One on Moral Retribution, The (Taishang ganying pian), 53–54, 117, 120 Treaty of Shimonoseki (1895), 126 Trotskyites, 153 Tsin, Michael, 38 tuberculosis, 95, 99, 164, 172–173, 179, 184, 226, 284 Tuesday Evening Dinner Party Association, 219 Tujia, 240 Twenty-ninth Army, 215 Twenty-One Demands (1915), 69, 126 typhoid, 164, 179, 184 typhus, 176 U, Eddy, 290 united front, 190, 217–218, 234, 291, 294 United States of America / American, 1–2, 8–9, 14, 25–26, 58–59, 68, 84–85, 89, 100, 113, 126, 128, 168, 226, 236, 255, 258, 261, 273, 291, 294, 297 Universal Cultivation Hall Hospital, 176 University of Chicago, 211 urbanization, 62 vagrants, 11, 25, 89, 241, 266, 271, 273, 288, 303 venereal diseases, 55, 64, 99 Vichy France, 220 Von Sebach, Kurt, 15 Wakeman, Frederic, 165, 238, 266 Wang A’bao, 104 Wang Chonghui, 26 Wang Chubao, 212 Wang Demao, 195 Wang Fanxi, 203 Wang Gulou, 100 Wang Jiaji, 220 Wang Jingwei, 27, 222, 229, 256; Wang Jingwei government, 219, 220, 222–224, 226–228, 230, 232, 235, 239, 246, 255–256, 259, 266, 273, 275, 303

Wang Jingyuan, 139, 141 Wang Kemin, 222, 256 Wang Keren, 214–217 Wang Luyi, 195 Wang Mingxian, 169 Wang Muzheng, 263 Wang Sanyi, 230 Wang Shiwei, 251 Wang Shiyi, 105 Wang Shouyun (Sun Tan), 207–208 Wang Shurong, 25, 49–50, 72, 158 Wang Tao, 231 Wang Wenbao, 30, 85 Wang Yangming, 39, 63, 119 Wang Yi, 213 Wang Yiting, 146, 148–149 Wang Yongbin, 193 Wang Yuanzeng, 7–8, 13, 25–27, 29–33, 37, 45, 51–52, 57–58, 71, 73, 78, 88, 104, 111, 117, 124, 136, 165, 176, 183, 192 Wang Yujie, 139, 141 Wang Zhen, 278 Wang Zuwu, 169 Wanglongmen Prison, 239–240 war crimes/criminals, 256, 305 Ward Road Jail, 211, 219, 225 wardens, 3–4, 7–8, 14–15, 25, 27, 29–32, 37, 43, 45, 49, 51, 54, 57–58, 60, 70–72, 78, 81, 85–88, 90, 92, 95, 97, 101–106, 108, 110–113, 115, 117, 119, 121–124, 130–137, 139–140, 142–143, 145, 147–148, 151–152, 154, 156–157, 159, 162–163, 165–168, 171–175, 177, 179–180, 184–185, 199, 209, 211–212, 215–216, 218–222, 224, 226–227, 233, 255–256, 258–259, 263–265, 275, 297, 299–301, 308 Washington, D.C., 24 Washington Conference (1921–1922), 29, 58–59 Wei Ruyi, 137–138 Wei Xiangru, 269–269 Wei Yuan, 21 Wenzhou, 129

Index West Lake, 162 Western Paradise, 144, 151, 154 Whyte, Martin, 251 wise sayings (geyan), 53, 59, 63, 117, 174 work training, 11, 20, 25, 32, 67, 130, 182 workers, 30–31, 49, 57, 88, 90, 92, 98, 149, 162, 188, 191, 197, 203, 205, 241, 261–262, 288–292 Wu County, 261 Wu Dingkai, 182 Wu Guoping, 222 Wu Jinzhang, 161 Wu Kui, 112, 123–124, 145, 152, 156–157 Wu Shipeng, 195–196 Wu Tingfang, 10 Wu Yaozong, 219 Wu Zhihui, 155, 202 Wu Zhiyuan, 166 Wu Zhongqi, 265, 275 Wuchang, 9, 13, 25, 167, 177, 196, 198, 233, 259 Wugong Lake, 268 Wuhan, 142, 218, 221, 230, 233, 240, 289 Wuhu, 223, 227 Wuhu District Court, 227 Wujin County, 130 Wujin County First District, 229 Wutuhe, 277 Wuxi, 177, 211, 224, 261 Wuxi Higher Middle School, 208 Wuxi Peaceful National Salvation Promotion Society, 221–222 Xia Lianju, 257 Xia Shupei, 152 Xia Zhixu, 204 Xiaduzhen, 259 Xiamen, 137 Xi’an, 19, 47, 127, 212, 214–215, 234, 236–238, 249 Xi’an Incident, 214, 249 Xiang Baicu, 144 Xiang Yingxin, 212–213, 218–219 Xiangshan, 138–139

Xiangya Company, 95 Xiao County, 261 Xiao Jian, 174–175 Xiao Zongjun, 219 Xiaozhuang, 200 Xibaipo, 261 Xie Fuci, 167 Xie Shoubao, 216 Xie Yong, 293 Xifeng, 237–239 Xiguan Airport, 236 Xinfengzhen, 267 Xing Yuantang, 227 Xinghua County, 47, 261, 267–268 Xinjiang, 182, 278 Xinzhu, 259, 264 Xiong Shihui, 240 Xiong Xiling, 44, 142 Xu A’qin, 176 Xu Bohua, 60, 85–86, 105–106, 108, 115, 117, 142, 151, 153, 163, 166 Xu Daocao, 265 Xu Guangping, 219 Xu Huifang, 90 Xu Jialin, 127 Xu Qian, 24 Xu Qingzhang, 169 Xu Shiying, 24–29, 37, 41, 49, 182 Xu Weiru, 132, 143 Xu Xiaoqun, 185 Xuancheng, 259, 263 Xuancheng labor camp, 260, 263 Xuanwu Lake, 225–226 Xue Dubi, 47, 54, 63–64, 67–69, 72–73, 108, 118–120, 174 Xuzhou, 80, 186 Ya’an, 291 Yalu River, 262 yamen jails, 35 Yan Jingyue, 70, 85–86, 88–89, 94–95, 97, 99–102, 105, 109–110, 116, 121, 147, 153, 190, 211, 219, 225, 227, 261, 291, 294–295, 308

401

402

Index Yan Yangchu (James Yen), 59 Yan’an, 3, 175, 231–232, 234, 237, 245, 247, 249–250, 254, 262, 271–272, 282–285, 291, 302, 306, 308 Yang Dengying. See Bao Junfu Yang Hucheng, 212, 214 Yang Jinhao, 212 Yang Lisan, 169 Yang Sanmao, 104 Yang Wenhui, 125 Yang Xin, 131, 142 Yang Xingfo, 193 Yang Xuanyou, 167 Yang Youda, 230 Yanglangba Prison camp, 238 Yangzhong, 261 Yangzhou, 267 Yangzi Delta, 153 Yangzi River, 88, 128, 201, 218, 223, 225, 240, 260, 263; Lower Yangzi, 4, 127, 153, 160, 218, 222, 224, 228, 303 Yao Chengqing, 71, 76, 152, 154–155 Ye Jianying, 218 Yellow River, 268 Yenching University, 85–86, 147, 211, 228, 261, 291, 294 Yichang, 139 Yilan Prison, 264 Yin Bingdong, 101–102, 297 Yin Changfa, 92 Yin County, 129, 131, 142 Yin County Jail, 129, 131, 140, 143 Yin Yuanzi, 235 Yinguang, 132–133, 142, 144–152, 157, 159 Yizhang, 259 YMCA, 48, 59, 72, 127, 173, 219 Yong’an Company Amusement Park, 180–181 Yongkang, 161 You Huaiqing, 168–169 Youth Instruction General Group, 240 Yu Qichang, 113 Yu Youren, 226 Yu Zhenzhao, 230

Yuan Huang, 53, 77 Yuan Shikai, 35, 49, 51 Yudu County, 174 Yulin, 232 Yun Daiying, 245 Yunnan, 277, 281, 285 Yushui Middle School, 174 Zai Feng, 27 Zeng Guofan, 53–54, 63, 107, 174 Zeng Sanxiang, 195–196 Zhabei, 67, 89 Zhang Baoyuan, 169 Zhang Binglin (Taiyan), 72, 125 Zhang Dinghua, 154–156 Zhang Dongsun, 261, 290 Zhang Jinbao, 95, 102 Zhang Kezeng, 209 Zhang Liufa, 168–169 Zhang Meiyi, 131, 139 Zhang Mingyuan, 101, 105 Zhang Naiqi, 213 Zhang Weizhen, 153 Zhang Xiaoliang, 148 Zhang Xueliang, 214 Zhang Xun, 104 Zhang Yipeng, 143 Zhang Yongfang, 34 Zhang Yuancheng, 139 Zhang Yuankai, 86 Zhang Zhidong, 9–10, 20, 22 Zhao Chen, 255 Zhao Chunhua, 216 Zhao Erxun, 11 Zhao Puchu, 219 Zhao Xingwu, 215 Zhao Xinyu, 185 Zhao Yingsheng, 263 Zhazidong Prison, 238–239 Zhejiang, 4, 19, 40, 46–47, 85, 95, 124, 127–130, 132, 138–147, 149, 157–163, 187, 197–198, 211, 219, 231, 239, 255–256, 263, 295, 301 Zhejiang Army Prison, 162, 189, 196–197

Index Zhejiang No. 1 Prison, 31, 95, 127, 138–141, 146, 159, 223 Zhejiang Self-Examination Institute, 196–198 Zheng A’Cheng, 209 Zheng Chaolin, 212 Zheng Lingjia, 177 Zheng Longkui, 112, 151 Zheng Qingfen, 157 Zhengzhou, 19 Zhenhai, 95, 138 Zhenjiang, 47–48, 177, 259, 261, 267 Zhenjiang-Jiangsu No. 2 Prison, 259 Zhentuo Sutra, 133 Zhide, 132–133, 135 Zhili (Hebei) province, 9, 11 Zhili No. 1 Prison, 31, 99, 100 Zhongbuzhen, 268 Zhongtong (KMT Center Organization Department’s Party Affairs Bureau of Investigation and Statistics), 186–187, 199, 203, 206, 230, 252, 266, 302

Zhou Enlai, 190, 218, 261, 306 Zhou Fohai, 256 Zhou Gongding, 145 Zhou Kuiyuan, 215 Zhou Mengyan, 53 Zhou Shuzhao, 89, 91, 93 Zhou Yigou, 147–148 Zhou Zuoren, 256, 258 Zhoushan Island, 128, 131, 226 Zhu Gang, 166 Zhu Guoquan, 106 Zhu Shuping, 222 Zhu Xi, 119 Zhu Xing, 293 Zhu Xi’s Commentary on The Great Learning, 118 Zhu Ziyuan, 33, 51–52, 88, 113 Zhuyin County Jail, 217 Zongde, 133 Zou Taofen, 189 Zou Zhennan, 101

403