Police Reform and State Coercive Capacity Building in China

Abstract

With the increasing diversity and complexity of Chinese society in recent years, China’s social control system has become less and less able to meet the needs of social development. In this context, China’s central and local governments have tried to reform the police system to strengthen the coercive capacity of the state. There are seven main models of police reform in China, which embody two core features of current coercive capacity building: on the one hand, deepening the reach of the police to the grassroots to strengthen the “penetrative power” of the police in controlling society; on the other hand, standardizing law enforcement to enhance the state’s “inhibitory power” over the police. “Penetrative power” is the prerequisite for “inhibitory power,” and “inhibitory power” is the precondition for the effectiveness of “penetrative power.” The dialectical relation of the two is the key to building coercive capacity