The Chinese Policing Webs

The study of policing has traditionally concentrated on public police forces. However, public police represent only one component of the broader landscape of policing. In this book, drawing on the pioneering work of Jean-Paul Brodeur and my two decades of research experience on Chinese policing, I propose a theory of Chinese policing webs, which consists of three interconnected layers: the public policing web, the private policing web, and the social policing web. These layers are deeply intertwined, forming a symbiotic relationship that is predominantly influenced by public policing. Nonetheless, this relationship exhibits both temporal and spatial variations. The theory of Chinese policing webs invites a reimagining of the policing studies agenda and offers crucial insights into understanding policing and social control in China.

Jianhua Xu is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Macau (UM). He is currently an academic visitor at the Center for Criminology, University of Oxford. His research interests include the sociology of crime and deviance, policing, victimology, urban sociology, and Macao studies. He is an author of over 60 publications in English and Chinese. Many of his works have appeared in journals such as The China Quarterly, The British Journal of Criminology, Theoretical Criminology and Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, among others. He is currently working on several projects including (1) the pluralization of Chinese policing, (2) the formation of the surveillance society, and (3) casinoization of Macao. During his stay at Oxford, he will finish the writing of his book entitled The Chinese Policing Web to be published by Oxford University Press.