Date: April 3, 2001 (Tuesday)
Time: 6:00 - 7:30 pm
Venue: Senior Common Room, 14/F, K.K. Leung Building, HKU

Speaker: Dr. Frank Dikotter, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
 

Based on a wealth of hitherto undiscovered prison archives from a dozen provincial and municipal archives, this paper will present some aspects of the social and cultural history of prisons in modern China. The paper will argue that prisons were imagined, built and run on the basis of the idea of reformation, or ganhua. The emergence of a model of imprisonment based on reformation in republican China was part both of a global movement towards penal reform, drawing on an international repertoire of ideas and institutions, and a local reconfiguration of a more traditional faith in the transformative capacity of education. Based on a Mencian view of human nature as inherently good, the notion of ganhua further sustained the belief that even criminals could achieve individual self-improvement through proper institutional guidance. In search of wealth and power, modernising elites viewed the reformation of criminals as only one aspect of a project of national reconstruction in which social stability, economic development and military strength could only be obtained by forging disciplined and productive citizens. As such, model prisons were not so much a foreign transplant as the microcosm of an exemplary society in which the emulation, if not imitation, of models - whether in the school, the factory or the army - was seen simultaneously as a project for social discipline and a strategy of development.
 

Dr. Frank Dikotter is Director of the Contemporary China Institute, SOAS, University of London, and has published books on racial theories, sexual identities and eugenics in the history of modern China. He recently finished a project on crime, punishment and the prison which will be published by Columbia University Press, and is currently heading an ESRC-funded project on the history of drug consumption in China.