New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014. x, 403 pp. (Maps.) US$65.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-300-18594-2.
As an historian who has published extensively on Buddhist print culture in late imperial and modern China, Jan Kiely offers an interesting and archive-informed perspective on various Republican Chinese prison wardens’ attempts to rehabilitate or ganhua 感化 their inmates with Buddhist or Confucian moral suasion. At the local level, morally rehabilitated or converted inmates would thereby be less likely to reoffend as recidivists, and at the national level Republican China would prove to the treaty-port foreign powers that they should abolish extraterritoriality in light of China’s modernized and rehabilitative criminal justice system. Part of what made the moral suasion of prisoners such a “compelling ideal” to elites in both China and Japan was that this Western-style emphasis upon rehabilitation instead of old-fashioned corporal punishment apparently contributed to the formal abolition of foreign powers’ extraterritorial privileges in Japan by 1899 and in China by 1943.
However, the reader might well raise some questions about how compelling these ideas about prisoner rehabilitation have truly been—and to whom they may or may not have been compelling. Ganhua is a notoriously slippery term that Kiely variously translates as “reform,” “convert,” or “reformation” (40–41). Although the official government accounts that dominate many archival sources may portray rehabilitative “reformation” as effective for prison inmates, would most ex-inmates have necessarily agreed that ganhua was truly compelling to them if asked about it in private after their release from prison surveillance and control? Moreover, by translating ganhua’s supposed Maoist substitute of gaizao 改造 identically as “reform” instead of with a more precise rendering such as “remold” or “remake,” Kiely elides the more thoroughly transformational connotations of Maoist gaizao as opposed to Republican-era ganhua (276). Within this sort of terminological blur, ganhua, gaizao and gaige 改革 all come to be confusingly lumped together under the identical English label of “reform” in spite of significant distinctions between rehabilitative “conversion” (ganhua), heavy-handed “remolding” (gaizao), and institutional “reform” (gaige), respectively.
One of the most convincing lines of argument in the book can be found in Kiely’s characterization of official pressure on prisoners in many 1930s Guomindang “Self-Examination Institutes” to confess their behavioural and ideological failings as “coercive voluntarism” (201). This imperative of obligatory self-criticism would be ratcheted up higher than ever during the Mao era to require a great many PRC prison inmates to write lengthy life stories accentuating their numerous misdeeds and supposed crimes—and culminating with vows to throw themselves on the mercy of the infallible Communist Party and remold themselves into “New Socialist Persons.” Within civilian life outside of prison, single-party Leninist authoritarian regimes have helped retain their firm control over the public narrative through analogous devices described by political scientists as “administered mass organizations”: nationwide “mass” outfits like the PRC Women’s Federation that appear to represent popular voluntarism while actually being kept firmly in line by a Party committee at their administrative centre.
The book’s scholarly apparatus contains a brief three-page glossary of selected Chinese terms, but sadly no glossary entries for any authors or other key Chinese personages mentioned in the text or endnotes. Furthermore, The Compelling Ideal lacks a proper bibliography or works-cited list of the sort one expects from a scholarly monograph. Instead, Kiely has appended a list of cumbersome source-based abbreviations such as “SXXSGFNSS” (319), in which key information about these sources such as page numbers for journal articles has often been omitted. In order to check a source citation, the reader must constantly flip back and forth between the text, the endnotes section, and the aforementioned list of source-based acronyms, thereby making the book far less accessible to non-specialist readers than the topic warrants. Moreover, Kiely’s presentation of the theory and practice of Maoist thought remolding and remolding through labour is less persuasive and informative than that of some major monographs on the subject that his book ignores, such as Jean-Luc Domenach’s L’archipelago oublié (Paris, 1992) and Hu Ping’s Ren de xunhua, duobi, yu fanpan (Hong Kong, 1999; translated into English in 2012 as The Thought Remolding Campaign of the Chinese Communist Party-state). I would thus recommend The Compelling Ideal with reservations—and only to specialists in either the history of politics or penology in modern China.
Philip F. Williams
Montana State University, Bozeman, USA
pp. 698-699