Authoritarian Policing under Xi: Business as Usual?

• In Event: 137. Transformations under Xi: A Critical Perspective on Political Change in China

Abstract

As President Xi Jinping approaches his fourth year in power, scholars and pundits are working to make sense of his administration’s influence on state-society relations. This paper explores Xi’s impact on one of China’s most conservative bureaucracies: the Public Security Bureau (PSB). Using interview data from Ministry officials and frontline police as well as content analysis of PSB documents and media reports, it parses continuity and change in ground level enforcement and the broader public security mission. Xi’s administration is perhaps most famous for its anti-corruption efforts, and the PSB is a critical enforcer of those campaigns. But in a bureaucracy characterized by weak capacity (Scoggins 2016) and devoted to stability maintenance work, the ability of ground level enforcement to keep up with the high-level rhetoric of anti-corruption efforts is unclear. This paper will assess and compare changes in the PSB under Xi using Jean-Paul Brodeur’s framework of high and low policing efforts to better understand which areas of policing have experienced the most change and in what ways. The findings will shed light on advancements in political policing in today’s China as well as on centralization efforts within the Chinese bureaucracy.

Author

• Suzanne E. Scoggins, Clark University