About 70 people gathered to hear Indiana University history professor Klaus Muhlhahn speak in the Knight Library Browsing Room on Monday afternoon.
The free lecture, “Crime and Punishment in China: A History of Penal Systems in the Twentieth Century,” was one of several recent events in the Jeremiah Lecture Series.
During his lecture, Muhlhahn gave an overview of the history of penal and judicial systems in colonial and modern China.
“The Chinese legal system produces accepted groups in the name of a national campaign and follows an exemption of its own state laws,” Muhlhahn said.
“The rule of exception is not unique to China,” he added, comparing the tension between sovereign power and the rule of law to the legal systems in the United States and Europe.
The idea of moral rehabilitation was prevalent through much of Chinese penal history, Muhlhahn said. Crime was thought to be a result of individuals having a “wrong consciousness,” usually caused by their social class.
In comparison to European executions at the time, where public executions of citizens were spectator entertainment, Chinese guards maintained peace at executions and prohibited noisy crowds from forming.
During the 1930s and ’40s, criminal punishments included fines, detention with forced labor, indefinite imprisonment, life imprisonment and death.
Hundreds of new prisons were built in urban areas during this time, Muhlhahn explained. These facilities were riddled with hunger, overcrowding and violence.
Under the People’s Republic of China, which emerged in the late ’40s and early ’50s, the five punishments were surveillance, criminal detention, one to six-month-long imprisonment with labor reform, life imprisonment and death.
In 1951, there were an estimated 5 million Chinese prisoners in 400 to 500 labor camps. The prisoners in these labor camps suffered from exhaustion, starvation, grueling work hours and shortened life expectancies. An estimated 10 percent of prisoners died annually.
At these labor camps, “People who worked less got less food,” Muhlhahn said.
A total of 8 to 10 million Chinese people were imprisoned in PRC labor camps in the ’50s. These labor camps were eventually abolished in 1994.
An “unrelenting rise of power of the state” began to emerge in the late 20th century, Muhlhahn said.
During Mao’s China, those who were considered “traitors” and “enemies of the state” were arrested in mass numbers.
In theory, Muhlhahn said, Chinese prisons are meant to rehabilitate citizens, but in practice, guards lack training and many jails are underfunded.
“An ideal jail system can never be achieved,” Muhlhahn said.
University history professor and Asian Studies Director Bryna Goodman said she nominated Muhlhahn for the Jeremiah Lecture Series because of the quality and significance of his work.
Muhlhahn’s book, “Criminal Justice in China: A History,” was awarded the 2009 John K. Fairbank Prize in East Asian History from the American Historical Association.
Monday’s lecture was sponsored by University alumna Connie Jeremiah and co-sponsored by the Center for Asian and Pacific Studies, which funded hotel fees, publicity and travel for the event.
Muhlhahn received his doctorate from the Free University of Berlin in 1998. He was visiting fellow at the Center for Chinese Studies at the University of California, Berkeley from 2002 to 2004. He is currently researching philanthropy and entrepreneurship in China, which Goodman referred to as “the happier side of things.”
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