History Department - University of Hong Kong

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Departmental Research Seminar 2011-2012

1 December 2011

War and Penal Thought Reform in China, 1937-1945

4:00 p.m.
MB150

Prof. Jan Kiely
Chinese University of Hong Kong

Abstract

The Japanese invasion and eight years of all-out war between Japan and China is known for horrifying destruction more than construction. And yet, the war brought conditions and imperatives that led government authorities to construct, develop, and expand systems, institutions and mechanisms of authority. Among the most notable of these were the programs designed to reform the thinking of offenders – penal thought reform – that had originated with the new-style prison reforms of the late Qing and early Republic. This talk explores how all the major war-states in China, particularly Jiang Jieshi’s Chongqing-based Nationalists, the collaborationist Wang Jingwei’s Nanjing-based Nationalists, and Mao Zedong’s Yan’an-based Communists, invested in penal thought reform programs for common criminal offenders and extended these methods and mechanisms to deal with large numbers of political offenders, deserters and other social undesirables.

Jan Kiely is Associate Professor of Chinese Studies and Associate Director of the Centre for East Asian Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He previously served as American Director and Associate Professor of Chinese Studies at the Johns Hopkins University-Nanjing University Center for Chinese and American Studies. Kiely holds a Ph.D. in history from the University of California at Berkeley and is a specialist on twentieth century Chinese history. His most recent publications are “Shanghai Public Moralist Nie Qijie and Morality Book Publication Projects in Republican China,” Twentieth Century China (January 2011), and “Spreading the Dharma with the Mechanized Press: New Buddhist Print Cultures in the Modern Chinese Print Revolution, 1865-1949,” in Christopher Reed and Cynthia Brokaw, eds., From Woodblocks to the Internet: Chinese Publishing and Print Culture in Transition, 1800-2008 (E.J. Brill 2010). He has recently completed a book on prison thought reform in the making of modern China, circa 1900-1960.