6. The Ordering of Crime in Republican Beijing from the 1910s to the 1930s
The analysis in this chapter reveals that the sweeping changes in the criminal justice system in China during the early twentieth century not only transformed the legal system, but also reconstructed the knowledge systems about crimes and criminals. Local sociologists began to catch up in the 1920s and produced important work in an attempt to develop their own sociological discourse on the problem of crime in China. Lawmaking and enforcement agencies, with their own missions and visions, revisited the legal ordering of crimes at the turn of the twentieth century. The policing agency of Beijing had been responsible for collecting data concerning various aspects of life in the city since the imperial period, with crime data being one of the most widely collected. Such data not only provided useful information about the rise and fall of crime numbers, but also traced the spatial order of crimes over time. Keywords:Beijing; early twentieth century; legal reordering of crime; sociological order of crime; spatial order of crime