Opportunities and Challenges for Legislative and Institutional Reform of Detention in China

This chapter illustrates the many sources of impetus for change, and the sometimes shifting coalitions that form to advocate for a particular set of reforms. They document developments that emerge out of political opportunities at the central institutional level, as well as out of those that result from local level initiatives. The chapter explores and critically evaluates a number of significant positive developments in both discourse in the field of scholarship and practice in the areas of detention and imprisonment that have either occurred over the last decade or are currently under way. As Macbean concludes, scandals have acted as powerful catalysts for recent reforms. In this book political ideology has long defined the parameters within which the idea of punishment is articulated in the literature and translated into practice.