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The Confucian ethic and the spirit of East Asian police: a comparative study in the ideology of democratic policing

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Abstract

This paper is an empirical study in comparative police ideology. It describes cultural qualities that distinguish Taiwan’s idea of democratic policing from comparable ideas in other places. I examine the historical process by which Taiwan’s police came to be organized around the population registry (the hukou). This process has institutionalized a Confucian understanding of civic virtue as an organizing principle in Taiwanese policing. Based on these historical and cultural observations, I formulate an ideal typical model of Taiwanese “policing through virtue” that can be compared to other stereotypical national policing styles such as Britain’s “policing by consent,” America’s discretionary policing, and France’s formalist emphasis on division of power and rule of law.

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Notes

  1. Chinese respondents generally indicated high levels of trust in all political institutions, with police and courts being the least trusted among them. Taiwanese reported a general lack of trust across all institutions, with police ranked as relatively the most trustworthy. ([101], p.198)

  2. Fei’s [43] theorization of particularistic connections portrays traditional Confucian idioms of trust as a core cultural resource producing the relative autonomy of the imperial Chinese state. I argue that Taiwanese police similarly rely on these ideas in that they use the ideology of virtue to maintain relative autonomy from forces in their political environment that could hinder their ability to maintain nonpartisan order. Detailed ethnographic evidence to this effect is beyond the scope of this paper.

  3. Eisenstadt, among many other things, developed an influential approach to comparative sociology based on cultural analysis, making it possible for contemporary scholars to “almost take it for granted that there are different routes to modernity and different types of modernization” ([87], p.232).

  4. Except when policing non-citizens, as in colonial situations. For the contemporary significance of these technologies of management of immigrant populations, see [31].

  5. The will of the governed might be expressed positively, as in a covenant, or negatively, as in criminal activities indicating willful disregard of the social contract. It could not, however, be legitimately altered by the clerical fiat of an administrative registrar.

  6. The phrase “policing by consent” came much later, however It seems to have entered common usage only with the publication of John Alderson’s [3] Policing Freedom.

  7. The larger story of modern state formation in East Asia is often told as a regional process of cultural re-signification beginning with the Meiji restoration. As Duara put it, a “regional mediation of the global circulation of the practices and discourse of the modern [resulted] in the hegemonic dominance of Japanese neologisms and re-significations of classical Chinese terms” ([35], pp.2–3).

  8. Brodeur [13] has analyzed the tensions, contradiction, and emergent modes of fusion between high and low policing in the context of democratic government.

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  1. Department of Sociology, University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam, Hong Kong

    Jeffrey T. Martin

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Correspondence to Jeffrey T. Martin.

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Thanks to Peter K. Manning, Jane K. Winn, Colin Smith, Jaida Samudra, Celina Kok, Zaynab el Bernoussi, Kevin Karpiak and the members of the East Asian Policing Studies Forum for reading drafts or discussing the concepts contained in this article. All claims and errors remain mine alone.

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Martin, J.T. The Confucian ethic and the spirit of East Asian police: a comparative study in the ideology of democratic policing. Crime Law Soc Change 61, 461–490 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10611-013-9497-z

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