Moral Panic and Strike-Hard Campaigns in Mainland China

Abstract

Faced with escalating crime rates in the wake of the 1978 economic reforms, the Chinese Communist Party launched a series of Strike-Hard campaigns to tackle the crime problem in a tough manner. The literature on these Strike-Hard campaigns mainly focuses on the following causes, such as soaring street crime, especially youth crime calling for a zero-tolerance response, the rationality of the authorities’ decision to get tough, the natural continuation of the Party’s tradition of organizing campaigns, and the campaigns’ political functions of maintaining the Party’s legitimacy and power.

In this study, I analyzed the Strike-Hard campaigns as official responses to the crime problem from a sociological point of view by drawing on contextual constructionism. More specifically, I applied the attributional model of moral panic to investigate whether a moral panic was constructed in the process of the first national Strike-Hard campaign launched in 1983. Based on the pyramid model, I proposed a top leader–ignited model to examine the process by which a moral panic is ignited in the context of the Chinese political system. Then, given the mass media’s important role in manipulating moral panic, I examined the Chinese mass media’s function during the Strike-Hard campaign. Last, in terms of the transient nature of moral panic, I investigated how the police responded to crime problems after the moral panic receded by conducting field work in City C in Southwestern China.

To achieve the above research objectives, I utilized four methods of data collection: historical research, content analysis, participant observation, and in-depth interviews. First, to explore the moral panic during the 1983 Strike-Hard, I gathered and screened various works, such as top political and legal leaders’ memoirs; yearbooks and annals on crime, law, and justice; and published personal recollections related to the Strike-Hard campaigns. Second, I conducted a content analysis of People’s Daily and Chongqing Daily which are a national and local newspaper respectively to examine the mass media’s role in manipulating moral panic. Third, I carried out participant observation at a police station in City C to investigate how the police respond to the current crime problems. Fourth, I conducted in-depth interviews with 8 interviewees in relation to the 1983 Strike-Hard campaign and 20 police officers from the police station in City C in relation to current police practice. Before engaging in the full-scale field work, I conducted a pilot study in a police station in a city in central China to evaluate feasibility and test the protocols.

The main findings of the study are in three-fold. First, the top leader played a decisive role in engineering the moral panic during the 1983 Strike-Hard by using a top-down approach under the one-party rule. Second, the Chinese mass media only played a supporting role in manipulating moral panic because the media was regarded as the Party’s mouthpiece. The media was demanded to publicize the positive aspects of the campaign to avoid causing any untoward influences among the public. Third, the police have continued to construct crime problems by implementing specialized campaigns and emphasizing the seriousness of certain crimes even after a moral panic recedes.

Generally speaking, this thesis extends the study of the Strike-Hard campaigns in China and broadens the understanding of moral panic in a non-Western country from a constructionist perspective. It demonstrated the process how a moral panic under the Chinese political system was engineered during a Strike-Hard campaign. In the early 1980s in the wake of the Cultural Revolution, together with other top Party members, the top leader orchestrated a classic moral panic to divert attention away from the public tensions in political and economic reforms, so as to maintain the Party’s legitimacy and establish his own personal authority. Meanwhile, such an in-depth examination of the Strike-Hard campaigns provides a distinct perspective to grasp the police and policing in China. By launching campaigns against criminals, the Party reshaped the moral standard of the entire society and strengthened its moral boundary. Furthermore, in the process, the police gained material benefits and strengthened their power as a law-enforcement department.

Date of Award	15 Sept 2017
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	City University of Hong Kong
Supervisor	Yueying Lena ZHONG (Supervisor)