| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Asia

Michael Dutton. Policing Chinese Politics: A History. (Asia-Pacific: Culture, Politics, Society.) Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. 2005. Pp. xiii, 411. Cloth $84.95, paper $23.95.
During the Cold War, Western and Chinese historians wrote the political history of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and People's Republic of China (PRC) within the narrative framework of a two-line struggle. Revisionist historians have been rewriting this history as the interaction of multiple actors and factions, each pursuing its own interest. It is astounding, then, that Michael Dutton builds his history of policing around the two-line struggle vision of politics that Mao Zedong articulated in 1926: "Who are our enemies, who are our friends? That is the question germane to revolution" (p. 3). The result is a well-written, provocative, and informative history of Chinese communist policing from its roots in 1927 through the 1990s. Dutton does not simply relate the story of policing: he links it to the story of what he calls "the political."	1
Dutton draws his concept of "the political" from two sources. Hannah Arendt supplies the idea that "any political action is a form of striving ... on the basis of some sense of (moral) commitment" (p. 11). Carl Schmitt contributes the understanding that "the political" is "a binary distinction between friend and enemy" (p. 10). Dutton does not, however, place the histories of policing or politics back into the Cold War straitjacket of two-line struggle. He recognizes and takes into account the multiple actors and factions that populate the pages of revisionist histories. But by suffusing his narrative with "the political," Dutton allows us to see how political actors were driven and legitimized by the moral conviction that they were acting against enemies and in the best political interests of party and country. In the tale of policing, Dutton traces the twists and turns of the passionate friend-enemy struggles of the CCP and the PRC and the ultimate decline of this brand of politics in the post-Mao era.	. . .

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