CHina policing

The police in China derive their authority from the state via a centralized system. Applying a PESTEL analysis provides insight into the historical and contemporary considerations that have established the authority and legitimacy of the police in the country, and also provides context for China’s policing system in the transnational landscape. Those political, economic, social, technological environmental and legal factors that have had a direct bearing on the legitimacy of the Chinese police are outlined below.

Political

The People’s Republic of China (PRC) is a one-party communist state. Coming out of World War II, China went through a period of civil war, resulting in the communist leader Mao Zedong establishing Mainland China as a communist country in 1949. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was rooted to a theory of class struggle and the dictatorship of the proletariat. In Marxist political thought, this refers to a state in which the working class controls the government; however, the Chinese government is fashioned after the Stalinist model, in which other political parties are prohibited from engaging in the governing process. In effect, this means the CCP is the government, and the leaders of the party are the leaders of the country, with most people absent from any active participation in politics. The authority of individual parts of the bureaucracy comes from the central government. This top-down power structure is the same for the police. (CIA World Factbook)

With China’s adoption of the communist governing model from the USSR came Soviet assistance in setting up police forces. Early police forces in the PRC largely resembled Soviet Militsiya policing systems. In the early years of the PRC, police not onl...

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...evidence is gathered and how suspects are interrogated.

While these in theory reflect many of the protections found in Western countries, the results are different. For example, the Chinese judicial system has a 98 percent conviction rate.

Additional meso-level legitimacy considerations that fall outside the framework of a PESTEL analysis are centered around the transnational relationships among China and other countries. China faces pressure from other developed countries (i.e. Western Europe and the U.S.) to address human rights issues in its country. While these countries have taken little punitive action against China because of the interdependencies of their economies, as Chinese. China is permanent member of the UN Security Council and participates in INTERPOL; however China has not submitted an International Court of Justice jurisdiction declaration.