ABSTRACT
There have been compelling reasons for the Chinese state to cast campaigns as instrumental to what it labels the national Reform program. Reform has entailed the complex and fraught process of introducing market regulation of economic behaviour alongside the role of the state, in a society in which the Maoist authori ties had previously outlawed the market. Post-Mao Chinese authorities have used campaigns in an attempt to outlaw the serious crime that market forces have both inspired and enabled. Campaigns are thus cast as means to help achieve reform. The taut regulatory muscle of campaigns has served to help secure the order and social stability on which China’s mixed economy, the reform program and the Chinese Communist Party depend. Campaigns are also a way for the party-state to respond to the serious surge in crime without the need to acknowledge the possible contri bution of the party itself and its unprecedented reform program to the crime problem.
