ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a bird's-eye view of these themes, comparing them to those that have been popularised by the Western media. In the absence of detailed information on how prisons operate in China, Western scholarly analyses have relied on descriptive rather than analytical approaches. Analyses of deprivation of liberty were useful, in that they allowed Western nation-states to gather the information needed to make those decisions they deemed the most appropriate. Even today the study of deprivation of liberty in the People's Republic of China (PRC) is largely studied by sinologists and lawyers trained in Chinese law. Such a division of labour between mainstream criminology and 'sino-criminology' results both from the difficulty in accessing sources that remain for the most part either unavailable or untranslated and from the design of college education curricula. Today there are still divisions among debates on corrections in China; these take place in the field of sinology, and in Western and Chinese criminological and penological literature.
