ABSTRACT
This chapter describes and explains police interrogation of criminal suspects in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Interrogation is mandatory in criminal investigations, and confessions are present in the overwhelming majority of convictions. The widespread practice of torture to obtain confessions of guilt, while formally contrary to law, is officially acknowledged to exist, especially at local levels. We will examine interrogation in its social, institutional, legal, and political contexts. Like punishment, interrogation is a “complex cultural process” (Boulanger and Sarat, 2005) that helps to characterize and explain elements of the system within which it is embedded. Overlapping contextual aspects of police interrogation and torture include the balance of crime control and due process, concerns over wrongful convictions, the death penalty, structural features of China’s criminal justice system, organizational characteristics of police departments, and the State’s attempts to advance the rule of law. This contextual frame extends beyond technical justice process issues to consider the relationship between police interrogation practices and the nature of China’s one-party state.
