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  • Chinese Justice, the Fiction: Law and Literature in Modern China
  • Colin Hawes (bio)
Jeffrey Kinkley. Chinese Justice, the Fiction: Law and Literature in Modern China. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. xi, 497 pp. Hardcover $69.50, ISBN 0-8047-3443-7. Paperback $24.95, ISBN 0-8047-3976-5.

Jeffrey Kinkley's latest study is without doubt an important and groundbreaking book on a topic that has been virtually ignored by Western scholars and seldom studied even in China: modern Chinese crime fiction. All the same, readers may find the book's structure somewhat confusing in places and its theory-burdened style rather heavy going and repetitive. While not outweighing the thoroughness of Kinkley's scholarship. and the insights contained in his excellent analyses of crime fiction, such idiosyncrasies may leave readers with a slight feeling of verbal indigestion, especially if they dare to devour the book in a single sitting.

The main focus of the book is crime fiction produced in the post-Mao period, specifically from the late 1970s to the early 1990s, with some description of earlier periods. The context-setting Introduction, subtitled "The Arrival of Law and Literature in China," sets the scene by defining crime fiction and briefly introducing the main theme of the book. Kinkley asserts that studying Chinese crime fiction can simultaneously give us valuable insights into the state of both literature and the law in contemporary China.

Subsequent chapter titles are quite vague, giving little indication of their contents, but after reading the book we find that chapter 1, "Origins," deals mainly with the earliest post-Mao crime fiction (1978-1980). This is divided into two main categories: detective stories (or "whodunits") and penal-law melodramas. Kinkley argues convincingly that the former are more influenced by Western detective genres, especially the Sherlock Holmes-Arsene Lupin tradition, whereas the latter shows more influence from traditional Chinese court-case tales, with their incorruptible official heroes resembling modern-day "Judge Baos."

Kinkley asserts that in the post-Mao "detective stories" politics are subservient to the whole plot (p. 37); in other words, unlike during the Maoist period, the characters' class background no longer indicates their tendency to engage in criminal behavior. Instead, criminals are motivated by personal grudges, greed, ambition, and other more "universal" character traits that would have been anathema to orthodox Maoist writers and literary critics of the 1950s and 1960s (p. 52).

By contrast, the "penal-law melodramas" have a much more obvious political slant, while still reversing the expectations of readers schooled in Maoist literature. They describe crimes committed for the most part by corrupt local officials and Communist Party bureaucrats, which must then be investigated by brave judges or procurators on lower levels of the official hierarchy than the suspects, or by experienced outsider police officers dispatched from the capital. [End Page 474] As Kinkley demonstrates, the main interest of these stories for readers is not so much in finding out "whodunit," but in their daring critique of crooked Party cadres using all kinds of nefarious means to cover up their crimes and destroy the careers of those brave or foolhardy enough to investigate them (pp. 61-62).

An interesting point that Kinkley notes in passing is that several of these penal-law stories end before justice is actually seen to be done (p. 62). Although the authors imply that the criminals will not escape justice in the end (p. 67), one wonders whether this is an indirect method by which the writers have expressed their doubts as to whether real-life corrupt local officials who covered up terrible crimes would truly be punished. It may be true, as Kinkley argues (p. 81), that these are crime stories, not crusades, but Chinese readers raised on paeans to Party incorruptibility from the 1950s and 1960s would surely find these negative portrayals of provincial Party cadres extremely daring, despite their ostensible settings in the Cultural Revolution past. Here Kinkley underplays the political signi-ficances of these stories, although later (in chapter 4) he does describe the government's continuing suspicion of crime fiction throughout the 1976-1983 period.

Chapter 2, "Traditions," focuses mainly on crime fiction in pre-twentieth-century...

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