Policing Public Assembly in China: Historical Continuity, Constitutional Departure, and Political Change

This paper is a comparative study of the law of assembly between the People's Republic of China (PRC) vs. the Republic of China (ROC). The comparison is achieved by looking at how these two Chinese societies structure police powers during assembly, procession, and demonstration — textually and contextually. Particularly, it investigates how the forces of history, constitution, and politics converge to define and shape the Law of Assembly. This comparative project is conducted to understand the relative development of police powers in the two Chinese societies, which once were linked by history and culture and are now divided by geography and ideology. In a still larger context, this research employs comparative policing to expose and explicate how the police in two closed societies, the ROC (Confucianist) and the PRC (Socialist), come to terms with social protests and political challenges, and suggests how to balance the forces of reform and control with the use of law.

Notes

Contact information: Kam C. Wong, Chair and Associate Professor, Department of Criminal Justice, Xavier University, Cincinnati, Ohio. Telephone: (W): 920–424–7304. (H): 920–4106204. Visiting Professor of Law, City University of Hong Kong, School of Law. E‐mail: [email protected]