“Eric Hobsbawm, with some irony and much love for the history profession, once remarked that ‘theoreticians of all kinds circle around the peaceful herds of historians as they graze on their rich pastures of primary sources.’ He endorsed the encircling of those pastures. Michael Dutton is one of those social science theoreticians who graze on the same rich fields, but at the same time he takes Asian studies and history into new and fascinating areas.”—Børge Bakken, author of The Exemplary Society: Human Improvement, Social Control, and the Dangers of Modernity in China “Michael Dutton’s Policing Chinese Politics is a work of deeply committed political scholarship. It will be of great interest to scholars of Chinese politics and to historians and critics of the socialist movement.”—Piers Beirne, Department of Criminology, University of Southern Maine