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This chapter shows that the system of penal reformation originated at the end of the Qing dynasty and in the early Republic with the establishment of modern prisons, which were at the forefront of state projects to remake society through indoctrinating individuals. The Qing scholar-official designers of the system interpreted a Japanese blueprint of a high modernist plan for rehabilitative incarceration in the Neo-Confucian language of moral education and self-cultivation, producing a radical theoretical redefinition of punishment as a social-ethical educative project wherein the penal process became a core means of governance through moral suasion. The moralistic definition of reformation was represented as a modern technique that realized ancient principles and contributed to saving the state. As penal reform was linked with the regaining of national sovereignty, reformation was presented in the early Republic as vital to national renewal through the transformation of criminals into good citizens. By the early 1920s, penal reformation had become the officially enshrined, powerfully conventional ideal of the legal-penal bureaucracy with a generative administrative centrality. It was also widely accepted by new academics, legal experts, elite moralists, and advocates of mass social education, civics, and political indoctrination interested in remaking the minds of “the people” for national transformation.

This chapter concerns the KMT party-state's expansion of the system of penal reformation and its extension beyond prisons in support of state-building agendas to attain legal-penal modernity, reorder urban society, eradicate the drug problem, and suppress the Communist insurgency. In the 1930s, the sustained mass incarceration of drug and political offenders destabilized prisons and undermined the reformative ideal. But this also brought an impetus to prison reform, expansion, the planning of rural labor camps, and the spread of the reformation system to new specialized carceral institutions for drug and political offenders. The new institutions adapted KMT versions of Soviet techniques of party-training and political indoctrination for settings modeled on the existing institutional patterns of penal reformation. Tensions between prison officers and party cadres were minimized through a coalescence around the reformative ideal and its value to their shared sense of paternalistic duty to reform talented “youths” for the nation. By the mid-1930s, party activists, mainly internal security agents, led the political prisons known as self-examination institutes and were promoting their politicized reformation to the prisons and for broader social use just as a wider convergence developed between penal reformation and state programs for national political training and civic-moral suasion.

This chapter illustrates how the imperatives of wartime mobilization produced a stunning escalation of earlier developments. Once unleashed by the eruption of full-scale war in 1937, the intense collective emotions for patriotic resistance to Japan were harnessed to support and inspire processes of reformation by the Chongqing KMT and Yan’an CCP governments. All the major wartime states, including the Japanese occupation authorities and their Wang Jingwei government collaborators, relied on prisons to support the war effort and constructed political prisons led by militarized security-service agents and party activists in part to convert and recruit through thought reform redeemable political enemies. There were also initiatives adapting Japanese and Soviet influences which attempted to develop comprehensive, multi-pronged regimes of custodial and noncustodial thought reform to “re-educate” and so win over “offenders” as well as those recruited to their organizations and members of targeted groups within society that might lead community mass mobilization. Out of the wartime crucible, the regime of reformation/thought reform proliferated not as an alternative to coercive violence, but as a mutually reinforcing companion and enabler of it in the state projects of making war and revolution.

Beginning with an account of the accelerated expansion of the penal reformation and thought reform systems under Kuomintang and Communist authorities amid the late 1940s civil war, this chapter argues that the Communist version that became a core instrument in their process of revolutionary advance, conquest and transformation of society was an ultimate extension of the wartime mode of the system. It also presents a dynamic sense of the culminating moment when the thought reform regime proliferated across China as an integral mechanism critical to the disciplining of a rapidly expanding party and military apparatus, a mushrooming prison labor camp system, and campaigns of revolutionary social-political transformation in the early 1950s. Much of the Communist system of thought reform resembled its predecessors and revealed its debts to the foundations laid in the previous decades. Yet it also featured certain distinctive modes and methods unlike those of its predecessors not just in its vast scale, but also in the experience of its disciplinary process. The Communist thought reform regime regularly inverted a disciplinary mode long designed and still often pursued in highly moralistic terms into forms requiring an amoral commitment to absolute loyalty.