Public Attitudes toward Auxiliary Police in China: a Preliminary Investigation

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Public Attitudes toward Auxiliary Police in China: a Preliminary Investigation Ivan Y. Sun 1

2

& Yuning Wu & Rong Hu

3

Received: 2 June 2020 / Accepted: 8 October 2020/ # Springer Nature B.V. 2020

Abstract

Despite their colossal size and importance in policing, China’s auxiliary police forces have garnered very little research attention. This study attempts to fill our knowledge gap by first describing key features that distinguish the auxiliary police from the regular police in China and their counterparts in Western societies, followed by an empirical investigation of public attitudes toward the auxiliary police in China. Based on survey data collected from a coastal city in China, we reported the general patterns of people’s evaluations of auxiliary officers and assessed whether variables representing institutional trust, media exposure, and neighborhood context are predictive of Chinese attitudes toward the auxiliary police. We found that Chinese citizens rated their local auxiliary officers very positively. Trust in the government and police and known negative reports about the auxiliary police are linked to Chinese’ global satisfaction with the auxiliary police. Trust in the police, exposure to and belief in negative media reports about the auxiliary police, and perception of neighborhood collective efficacy are associated with people’s specific attitudes toward auxiliary officers. Implications for future research and policy are discussed. Keywords Auxiliary police . Chinese police . Institutional trust . Media exposure . Neighborhood context

* Ivan Y. Sun [email protected] Yuning Wu [email protected] Rong Hu [email protected]

1

Department of Sociology and Criminal Justice, University of Delaware, Newark, DE 19716, USA

2

Department of Criminal Justice, Wayne State University, Detroit, MI 48202, USA

3

School of Sociology and Anthropology, Xiamen University, Xiamen, China

Asian Journal of Criminology

Introduction Since Xi Jinping came to power in 2012, China has moved unprecedentedly toward the most authoritarian society, with the police exercising the key role in governmental surveillance, censorship, and punishment of its populace. The 2 million strong regular police force, the socalled People’s Police (minjing in Chinese), assisted by the massive auxiliary police (fujing in Chinese) and the quasi-military People’s Armed Police (wujing in Chinese), is empowered with seemingly unlimited authority and resources to protect the privileges and interests of the Chinese Communist Party. Given the pivotal role of the Chinese police in domestic governance, an increasing number of studies have devoted to analyzing various aspects of policing, with research on public attitudes toward the police as one of the most frequently investigated areas. Relying predominately on public opinion surveys, a vein of recent inquiries has noticeably extended the criminological literature by studying Chinese views on the police along such evaluative measures as general attitudes (Michelson and Read 2011; Zhang et al. 2014),

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