Council of Councils
Think Global Health
Online Store
Challenge to China
How Taiwan Abolished Its Version of Re-Education Through Labor
Challenge to China draws attention to an underappreciated aspect of legal reforms in Taiwan, and asks how Taiwan's experience might be relevant to its giant neighbor across the Taiwan Strait.
- Book
- Foreign policy analyses written by CFR fellows and published by the trade presses, academic presses, or the Council on Foreign Relations Press.
More on:
This timely book by Jerome A. Cohen, whose groundbreaking work in the 1960s laid a foundation for the expanding field of Chinese law, and Margaret K. Lewis, professor at Seton Hall University School of Law and an expert on Taiwanese and Chinese law, will be valuable to lawyers, judges, and criminal justice professionals, as well as to anyone interested in legal reform and in the development of criminal justice systems.
The Chinese leadership has for years claimed that it would soon abolish the infamous labor camps for its police-dominated system of "re-education through labor" (RETL) but so far has not taken steps to do so. Although the country's new leadership has signaled that it may finally reform, or perhaps even eliminate, RETL, it is still a reality in China. Having abolished its own similar system of labor camps for liumang--very loosely translated as "hooliganism"--in 2009, Taiwan's success in curbing arbitrary police power stands as a challenge to its neighbor across the strait to outlaw, at last, its analogous system. Taiwan's success in curbing arbitrary police power stands as a challenge to China to follow through on years of false starts on reining in the most egregious exercises of unfettered police power.
More on: