Suzanne Scoggins, Ph.D.
suzannescoggins@gmail.com
Associate Professor
Clark University
About Me:
I am an associate professor of political science and Director of Asian Studies at Clark University at Clark University. My work focuses on policing in reform-era China and explores themes of local governance, bureaucratic policies, and authoritarian control. I'm the author of Policing China: Street-Level Cops in the Shadow of Protest, and my articles have appeared in the China Quarterly, Comparative Politics, and the Journal of Chinese Political Science. My research has also attracted attention from The Economist. I received my PhD in political science from UC Berkeley in 2016.
Research Interests
Asian Politics
Bureaucracy
Comparative Political Institutions
Crime Politics
Non-Democratic Regimes
Police Policy
Democratization And Authoritarianism
Power And Authority
Public Opinion
China
Police Violence
Police And Politics
Police, Police Reform
Social Media
Countries of Interest
China
Hong Kong
My Research:
Why would police officers look the other way when criminals run from the scene of a crime? Why would an officer fix a broken lock in exchange for the victim calling to say she reported a break-in by mistake? My research investigates issues of front-line policing and security capacity in the People’s Republic of China. It probes the challenges faced by ground-level officers and their superiors at the Ministry of Public Security as they attempt to do their jobs in the face of funding limitations, reform challenges, and structural issues that complicate police response on the ground. To do so, I rely on interviews, station-level data, news reports, internal documents, and social media postings to understand how local policing in today’s China works.
Publications:
Journal Articles:
accepted for publication
accepted for publication
The study of policing in China is a small but growing subfield with critical insights for law and society scholars. This article examines the fundamentals of policing, tracing the organization’s history and institutional basics before turning to a review of the emerging literature. Scholars have made headway analyzing topics like policing practices, social control, public relations, and police perspectives, but there is still much work to be done. Partly because research on the police faces methodological challenges, the literature is uneven, leaving gaps in our knowledge about key issues such as police corruption, regional variation, and the relationship between police and private security groups. By outlining what we do and do not know about policing in China, this article parses the field’s best answers to questions of how police officers and the Public Security Bureau enforce state mandates and respond to challenges on the ground.
Facing heavy caseloads, administrative drudgery, and low pay, China’s street-level police are frustrated. Front-line officers from six cities report that discontent encourages shirking, corruption, and waste. Grievances and feelings of powerlessness have not been reduced by recent reforms, and give us cause to rethink the image of police as effective arms of a highly securitized state.
Claims that China's people are exhibiting a rising “rights consciousness” have become commonplace, with some suggesting this phenomenon is driving political change. Yet it is often unclear what the concept means, leading to ambiguous or contradictory conclusions from field research. In order to create a basis for more systematic analysis, we develop a rational choice framework that characterizes three different factors that could lead to rights-conscious behaviour: changing values, changing government policies, and changing expectations of the behaviour of others. What rising rights consciousness implies for social stability can vary dramatically, depending on which change is at work. Rights consciousness resulting from changes in values or in shared expectations of behaviour is destabilizing for the CCP's continued rule, whereas rights consciousness derived from government policies has a stabilizing effect. While in practice these can be interrelated in complex ways, empirical research would benefit from greater attention to these distinctions.
Challenges doing research in China
Media Appearances:
TV Appearances:
Clark University's Scoggins on APEC Summit Takeaways November 17th, 2023, 7:14 PM EST Clark University Associate Professor of Political Science and 'Policing China' author, Suzanne Scoggins, discusses President Biden and President Xi Jinping's meeting at the APEC Summit earlier this week and breaks down what her biggest takeaways are. Suzanne speaks with Annmarie Hordern and Joe Mathieu on Bloomberg's "Balance of Power." (Source: Bloomberg)
Exploring the origins of protests in China, their impact on China's ruling party and use of high-tech surveillance to crackdown protests.
Newspaper Quotes:
China says it has achieved a miraculously low-crime society The truth is more complicated "Knowing what crimes are rising and falling would enable police to better combat them. But even the government seems to have only a fuzzy sense of what is happening. “I had thought that the police stations actually had accurate data that was different from the reported data,” says Suzanne Scoggins, a criminologist at Clark University in Massachusetts. She interviewed officers in cities across China. “Several of my best sources told me that simply wasn’t the case,” she says.
“In comparative perspective, the Chinese state is increasingly adept at collecting a broad range of information, and government officials would justify that this is done in the name of public security, i.e., residents who have done nothing wrong have nothing to fear,” Suzanne Scoggins, an assistant professor at Clark University who studies Chinese policing, told Grid.
"The automated alerts don’t result in the same level of police response. Often, the police give priority to warnings that point to political problems, like protests or other threats to social stability, said Suzanne E. Scoggins, a professor at Clark University who studies China’s policing."
“The police forces involved have been training for this type of protest for years, even decades,” said Suzanne Scoggins, a Clark University professor specializing in China’s security and policing system. “The state has invested considerable resources in coordinating protest response with different agencies and local government leaders. In short, the local, provincial, and national levels are well prepared,” Scoggins said. However, this doesn’t make it easy for the state, according to Scoggins, as the high-profile events involve historically sensitive groups like students and ethnic minority group members. “I doubt this is going to be a 1989 situation,” Scoggins said, referring to the bloody crackdown in Tiananmen Square, where the government sent troops to suppress student-led democracy demonstrations. “It is far more likely that we will see the state attempt to subdue dissent quietly with curfews and other measures like enhanced police presence so that ground-level forces will need to resort to public repression as infrequently as possible.” “Police and other state agents on the ground have to act carefully if they are going to avoid further inflaming the situation,” she added.
The new event is part of the central government’s increasing effort to recognise the hardship of police work on the front lines, said Suzanne Scoggins, assistant professor at the department of political science of Clark University in Massachusetts. “We can see the designation of a national police day as an extension of those efforts to show appreciation for the work that police officers do,” she said. “Encouraging others to celebrate may also bring some diffuse benefits by fostering goodwill toward the police.” Scoggins said she assumed there will be an increase in television specials and social media postings from police accounts on the day, as details of the occasion are yet to be announced.
While it might seem useful to have full oversight of citizens’ movements and vital signs, making use of data of that scale requires manpower and training that China’s police force lacks, says Suzanne Scoggins, an assistant professor at Clark University. Scoggins, who researches policing and authoritarian control in China, says tracing the spread of a virus is different from tracking the movements of dissidents or criminals. “This is still relatively new technology that is likely being used in a way that is different from its original design,” Scoggins says. “It may help some, but we shouldn’t expect it to contain an outbreak.”
“On May 7, Hogan Lam heard that the Hong Kong Police Force (HKPF) had posted a job listing on McMaster University’s careers services website. The fourth-year arts student at the University of Toronto wondered if similar postings were up at his school. Lam found a posting listing 50 police inspector positions with the Hong Kong police the next day… Suzanne Scoggins is a political science professor at Massachusetts’ Clark University with expertise in Chinese politics, policing and protest management. She calls the force’s overseas recruitment drive an interesting development, especially during Hong Kong’s uncertain political times. ‘In mainland China, rotations are used heavily – especially at higher levels – to reduce corruption,’ Scoggins wrote in an email. ‘As a former British colony, though, the practice of recruiting police from outside of Hong Kong used to be commonplace.’”
“The stories not only create a positive narrative about the victims, but their choice of professions also shows how the tragedy brought them closer to the state,” said Suzanne Scoggins, an assistant professor of political science at Clark University in Massachusetts. ... By reframing the quake anniversary as a day of thanksgiving, local officials are probably trying to forge an atmosphere of unity, reinforcing “the way in which government groups and residents worked together,” Professor Scoggins said.
"For frontline police, corruption is more a function of guanxi and gift-giving culture meeting opportunity. It's well known that you can use money, gifts, and connections to get things done, and the police are no exception," Suzanne Scoggins, an expert in Chinese policing at Clark University, told Business Insider.
Such stresses are common across China, according to a new study by Suzanne Scoggins and Kevin O’Brien at the University of California, Berkeley. They argue that a policeman’s lot is “filled with uncertainty, hardship and feelings of powerlessness”. The authors conclude that one must “rethink the image” of the much-disliked police in China’s authoritarian state.
Blog Posts:
Re-politicising policing in China
Policing Public Relations in China
Violence Against the Chinese Police