Books by Harold Tanner

The civil war in China that ended in the 1949 victory of Mao Zedong’s Communist forces was a major blow to US interests in the Far East and led to heated recriminations about how China was "lost." Despite their significance, there have been few studies in English of the war's major campaigns. The Liao-Shen Campaign was the final act in the struggle for control of China’s northeast. After the Soviet defeat of Japan in Manchuria, Communist Chinese and then Nationalist troops moved into this strategically important area. China’s largest industrial base and a major source of coal, Manchuria had extensive railways and key ports (both still under Soviet control). When American mediation over control of Manchuria failed, full-scale civil war broke out. By spring of 1946, Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist armies had occupied most of the southern, economically developed part of Manchuria, pushing Communist forces north of the Songhua (Sungari) River. But over the next two years, the tide would turn. The Communists isolated the Nationalist armies and mounted a major campaign aimed at destroying the Kuomintang forces. This is the story of that campaign and its outcome, which were to have such far-reaching consequences.

As it set forth to achieve rapid modernizing economic growth under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping, the People's Republic simultaneously undertook to reform China's criminal justice system in order to make it more efficient, more accountable to central authority, and better suited to the task of maintaining public order in a changing economic and social environment. Taking a historical approach, this book draws on a wide variety of openly and internally published laws, legal interpretations, talks, speeches, Communist Party documents, collections of criminal cases and other sources ranging from the 1950s to the 1990s in order to portray the development of the Chinese criminal justice system between 1979 and 1985 and to place these changes in the context of the reform agenda of Deng's China. Particular attention is paid to the practice of criminal justice and the reform of prisoners, to the role of campaigns in the development of the Chinese criminal justice system, and to the relationship between crime trends, criminal justice, and modernization.