Larry Saha Room #2175, Haydon-Allen Building.  Presented by: Professor Børge Bakken

RSVP for light lunch: Dr Al Klovdahl alden.klovdahl@anu.edu.au  by Friday, 29 October

Conrad and Schneider’s now classical work on the historical transformation of definitions of deviance from “badness” to “sickness” is relevant for the situation in China today, although with some modifications. The weakly founded medical/psychiatric profession and the strong political/ideological discourse in China leads to a strange combination of medicalisation and moralisation, even criminalisation in this country. The “sick” is often combined with the “bad”, and “sickness” is often seen as a secondary sign of “badness”. The pan-moralist tradition of ancient China seems to be closely combined with the Communist era’s strong belief in political-ideological correctness, and its strong belief in social engineering. It is interesting to note that my research on crime and deviance in China in the 1980s and 1990s seems to be confirmed by today’s discourse, although there are new moral panics and new forms of medical-moralistic definitions of deviance in China today. Still, the categories of deviance are very much socially constructed entities closely related to the moral-political order of present day China. I will use three cases to
underline my argument. First, the type of deviance I call “majority deviance”, related to the case of the prejudice and dangers associated with the only-child. My second example has to do with what I term the “wayward girl” and the moral panics concerning so-called zaolian – or “premature love” among young girls. The third example is the new panic surrounding “internet addiction disorder” or IAD. While the “disco” and the “dance hall” were the sites of disorder in the 1980s and 90s, the wangba – or “internet bar” is now seen as the most dangerous site of crime and deviance.

Professor Børge Bakken is Director of the Criminology Masters Programme at the Dept. of Sociology, the University of Hong Kong. He is on sabbatical at the ANU until January 2011. He is presenting this year’s Morrison Lecture on the norms of death and the death penalty in China. Bakken has written extensively on crime, control, and deviance in China, on cultural sociology, norms, and modernity. Among his books are The Exemplary Society (Oxford University Press, 2000) and Crime, Punishment and Policing in China (Rowman & Littlefield, 2007). He is currently working on a book on punitive norms: The Punitive Society. Bakken, a Mandarin speaker, has worked in Scandinavia, Germany, Australia, the United States, and China/Hong Kong.