Policing Madness in Early Twentieth-Century Beijing

Prior to the twentieth century, madness in China was typically managed
within the home, and the state was only expected to intervene when
the mentally ill individual committed a serious crime. In the first two
decades of the century, however, the late Qing and early Republican
governments began to adopt a more proactive stance toward the
policing of madness. Under pressure from foreign missionaries, Qing
authorities erected a public asylum in Beijing in 1908 1 which was placed
under the management of the municipal police. From this point
forward, the municipality began to preemptively arrest and
institutionalize the insane, regardless of whether they had broken the
law. This talk will examine the shift from reactive to proactive policing
of madness, and will discuss why the Beijing police chose to
institutionalize the individuals they did. In so doing, it will seek to shed
light on the relationship between modern statecraft and shifting
conceptions of madness in early twentieth-century China.