Tanner, Harold M.
(Harold Miles Tanner)

PERSONAL:

Education: New England College, B.A., 1983; University of London, M.A. (area studies, China and Japan), 1985; Beijing Languages Institute, M.A., (modern Chinese), 1987; Columbia University, M.Phil., 1990, Ph.D., 1994.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Department of History, University of North Texas, Box 310650, Denton, TX 76203-0650. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

University of North Texas, Denton, assistant professor, 1994-2000, associate professor of history, 2000—, history department chair, 2001-05. Director and lead instructor, Faculty Development Institute on East Asia, Columbia University, 2001, 2003-05. Codesigner and coteacher, AP World History Summer Institute, 2000-02.

MEMBER:

American Historical Association, Association for Asian Studies, Southwest Conference on Asian Studies.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Sasakawa Fellowship, San Diego State University, 1995; Developing Scholars Award, University of North Texas, 1999-2000; Freeman Foundation grant, 2004-05.

WRITINGS:

Strike Hard! Anti-Crime Campaigns and Chinese Criminal Justice, 1979-1985, East Asia Program, Cornell University (Ithaca, NY), 1999.

Contributor of articles to collections, including Warfare in China since 1600, edited by Kenneth Swope, Ashgate Publishing (Aldershot, England), 2005. Contributor to professional journals and periodicals, including Journal of Military History, Twentieth Century China, Law and Social Enquiry, China Information, and Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs.

SIDELIGHTS:

Historian and professor Harold M. Tanner concentrates his scholarship on twentieth-century China and Japan, and the ways in which the modern world has influenced their development. His study Strike Hard! Anti-Crime Campaigns and Chinese Criminal Justice, 1979-1985 examines the development of Chinese criminal law in the post-Maoist era. From 1949, the time of the Communist revolution under Mao Zedong, until the chairman's death in 1976, crime in China was defined almost entirely by the Communist party bureaucracy. Any type of behavior that offended the Communist authorities could be (and usually was) prosecuted without mercy and occasionally without trial. This process began to change in 1979, when China passed its first criminal code, and in 1980, when the country created a procedural law for prosecutors. In an effort to stay true to its socialist roots, the Chinese Communist party launched a massive crackdown on criminal behavior, which ballooned during the 1980s. Their efforts to create a more moral society through this crackdown, however, undermined their earlier attempts to systematize the Chinese legal system.

One thesis of Tanner's book, critics noted, was that the Communist regime relied less on traditional Chinese concepts of law and order, and instead followed a pattern closer to that of the rest of the world. The book, claimed Michael W. Dowdle in his Pacific Affairs review, "largely rejects claims that China's approach to crime and criminal justice problems are primarily historically and/or culturally path-determinate, or founded on uniquely Chinese conceptualisations of law and society, and suggests instead that China's experiences and responses are generally consistent with what we find in many developing societies." Strike Hard!, declared Melissa Macauley in the American Historical Review, "remains highly useful reading for specialists in Chinese legal and institutional history."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

American Historical Review, June, 2000, Melissa Macauley, review of Strike Hard! Anti-Crime Campaigns and Chinese Criminal Justice, 1979-1985, pp. 906-907.

Pacific Affairs, fall, 2000, Michael W. Dowdle, review of Strike Hard!, p. 425.*