The Sacred Red Tape: Bureaucratic Rehabilitation, Managerial Care and Organisational Formalities in Chinese Drug Policing

With the therapeutic turn in China's drug governance, researchers have identified numerous factors that undermine the success of police-led rehabilitation for drug offenders. Yet existing scholarship on Chinese drug policing has largely overlooked the organisational logics and dynamics that shape treatment delivery within police agencies. Drawing on ethnographic data from drug policing in a large Chinese city, this study examines drug rehabilitation and its implementation within a police agency. Our analysis reveals that distinct bureaucratic norms – which we term the “sacred red tape” – have emerged in officers’ routine activities and permeate their interactions with drug offenders. We demonstrate how the police's mystification of organisational formalism and reverence for bureaucratic rigidity shape officers’ interpretations of drug offenders’ vulnerabilities and their framing of rehabilitation objectives. Overall, drug policing practices are caught in an organisational vortex structured by bureaucratic edicts that prioritise formalism and managerialism over offender well-being. By illuminating the influence of bureaucratic norms and ideologies on drug policing practices, this study carries implications for research and policy on contemporary China's expanding penal modernism.