Aminda Smith’s forthcoming book, Thought Reform and China’s Dangerous Classes: Reeducation, Resistance, and the People focuses on Chinese Communist reformatories, where agents of the state worked to transform beggars, prostitutes, and other “vagrants” into new socialist citizens. She explores reeducation centers as both institutions and symbolic spaces through which “The People” were created.

Aminda Smith is Associate Professor of History at Michigan State University.