Unifying Chinese Fingerprinting during the Nanjing Decade, 1927–37: A Case Study of the Fingerprint Investigation Commission

Beginning in the 1910s, police and prisons in China began to adopt various systems for organizing their collections of fingerprint records. Some adopted the Henry system, used within the British empire, while others used the systems of Vucetich, Roscher, and others. In order to unify police and judicial record-keeping, China's Nationalist government convened a "Fingerprint Investigation Commission" composed of bureaucrats and identification experts in early 1936. The group was tasked with devising a new fingerprint registration system that could be implemented nationally.

Taking the history of the Commission as a case study, this paper explores the biometric policies and ambitions of the Nationalist state during a period in which Chiang Kai-shek and his government struggled to maintain rule over China amid increasing Japanese aggression. At one level, the history of the Commission suggests that the Nationalists had significant biometric ambitions: unifying the identification practices of all Chinese police and prisons was a daunting task, no less so given the Commission's decision to base its work on exhaustive surveys of the fingerprint characteristics of China's population.

At the same time, the Commission's mandate was focused on a narrow application of biometrics: the registration of suspected criminals and imprisoned convicts. The Nationalist government did not show interest in fingerprinting the population as a whole or using searchable fingerprint records for civil registration, a hallmark of the kind of expansive "biometric state" that would be established in South Africa over the 20th century (Breckenridge, 2014). That the early People's Republic of China adopted a system of fingerprinting that was strikingly similar – unified nationally, focused on criminal identification, and based on the careful study of biometric data – raises the possibility that there were long-term continuities in how the drastically different mid-century Nationalist and Communist regimes applied biometric technologies to domestic governance.