Borrowed legitimacy and beseeched resources: How competing professionals negotiate identities and forge symbiosis within Chinese community corrections.

This article examines the professional dynamics within Chinese community corrections (CCC), a penal system formally established to emphasize rehabilitative services alongside offender supervision. Drawing on ethnographic and interview data from a large Chinese city pioneering this model, the study explores how justice-oriented professionals (e.g., correctional officers) and service-based professionals (e.g., social workers, psychologists) negotiate their competing roles and identities in delivering rehabilitation. Despite inherent tensions and differing philosophies—justice personnel focusing on legalistic supervision and service providers emphasizing care and treatment—both groups engage in a pragmatic, symbiotic relationship characterized by compromises, identity blurring, and mutual reliance to fulfill CCC's rehabilitative mandate. The findings highlight how justice actors "borrow legitimacy" from service professionals to enhance governance capacity and how service providers, dependent on state resources, sometimes adopt supervisory roles contrary to their caring ethos, illustrating the complex interplay of punishment and welfare logics in China's evolving penal landscape.