Reimagining Policing Through the Ethics of Care: Insights From Chinese Narratives and Practices

This article reexamines the foundations of policing by advancing homo curans —the caring human—not as a normative ideal, but as an emergent institutional rationality and governance disposition. Positioned as a counter‐logic to the long‐dominant homo economicus model of instrumental rationality, the study analyzes how security is increasingly reframed as a mechanism of collective care, structured by interdependence and responsiveness rather than coercion alone. Methodologically, the study combines critical discourse analysis of 300 Chinese media reports on policing (2014–2024) with 28 semi‐structured interviews involving frontline officers, experts, and citizens. This design traces how homo curans functions as both a discursive legitimation frame and an operational logic across institutional texts and frontline practices. Findings reveal a gradual but uneven “care turn” in Chinese policing narratives. While early coverage emphasized deterrence, performance, and procedural control, post‐2019 discourse increasingly featured relational and preventive vocabularies such as “linkage,” “home visits,” and “warm enforcement.” Pandemic‐era reversals briefly restored coercive frames, yet post‐2022 governance reforms consolidated care‐centered narratives. Interview data corroborate this shift, identifying a routinized de‐escalation → explanation → referral → follow‐up pathway and a dual foundation of legitimacy: procedural correctness and relational recognition. The article contributes to policing studies by demonstrating that homo curans represents a substantive shift in governance logic, moving beyond the binary of coercion versus service to reveal care as an empirically institutionalized dimension of contemporary statecraft.