NCJ Number
91327
Date Published
1983
Length
35 pages
Annotation
This paper identifies and discusses the contending forces and ideas that have so enlivened justice, sociopolicy, legal theory, and research over the course of China's socialist transformation.
Abstract
The Chinese have no equivalent to the term 'criminology' in their language. Instead, they use the words 'cheng fa,' which are best translated as 'political legal.' Police officers, judges, lawyers, justice planners, law professors, and research scientists are all considered political legal specialists or 'cadre.' The fusion of politics and law in Chinese terminology provides some clue to the intense conflicts that have so strained justice policy and often disrupted the careers of those whom westerners might consider criminologists. The revolutionary line and its radical policies have been most strongly supported by unskilled and semiskilled workers, poorer peasants, women, and youth, while middle-level bureaucrats, intellectuals, technicians, wealthier peasants, and former capitalists have a stake in the maintenance of social hierarchies and material inequalities. Justice policy, institutional jurisdiction, and the definition of crime have been strained between these two perspectives. As revolutionaries, the communists considered the feudal system of peasant exploitation to be the germinal crime in Chinese society. This produced efforts to transform socioeconomic structure and reform socioeconomic thinking. The present Peking leadership has emphasized the need to stabilize and regulate society through a complete legal system that can legitimate social and economic policies. The law schools and the legal institutes have undergone dramatic expansion as the legal bureaus have become professionalized, and there has been a rapid growth of codified law. Still, professionalism, codified law, and the conservative theories of state and society have yet to bury Maoism and a criminology that views crime as the result of the failure to bring to completion radical socioeconomic transformation. Some crime trends are discussed. Ninety-eight notes and 42 bibliographic entries are provided.