China S Criminal Justice System And The Trial Of Pro Democracy Dissidents

Since the Tiananmen Square incident in 1989 there has been increasing international pressure on China to improve its approach to human rights, whilst at the same time the Chinese government has itself realised that it needs to improve its approach, and has indeed done much to implement improvements. This book explores systematically the international engagement in human rights in China and assesses the impact of such foreign involvement. It looks at particular areas including criminal justice, labour, and religious freedom, considers the processes by which international pressure is brought to bear and the processes by which improvements are implemented in China, and concludes that, whilst China’s human rights record has improved more than many people realise, further improvements are still needed.

Drawing on insights from the author's own empirical data obtained from systematic observation of the daily routines within Chinese criminal justice institutions, this ground-breaking book examines the functional deficiency of the criminal justice system in preventing innocent individuals from being wrongly accused and convicted. Set within a broad socio-legal context, it outlines the strategic interrelationships between key legal actors, the deep-seated legal culture embedded in practice, the deficiency of integrity of the system and the structural injustices that follow. The author traces criminal case files in the criminal process – how they are constructed, scrutinised and used to dispose of cases and convict defendants in lieu of witnesses' oral testimony. This book illustrates that the Chinese criminal justice system as a state apparatus of social control has been framed through performance indicators, bureaucratic management and the central value of collectivism in such a way as to maintain the stability of the authoritarian power. The Construction of Guilt in China will appeal to academics, researchers, policy advisers and practitioners working in the areas of criminal law, comparative criminal justice, criminology and Chinese studies. Winner of the 2020 SLS Peter Birks Prize for Outstanding Legal Scholarship.

This comprehensive study examines the development and changing characteristics of the judicial system and reform process over the past three decades in China. As the role of courts in society has increased so too has the amount of public complaints about the judiciary. At the same time, political control over the judiciary has retained its tight-grip. The shortcomings of the contemporary system, such as institutional deficiencies, shocking cases of injustice and cases of serious judicial corruption, are deemed quite appalling by an international audience. Using a combination of traditional modes of legal analysis, case studies, and empirical research, this study reflects upon the complex progress that China has made, and continues to make, towards the modernisation of its judicial system. Li offers a better understanding on how the judicial system has transformed and what challenges lay ahead for further enhancement. This book is unique in providing both the breadth of coverage and yet the substantive details of the most fundamental as well as controversial subjects concerning the operation of the courts in China.

China, after some twenty years of reform, is no longer a country without law. Indeed, one may legitimately complain that there are too many laws that are changing too rapidly. However, law acquires no life nor performs its intended social functions without proper implementation and enforcement. Here, few people, Chinese or foreign, are content with the general situation of implementation of law in China. The problems and difficulties in implementing and enforcing laws and regulations are reported and discussed in the various forums of the Chinese media almost on a daily basis, and often reported in Western media also. Academics in China are filling the pages of various legal journals with their diagnoses and analyses of the causes of, and solutions to, the lack of proper implementation of law, and legal regulations and policy measures are being issued to deal with these problems and to overcome the difficulties. The future of the rule of law in China, as we are so often reminded by scholars of Chinese politics and law, largely depends on the proper implementation and enforcement of law. This is a book about `law-in-action' in China, that is, it focuses on the administration of the law as a process through which `law-in-the-books' is put into action and, hence, is made to perform its intended social functions. It deals with the process, the institutional settings (the players), and the political, economic, social, and cultural settings (the factors) involved in the administration of law in China. Throughout the book, we will see a variety of problems and difficulties involved in implementing and enforcing laws and regulations that are identified and analyzed by the contributors. We will also see analyses on legal regulations and policy measures that have been issued to rectify the many identified problems, to raise the standard of actual implementation of law, and to improve the functioning of the various law-implementing/enforcing authorities. Additionally, the book provides various case studies on implementation of law in China. The present book, we believe, is among the first collective efforts at a systematic and comprehensive study of the implementation of law in China, and we hope that it will stimulate many more such studies - studies on the actual operation and impact of law on society and on individuals.

Traditionally, social theorists in the West have structured models of state social control according to the tenet that socialization is accomplished by means of external controls on behavior: undesirable actions are punished and desirable actions result either in material reward or a simple respite from the oppressive attentions of an authoritarian state. In this volume, the author presents the tradition of law in China as an exception to the Western model of social control. The Confucian bureaucracy that has long structured Chinese social life melded almost seamlessly with the Maoist revolutionary agenda to produce a culture in which collectivism and an internalized adherence to social law are, in some respects, congenital features of Chinese social consciousness. Through her investigation of the Maoist concept of revolutionary justice and the tradition of conformist acculturation in China, the author constructs a fascinating counterpoint to traditional Western arguments about social control.