(Not) Talking about Capital Punishment in the Xi Jinping Era

In this paper, we investigate the death penalty in the People’s Republic of China in the Xi Jinping era (2012–). Unlike previous administrations, Xi does not appear to have articulated a signature death penalty policy. Where policy in China is unclear, assessing both the quality and frequency of discourse on the topic can provide evidence regarding an administration’s priorities. Therefore, we analyse death penalty discourse during Xi’s tenure and compare it with discourse under his predecessors. We base our analysis on three large datasets assembled for this project—the collected works of China’s leaders, a complete corpus of The People’s Daily and a database of academic publications in China. We find no references to the death penalty in Xi Jinping’s speeches. We also find a decline in The People’s Daily coverage of the death penalty beginning in 2015 and a sharp decrease in academic publications on capital punishment beginning in 2011. Our findings indicate that discourse on the death penalty has declined in the Xi era. We argue that the death penalty has been demobilised under Xi as a discursive site of political signalling. Finally, we conclude with some observations about discursive silence

Death Penalty Politics: The Fragility of Abolition in Asia and the Pacific

This special collection of articles on the death penalty and the politics of abolition in Asia and the Pacific is published to coincide with the centenary of one of the world’s earliest statutory abolitions, in the Australian state of Queensland, in August 1922. Scholars of the death penalty, its practice and its abolition were invited to participate in a symposium in May 2021 hosted in Melbourne by Eleos Justice at Monash University and the Griffith Centre for Social and Cultural Research at Griffith University. They were joined by lawyers and abolition advocates, including some who had worked on death row cases. This collection seeks to bring perspectives from a variety of disciplines and methods—historical, legal, sociological, comparative—to bear on the questions of retention and abolition in a variety of jurisdictions and time periods. If there is one conclusion to these collective studies, it is the fragility of abolition. Abolition may now be widely embraced as a norm of international human rights law, but its establishment as a comprehensive and irrevocable fact remains elusive. The task of a research collection such as this is to understand why that may be as a guide to what might be pursued in the future regarding abolition

Ideology and organisation in Chinese law: towards a new paradigm for legality

Asian Studie

Female Membership in the Black-Society Style Criminal Organizations: Evidence From a Female Prison in China

From the 1970s onwards, women’s participation in gangs in the mainstream Western social contexts has been increasingly researched. However, the experiences of women in other cultural settings are rarely discussed. This qualitative study focuses on female members of the black-society style criminal organizations (BSSCO) in China. It starts with reviewing literature on female gang membership and on BSSCO so as to locate its discussions in the international criminological framework. This is followed by a methodology section, and then it analyses the empirical findings. This article seeks to provide some theoretical insights into the construction of female criminal membership in broader social contexts

The politics of law and stability in China /

'This fascinating book explores how issues of law and justice are being re-defined by China's obsession with 'social stability' and how this might impact upon claims to legitimacy that the Party-state advances. A first-rate team of experts put their lens on a wide range of important areas including trial and settlement practices, administrative law, criminal justice, environmental pollution, labor relations, land ownership, policing and welfare. Each contribution offers key insights into how we should understand the effects of China's response to increasing social discord.'--Mike McConville, The Chinese University of Hong Kong. The Politics of Law and Stability in China examines the nexus between social stability and the law in contemporary China. It explores the impact of Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) rationales for social stability on legal reforms, criminal justice operations and handling of disputes and social unrest inside and outside China's justice agencies. The book presents an extensive investigation into the conceptual and empirical approaches by the Party-state to the management of Chinese citizen complaint and unrest. It explores how the Party-state responds to what it sees as potentially de-stabilizing social action such as public protest, discord, deviance and criminal behaviour. This timely and important study reaches across a broad variety of areas within the legal sphere, including substantive criminal law and criminal procedure law reform, labour law, environment and land disputes, policing and surveillance, and anti-corruption drives. The central thread running through all the chapters concerns how the imperative of social stability has underpinned key Party-state approaches to social management and responses to crime, legal disputes and social unrest across the last decade in China. This book will appeal to lawyers, political science scholars and social scientists in the area of China studies. Scholars generally interested in Chinese criminal law and criminal law procedures will also find much in this book that will be of interest to them

Courts on the Campaign Path: criminal court work in the 'Yanda 2001' anti-crime campaign

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China’s Death Penalty: The Supreme People’s Court, the Suspended Death Sentence and the Politics of Penal Reform

This paper examines the issue of judicial discretion and the role of the Supreme People's Court (SPC) in death penalty reform since 2007. The SPC has been encouraging judges to give 'suspended' death sentences rather than 'immediate execution' for many crimes. This process entails encouraging judges to use their discretion to recognize mitigating circumstances that would allow them to sentence offenders to a suspended death sentence The SPC has used 'guidance' instruments which include 'directives' and other SPC interpretations and a new 'case guidance' system which provides case exemplars to follow. We explore these guidance instruments as a way of deepening our understanding of how law, politics and judicial practice is interwoven to achieve reform goals.No Full Tex