Suchergebnisse

One of the major changes in Chinese Government policy since the death of Mao Zedong has been the new emphasis on the need for stability and regularity in everyday life, to be achieved by the systematic codification of laws and the strengthening of institutions for administering them. Since 1978 much legislation has been enacted with this end in mind, but the significance of this legislation is not self-evident. What the new laws minimally represent is a set of rules promulgated by the government which purport to govern social relationships in specified areas. Whatever else they might mean – that is, what social effects will follow from the declaration of particular rules – needs to be understood through a study of the individuals and institutions that will have to deal with these rules. Fundamentally, this is a matter of asking whether and why violations of "the law" should matter, and who has the power to find a violation and to remedy it.

One of the major changes in Chinese government policy since the death of Mao Zedong has been the new emphasis on the need for stability and regularity in everyday life, to be achieved by the systematic codification of laws and the strengthening of institutions for administering them. The author surveys some basic features of the Chinese legal landscape, understanding the term 'legal' in the broadest sense - by exploring a large sampling of recent literature, seeing what patterns can be found and what assumptions the writer seems to expect the readers to share. The relative loosening of controls on literature since 1973 has made it a richer source than before for the study of Chinese attitudes and values, not only in politics but in other areas of life as well. (DÜI-Sen)

The institutions of criminal law and their relation to human rights in the People's Republic of China are worth studying for a number of reasons. First, it is in the realm of criminal law and human rights discourse that much of the Chinese conception of law itself is worked out. Secondly, criminal law in China, like criminal law anywhere, carries with it a theory of social order and disorder that is worth looking at for its own sake. One of the challenges facing Chinese criminal law today is that of rejustifying itself in the face of the enormous social changes that have taken place since the beginning of economic reform and China's opening to the outside world in the late 1970s. Thirdly, as long as human rights remain a matter of international concern, one cannot ignore the institutions of punishment that govern one-fifth of the world's population. This article gives an overview of issues of criminal law and human rights as they affect Chinese society today.

As the authors point out, for most of the history of the PRC, the official view has been that crime is a product of class society - a society based on the private ownership of the means of production. According to this theory, the socialist system not only does not produce crime, but brings about its eventual extination. As he decades since 1949 passed, however, and crimes with no plausible class-based explanation continued to occur, the traditional theories were quietly dropped. The authors discuss the institutions of criminal law and their relation to human rights in the PRC. (DÜI-Sen)