Policing Serious Crime in China

Susan Trevaskes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136951824
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Derecho
• Subtopic: Derecho penal

Despite a resurgence in the number of studies of Chinese social control over the past decade or so, no sustained work in English has detailed the recent developments in policy and practice against serious crime, despite international recognition that Chinese policing of serious crime is relatively severe and that more people are executed for crime in China each year than in the rest of the world combined.

In this book the author skilfully explores the politics, practice, procedures, and public perceptions of policing serious crime in China, focusing on one particular criminal justice practice – anti-crime campaigns – in the period of transition from planned to market economy from the 1980s to the first years of the twenty-first century. Susan Trevaskes analyzes the elements that led to the Hard Strike becoming the preferred method of attacking the growing problem of serious crime in China before going on to examine the factors surrounding the failure of the Hard Strike as a way of addressing the main problems of serious crime in China today, that is drug trafficking and organized crime.

Drawing on a rich variety of Chinese sources Serious Crime in China is an original and informed read for scholars of China, criminologists generally and the international human rights community.

1 The rise of campaign justice

The purpose of this chapter is to illustrate the unremitting nature of the onslaught of specialized struggles that occurred in China from the mid-1980s to the end of the twentieth century. The nation’s first Strike Hard campaign, which ended in late 1986, produced offspring in the form of ‘specialized struggles’ that would propel the culture of campaign justice into the twenty-first century. We find that targeting specific crime groups signifies a reworking of the generic Strike Hard campaign (1983–86) into a more particularistic approach. Although these specialized struggles have been a mainstay of criminal justice operations against serious crime in China since the mid-1980s, they have not been examined in detail in literature outside China.¹ In this chapter we explore the recent history of nationally implemented specialized drives and then move to a particular focus on one jurisdiction – Beijing from the mid-1980s to 2000.

The repeated listing of campaigns and their targets tabled in this chapter serves the purpose of supporting my argument, which is that the ubiquitous nature of specialized struggles during the 1980s and 1990s cemented the popularity of campaign justice, if not with grassroots police then at least with key figures in the party. Specialized struggles created a chain of continuity that gave momentum and cohesion to the model of campaign justice. It is the ever-present and unrelenting nature of these campaigns that helped to entrench the culture of campaign justice in the 1980s and 1990s.

As early as 1988, Public Security Bureau (PSB) researchers had begun to recognize and report on what they saw as an uphill battle by the state to halt the march of crime. Murmurs of discontent pointed to the inability of campaigns to live up to their ambitious deterrence goals. Internal criticisms within the PSB, however, failed to halt the march of campaigns in the 1990s despite the presence of evidence that suggested the counterproductive effects of campaigns. The final section of this chapter relates the beginning of attempts by policing authorities to sidestep party officials’ insistence on using campaigns as the sole panacea for the control of serious crime. Here we briefly outline the reaction of public security practitioners to the relentless succession of campaigns during the 1990s, as we find that the surface appearance of unity and harmony of interests within the ranks of criminal justice began to be challenged by the stirrings of internal discord.

The birth of the specialized struggle

Let us begin this examination with an observation by Borge Bakken, not about specialized campaigns, but about the state-induced moral panic that impelled the call to ‘Strike Hard’ in the first generic campaign in 1983.

Alarmist viewpoints about crime reached high proportions at the beginning of the economic reforms in China. The recorded ‘crime boom’ of the early 1980s, and the alarmist atmosphere which triggered the draconian anticrime campaign of 1983... was to a large extent caused by panic about soaring rates of reported crime by juveniles... It adds to the argument about a moral panic that not only were the Chinese crime rates among the lowest in the world, but also that when the Strike Hard campaign was launched in September 1983, the crime rate was the lowest since 1979.²

The 1983 Strike Hard campaign began when a group of party leaders decided there was a need to restore the public order situation in post-Mao China to levels enjoyed in the halcyon days of the 1950s. These leaders believed that the criminal justice agencies had been too soft on crime in recent years and that a policy of dealing ‘severe and swift’ blows to criminals was required to turn around the situation. The observation by Bakken above provides a useful starting point to this study of specialized struggles because it reminds us that a simple ‘responsive state’ thesis is inadequate to explain the popularity of campaigns amongst the political elite. The party-led onslaught of campaigns was not the result of a simple cause-and-effect scenario – that is, a dramatic rise in serious crime in the early 1980s leading to a dramatic state response. This is because the goal of campaigns was never merely to effect a decrease in crime but to enable the appearance of a level of social stability comparable to the golden years of social order in the 1950s when (as the myth goes) it was not necessary to lock one’s door at night. This point is important because it indicates that from the start, the goal of campaigns was based on an idealist vision of order-stability, not on contemporary managerial goals of containment.

Strike Hard 1983 began – and ended – with directives from the top echelons of Politburo power. In the mid-summer of 1983, Deng Xiaoping summoned the newly appointed Minister of Public Security, Liu Fuzhi, to a seaside resort at Beidaihe to order him to launch a new offensive against serious crime. Deng saw the crime epidemic as a result of the public security forces’ unwillingness to attack crime, the inability of the procuratorate (the public prosecution) to conduct timely prosecutions, and the courts’ leniency towards criminals.³ Peng Zhen, head of the Central Politico-legal Affairs Committee, was also at this meeting. Supporting Deng’s view, Peng claimed that his repeated calls to attack crime ‘severely and swiftly’ had been largely ignored by the criminal justice organs and that this lack of enthusiasm and vigour in dealing ‘severely and swiftly’ with crime would be interpreted by Party authorities as tantamount to ‘encouraging crime’.⁴

The targets of the 1983 campaign were individuals and groups who endangered economic reform and social stability, specifically criminals whose crimes disrupted the public order or the social order. Official assessments indicated that the hooligan – who was the main target of Strike Hard 1983 – was the main cause of the deteriorating social and public order in China in the immediate post-Cultural Revolution period. The main targets of Strike Hard 1983–86 had therefore been first of all ‘collective’ offenders – groups of unemployed youths who committed property and public order offences – and secondly, ‘individual’ offenders – more serious offenders who committed murder, robbery, arson and rape.⁵

Strike Hard 1983–86 was described in the official rhetoric as a ‘political struggle’ that required mass participation and support. To mobilize the masses in 1983 and gain their support, the momentum which was needed to kick-start the campaign came in the form of a policy of meting out punishment to criminals ‘severely and swiftly’, and doing so in public arenas that provided the greatest possible publicity. Two key criminal justice activities created momentum: first, ‘united operations’ that caught suspects in ‘one fell swoop’, which involved police and parapolicing forces converging on the streets en masse in ‘search and inspection’ operations and second, public sentencing rallies. Thousands of rallies were conducted nationwide during the campaign, and in two provinces alone there were over 5,000 rallies (2,336 in Liaoning and 2,780 in Guizhou) held between August 1983 and January 1987.⁶

Beijing became the national model for Strike Hard implementation during the first campaign in 1983. On 9 August, a ‘Strike Hard Office’ was established and a meeting was held at the Capital Stadium and attended by 10,000 criminal justice personnel. The Beijing Strike Hard Office designed the overall plan for the national offensive. On 30 August, the first public sentencing rally, organized by the Beijing Municipal Party Committee was held at the Workers’ Stadium and attracted an audience of 100,000. At the rally, the President of the Beijing Intermediate Court, Judge Liu Yuanfeng, announced the death sentence for 30 convicted criminals, 19 of whom had been convicted of murder, 10 of rape and one of armed robbery. The crowd applauded enthusiastically at each announcement of the death penalty. On 17 August, in preparation for the rally, the Beijing Municipal Party Secretary had invited 60 non-CCP politicians, workers, union members, and well-known identities to discuss the plans and rationale for the 30 executions. They were briefed on the circumstances surrounding the crimes and shown the available evidence. They had all agreed to the executions.⁷ These scenes were repeated hundreds of times over throughout the country in the three years of the campaign and, as we mentioned in the Introduction, it has been estimated that over 30,000 people were sentenced to death. From August 1983 to the end of 1986, more than 1,400,000 cases involving 1,721,000 people were tried in the criminal courts nationwide.⁸ The 1983–86 generic Strike Hard campaign provided the specialized drives with a ready-made template that informed their rationale, format and rhetoric. ‘Specialized struggles’ came to the fore within months of the end of Strike Hard in 1986. They appeared on the scene in early 1987 as periodic ‘attacks’ on one type of crime and operated under the guiding principle of police ‘uniting in battle’. These campaigns developed a way of combining police powers into a concentrated force where police from different fields and specialties would unite against a common target.⁹ Most specialized drives, like their parent the Strike Hard campaign, employed Strike Hard policy and followed a four-pronged implementation format. The first step is the announcement at a national public order conference or forum that crime rates have become unacceptably high and have created the need to ‘Strike Hard’ at certain targets. Second, a series of ‘offensives’ are scheduled over a period ranging from weeks to months. After this, a discrete set of enemies to be targeted is determined, and finally a public show of force is organized in the form of large-scale police stings followed by public arrest and sentencing rallies.

Specialized struggles take two main forms – stand-alone campaigns and those implemented as part of the generic Strike Hard campaigns. Some begin as standalone drives and end up enmeshed within generic campaigns. For example, a specialized ...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Policing Serious Crime in China
• Routledge Studies on China in Transition
• Policing Serious Crime in China
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowlegements
• Lists of abbreviations and pinyin words
• Introduction
• 1 The rise of campaign justice
• 2 The campaign template
• 3 Striking hard in the new millennium
• 4 Cracks in the campaign armour
• 5 The people’s war on drugs
• 6 Fighting the collective: The rise of organized crime
• 7 The end of campaign justice?
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index