Moral panics, crime rates and harsh punishment in China.

• Jurisdiction: Australia
• Date: 15 December 2004
• Author: Bakken, Borge
• Published date: 15 December 2004
• Author: Bakken, Borge

Today's extremely harsh sentencing regime in China, which includes extensive use of the death penalty, was triggered in particular by a moral panic about juvenile crime and to some extent economic crime in the early 1980s. The policy was justified by the belief that China was experiencing an extreme upsurge in crime. A critical look at Chinese crime rates over the last 25 years does not support this belief, however. Chinese reactions against crime instead have to be seen in terms of the regime's legitimacy and alleged defence of the social and moral order in a society undergoing rapid change.

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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, the yanda (hard strikes), a campaign of 'hard strikes against serious criminal activities', was to a large extent caused by panic about soaring rates of reported crime by juveniles. Although the panic was also fuelled by the Communist Party elites' fear that economic crimes could hamper the modernisation program, the harsh justice that followed was substantially triggered by a moral panic about disorderly youth in a rapidly changing society. The anticrime campaigns particularly targeted juvenile gang leaders (touzi) rather than corrupt officials and entrepreneurs (Xu & Wu, 1987, pp. 398-406; Cao, 1988, p. 278). The Chinese reaction against juvenile crime and juvenile transgression in general fits well with the picture painted by Stan Cohen's classic description of a moral panic. He described the phenomenon as a situation occuring when a 'condition, episode, person, or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests. Such threats are represented in a stylised and stereotypical fashion by the mass media as well as by the moral educators' (Cohen, 1980, p. 9). The Chinese moral educators worked hard trying to link former ideological truths to the need for stability under the upheavals of 'market socialism'. Youthful sexual transgression was often linked to the perceived increase in juvenile crime, and it was not coincidental that the campaign against 'spiritual pollution' (jingshen wuran) was launched in the same year as the negative counterpart of the ideological 'spiritual civilisation' (jingshen wenming) movement (Bakken, 2000, pp. 317-376). To some extent the panic went beyond the issue of youth. Some much-publicised unsolved crime cases had shamed the police and the state. Face had to be regained. In particular, the case against the two brothers Wang was important. The Wangs killed several policemen and kept escaping the law, humiliating the police in the process. The two were finally killed in a shootout with the army.

The Cultural Revolution baby boomers, however, became the prime stereotypical scapegoats of this moral panic. Such panics are triggered by negative expectations about ambiguous situations. The early 1980s gave rise to precisely such a situation, uprooting the habitual ways in which people had dealt with life under socialism. The regime needed to boost its legitimacy by showing that it was in control of the negative social consequenses of market reforms. In this process, the harsh reaction against crime became a problem in itself.

It adds to the argument of a moral panic that not only were the Chinese crime rates among the lowest in the world, but also that when the yanda campaign was launched in September 1983, the crime rate was the lowest since 1979. The traditional belief in China is that parading evil for all to see will lead to a decrease in crime. Such traditional beliefs were spurred by the viewpoints of China's new ultimate leader, Deng Xiaoping. It should not be forgotten that although Deng introduced legal reforms, he did so from the standpoint of fajia, an ancient Chinese school of legal thought noted for its harsh punishment regime. Thus it was that the 'hard strikes' campaign gave great importance to publicising the many executions that took place. The aim was to dissolve the gangs and prevent further recruitment of juvenile criminals. The strategy of eliminating gang leaders by executing them did not have the intended consequence. The networks survived and juvenile gang crime multiplied. Ministry of Public Security reports later confirmed this unsuccessful result of harsh deterrence (Zhonghua renmin gongheguo gonganbu, 1988, p. 43). One of the most questionable traits of the yanda campaigns was that juveniles down to 16 years of age were given the death penalty. The execution of juvenile gang leaders and 'principal criminals' after summary trials was a conspicuous feature of the campaign.

This took place despite there being no real crime upsurge. China still had one of the world's lowest recorded crime rates. The baby-boomers of the large age cohorts born in the late 1960s served as scapegoats for the uncertainties of a society in rapid transition. We know that criminal behaviour is to a large extent youthful behaviour, and some early western criminologists went so far as to conclude that the age distribution of crime conforms to a 'law of nature' (e.g., Goring, 1913). Modern criminology still talks of an 'age invariance effect'. For instance, it has been stated that while numbers of arrests have changed in absolute magnitude over time, 'the same pattern has persisted for the relative magnitudes of the different age groups, with 15- to 17-year-olds having the highest arrest rates per population of any group' (Blumstein & Cohen, 1979, p. 562). China's rising juvenile delinquency rates at the start of the 1980s can be largely explained by demographic data. The picture of Chinese crime fitted the description given by 'age invariance' theoreticians, and the crime curve fitted the 'ageing out' effect described in the criminological literature (Gottfriedson & H irschi, 1990, p. 131)--the Chinese 'baby boom' would be expected to produce increased crime rates as the boomers grew into their teens. The size of the age cohort in question clearly proves the demographic argument. The population of 14- to 25-year-olds exploded from under 120 million to a peak of 272 million from 1965 to 1987. The number has since declined by about 50 million (Bakken, 2000, p. 383)

From the birth data one could easily have predicted a sharp decline in juvenile crime, and by the late 1980s, relative rates were indeed already falling. Since then, the decline in juvenile crime has occurred as predicted, and data published in 2002 show that the relative number of juvenile crimes has halved compared to the mid-1980s. The relative percentage of juvenile crime committed by the 14-25 age cohort declined from 76% of the total recorded crime in 1988 to 42% in 2001. The age group below 18 halved from 24% to 12% between 1985 to 2001 (Fan & Wang, 2002, pp. 22-23). The alarmist reaction about youthful crime and transgression in China has then proven to be largely the result of a classic moral panic. Or can we still compare China with other societies of high crime? To answer that question, we need to take a more critical look at the Chinese crime rates.

Heishu, the Hidden Figures of Chinese Crime

Heishu in Chinese means 'black numbers', referring to the vast number of crimes that go unheeded in the statistics. As every criminologist will know, crime statistics do not deal with 'objective reality' as the data are often derived from official police and court records, and such records reflect, rather, a bureaucratic record-keeping process used and misused for political means. In other words, the 'crime problem' is partly a socially and politically constructed phenomenon, and official data not only create an incomplete picture, they present a systematically biased picture of crime (Maguire, 1994, pp. 233-291). Judicial descriptions of 'the facts' are partial reconstructions of 'what really happened'. Further, it is inappropriate to hold domestic figures for international comparison. The figures for crime are also 'hidden' in that people simply do not always report crime to the police. Chinese criminologists have realised this and gradually tried to construct a more reliable picture of Chinese crime by applying better methodologies.

Let us start with police statistics. Interpol figures from the early 1980s indicated that the Chinese reported crime rates were about 1:140 of a selected number of industrialised western nations used for comparison. Some years later official Chinese rates had increased, but were still at the level of 1:60 (Bakken, 1993, pp. 377-407; 2000, p. 380). Taking the quality of the data into consideration, the comparison just gives us a rough indication that crime in China was not as serious as often presented.

The overall crime rates from 1981 are shown in Figure 1. The 'crime boom' of 1981 was followed by further significant peaks in the late 1980s and at the turn of the millennium. The overall crime rate has more than quadrupled in 20 years. Some crimes have increased more dramatically than others: the robbery rate jumped from just over 20,000 cases in 1981 to a staggering 350,000 in 2001, a 17-fold increase in 20 years. Observers who assume a clear deterrent effect of harsh punishment would see such sharp rises in crime as a legitimising argument for even harsher punishment, and in China, such arguments have now become 'common sense'. They are held by public security personnel as well as by people in the press, administration, and the public at large. Both domestically and internationally, the press has often given the impression that crime is out of hand, and that crime rates are extremely high in China. The country has even been compared to other transitional societies with a high level of crime: in the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin wall there were extraordinary increases in recorded crime in countries such...