(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

Under Rule of Law

IN POST-EIGHTEENTH Party Congress China, politics continue to dominate the justice agenda, particularly in corruption cases and in cases that may have an impact on social stability. Despite its staunch opposition to liberalism, the new party leadership recognises that, during the last decade, encroachments of the Stability Maintenance agenda on the legal system have resulted in a widespread loss of public trust in the law. Hence, in 2013 rhetorical expressions such as ‘using rule-of-law thinking’ have reappeared in the politico-legal discourse. This in no way implies a new commitment to liberal values. Indeed, the prescribed route to development and prosperity in Xi Jinping’s China remains unmistakably socialist, intolerant of the ‘deviant path’ of Westernisation and heavily reliant on anti-corruption rhetoric and Mass Line discourse, and these ideological concerns justify and inform justice practices

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

Using Mao to Package Criminal Justice Discourse in 21st-century China

“Strike hard” anti-crime campaigns, “harmonious justice” and “stability maintenance” are the three key politically inspired agendas of crime control and punishment in 21st-century China. This paper is a study of how discourse has helped to package these agendas and to mobilize politico-legal functionaries into action. It examines discourse in the first weeks of the 2014 “people's war on terror” and the agendas of “harmonious justice” and “stability maintenance” in the Hu Jintao era. It finds that each has been rationalized and shaped by an understanding of the utility of punishment based on Mao's utilitarian dialectics. The political virtuosity of Mao's dialectics is that it can be adapted to suit any political situation. In understanding how Mao connects with criminal justice in China today, this paper identifies what is the “political” in “politico-legal” discourse in the fight against crime in the 21st century

Rationalising Stability Preservation through Mao’s Not So Invisible Hand

This paper considers the process of constructing the official discourse of weiwen (维稳, stability preservation) in the policing arena in the first decade of the 21st century. It focuses on the pivotal period after 2003 when policing priorities were shifted from “striking hard” at serious crime to pursuing weiwen to contain burgeoning protests and civil dissent, as a move to maintain stability in the early to mid years of the Hu Jintao–Wen Jiabao harmonious society era. We observe how Mao has been central in this process. Stability preservation operations have been rationalised through Maoist ideology using some staples of Maoist discourse, particularly “social contradictions”, and policing authorities have adopted key methodological aspects of Maoist campaign-style policing to embed this new weiwen focus in the everyday agendas of policing, while ever more “mass incidents” disrupt the maintenance of stability in China