Moral Panics, Crime Rates and Harsh Punishment in China
| Date | 01 December 2004 |
| Author | Børge Bakken |
| DOI | 10.1177/00048658040370S105 |
| Published date | 01 December 2004 |
| Subject Matter | Article |
Moral Panics, Crime Rates
and Harsh Punishment in China
Barge Bakken
Australian National University, Australia
oday’s extremely harsh sentencing regime in China, which includes
T
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.
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 activi-
ties’, 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
(tousi)
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
Address for correspondence: Borge Bakken, Fellow, Research
School
of Asian and Pacific
Studies, ANU, Canberra,
ACT
0200,
Australia: E-mail: borge.bakken@anu.edu.au
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BBRGE BAKKEN
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 stereotypi-
cal scapegoats
of
this moral panic. Such panics are triggered
by
negative expecta-
tions 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 tradi-
tional 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
fujia,
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 unsuccess-
ful result
of
harsh deterrence
(Zhonghuu renmin gongheguo gongunbu,
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’ theoreti-
cians, and the crime curve fitted the ‘ageing out’ effect described in the criminolog-
ical literature (Gottfriedson
&
Hirschi,
1990,
p.
131)
-
the Chinese ‘baby boom’
would be expected
to
produce increased crime rates
as
the boomers grew into their
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