Can Restorative Justice Reduce Incarceration? A Story From China

Abstract

This paper attempts to investigate the capacity of restorative justice (RJ) to reduce incarceration in China. It utilizes a “top-down” approach to explore how macro transitions in Chinese politics and criminal justice translate into micro implementation of RJ, which ultimately affects incarceration. Interviews with Chinese police, prosecutors, and judges revealed how minor injury cases were diverted by RJ throughout the criminal justice system. In addition, 172,731 judicial judgments were coded to estimate RJ’s effect on sentencing lengths and the probability of probation for offenders. The findings suggest that the Chinese approach to implementing RJ does liberate numerous offenders from harsher incarceration. Yet, Chinese RJ reforms remain a thin version without deep roots in civil society, in “bottom-up” social movement excellence, or thorough foundations in restorative Confucianism with roots in ancient Chinese society. RJ is still a marginalized part of a Titanic that resists turning away from the punitive “Strike-Hard” ideology.

Keywords:

• Restorative justice
• China
• incarceration
• triangulation
• mixed-method

Acknowledgments

We humbly owe our sincere gratitude to the three anonymous reviewers and the following professors and scholars for their constructive comments and suggestions on this paper: John Braithwaite, Liqun Cao, Jianhua Xu, Enshen Li, Xiaoyu Yuan, Ibolya Losoncz, Ronald Foster, and You Zhou. We also appreciate the comments from the participants at the first on-line conference of the Association of Chinese Criminology and Criminal Justice in January 2021.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 The Regulations was repealed and replaced by the Public Security Administration Punishment Law of the People's Republic of China in 2005.

2 Such as brawling, damaging or destroying other persons’ property and slight injury.

3 It is officially reported that protests and demonstrations have dramatically increased in the past decades, from 8700 incidents in 1993 to 87,000 in 2005 ( Chung et al., 2006).

4 The other major type of crime for criminal reconciliation in practice is criminal traffic offenses ( Xin & Cai, 2020).

5 Chongqing is one of the four municipalities under the direct administration of the central government of China (the other three are Beijing, Shanghai and Tianjin).

6 The CJO, established in 2013, is an official platform for archiving judicial documents as the Chinese government’s endeavour to enhance the transparency and efficiency of its judicial system ( Ahl & Sprick, 2018).

7 According to the Chinese law, a criminal record is a broader concept than recidivism. Criminal record means general re-offences (intentional or negligent). Recidivism specifically refers to intentional re-offence within five years since the last intentional offense sentenced with fixed imprisonment or above. All the cases with recidivism were excluded in our study because they are not eligible for criminal reconciliation under the 2012 CPL.

8 Local police stations are the elemental unit of the policing infrastructure of China. In 2004, there were 43,772 local police stations in China (Sohu, 2005). There have been no further statistics published since then.

9 After 2013, the data was not published anymore.

10 In 2008, the Chongqing Municipal People’s Procuratorate Regulations passed the Regulation on Applying Criminal Reconciliation on Dealing with Minor Criminal Cases as a pilot program of criminal reconciliation.

11 The Procuratorate Committee consists of an odd number of senior prosecutors who are responsible for reviewing and deciding influential and complicated cases. For criminal reconciliation, the Committee has the authority to (dis)approve a non-prosecution decision after reviewing all the materials.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Yan Zhang

Yan Zhang, Ph.D. scholar School of Regulation and Global Governance (RegNet), Australian National University, Managing Editor of Asian Journal of Criminology, Research interest: restorative justice, China study, qualitative research

Yiwei Xia

Yiwei Xia, Ph.D, Associate Professor, School of Law, Southwestern University of Finance and Economics, China, Research interest: quantitative method, substance abuse, and social demography.