Juvenile Justice in China and the United States Compared

Introduction

Examining the juvenile justice system of China in order to compare it to that of the United States, the literature underlines several important points regarding China. China generally strives to base itself upon a restorative system of justice. It also appears to be moving, as a work-in-progress, toward becoming more formalized as a "rule of law" system. Problematically, youth crime has been rising rapidly over recent decades. Overall, it is not easy to compare the two systems. The American juvenile justice system has its own difficult problems, and one cannot appraise it without confronting its ethnic dimensions: some minorities — specifically African Americans — are incarcerated at a demonstrably unequal rate compared to other groups. This paper first identifies the features of Chinese juvenile justice that reflect principles of restorative justice and concludes with a comparison to the American juvenile justice system.

Historical Development of Chinese Juvenile Justice

The history of the modern Chinese justice system may be seen as a progression from a kind of Confucian communitarianism, codified into communism by the Maoists, then proceeding through the end of the Cultural Revolution, and ultimately shedding Confucianism to adopt a system based on the "rule of law" as opposed to the "rule of man" (Braithwaite, 1999; Zhang, 2008, pp. 154–155). The official Chinese view regards this history as the progress of the socialist legal system — one that saw the practices of the Cultural Revolution revised in 1978, marking the ascent of Deng Xiaoping, toward the codification of laws under the country's Constitution (People's Daily). Since the end of the Cultural Revolution, China has evolved a socialist market economy legal system. This system has importantly incorporated workable features of the communist legal system into a body of general law that includes criminal law, civil law, administrative procedure law, and juvenile law, among others (People's Daily).

China did not have a juvenile justice system during Mao's period (1949–1978). When Deng Xiaoping took over leadership and guided the country toward an open free-market system, he dismantled several structures the communists had built that had made the people more or less dependent on the state. One important example was the rationing system, which since 1955 had rationed and controlled the flow of consumer goods and food grains in an attempt to balance demand and supply (Chen, 2005, p. 95). Rationing extended to housing, education, and other necessities of existence. It effectively devalued money-making and the route it offered toward an independent bourgeois lifestyle. The market reforms that Deng began introducing in the early 1980s undercut the state central-planning economy and ushered in consumerism, but more importantly, they eroded the moral authority of the state in favor of market economics.

Chen points out that Deng's changes released the peasantry from hukou, the household registration system. Peasant migrants began moving en masse into cities, unemployed and unskilled, and were joined by thousands of laid-off workers from state-owned enterprises. The effect was to create a large vagrant class circulating in the cities — a "floating population" of unskilled workers. China's government, in its move toward an open market economy, had not foreseen this uprooting of populations and had not built an adequate social welfare system to absorb them. Chen uses this development to explain the rapid growth of crime and the reappearance and expansion of organized crime gangs and secret societies. Rapid urbanization tore away the traditional bonds of the communal Chinese family; migrants entered cities without family connections, and identities were no longer under state control or care.

Rising Youth Crime and Social Dislocation

Bakken (1993) focused on the rapid rise of youth crime, identifying a significant growth in the youth population stemming from the baby boom. In 1949, the 14–25 age group numbered 90 million. During the 1980s that population peaked at 282 million in 1987 before falling to 215 million in 2000 and settling at 225 million by 2003 (Bakken, p. 36). During the 1950s, youth delinquency averaged 18% of total crime figures. In 1957 the figure reached 32.3%, and during the mid-1970s it appeared to level off at 40–50%. From 1979 to 1988, the youth delinquency share of all total crime climbed from 47.6% to a peak of 75.7% (Bakken, p. 38). For youth under 18, the figure stood at 1.4% in 1977 and reached 23.8% by 1985.

Bakken underlined the new mobility entering Chinese society as a partial explanation for the breakdown of the cultural norm of self-restraint that had supported values of moderation, harmony, and balance (Ibid., p. 43). With youth circulating through cities virtually unattached, negative characteristics of disorder and chaos began to appear, amplified by liu — a drifting and moving. This phenomenon, in Bakken's view, was analogous to the mass movement of people from farms to cities during the nineteenth-century Industrial Revolution in European countries (p. 44). In the new China of the 1980s and 1990s, cities could not provide enough jobs to absorb the rapidly increasing population. The cultural fabric of China stretched and broke as youth were detached from their families and, critically, from the economy (p. 47).

The Chinese system of values is built on strong respect for family and also guanxi — a deep appreciation of personal bonds and mutual belonging (Chen, p. 93). Chen suggests that guanxi reappeared after the Cultural Revolution in the rapid resurgence of secret societies and organized criminal gangs. Mislocated teenagers began to join and swell the membership ranks of these gangs — a reaction to the decline of the paternalistic state, compounded by social dislocation and the widening income gap between rich and poor (Ibid., p. 94). The government proved ill-prepared to deal with this new phenomenon. The rise of the gangs led to "vehement waves of crime" (Chen, p. 95). In 1983 the government reacted with an apparently extreme and bloody "Severe Blows" (yanda) campaign, tracking down gang leaders and pursuing a stark program of public executions (Bakken, p. 50).

By eliminating gang leaders, the government sought to close gang membership to youth. There was a short-term decrease in criminal activity, but the decrease was limited to petty crime and petty theft (Ibid., p. 52). Overall, the opposite occurred: gangs multiplied, membership became younger, and networks spread (Ibid., p. 51). By 1989, youth participation in violent crime had heightened to account for 71.3% (Ibid., p. 53). In 1983, the government invoked an extended version of Article 44 of the Chinese Criminal Law to punish youth for serious crimes. This article placed youth under the age of 18 outside the scope of the death penalty but held that a two-year suspension could apply to those aged 16.

Conclusion

The Chinese criminal justice system cannot be compared to the American criminal justice system without understanding the complex makeup of America's social and ethnic fabric. The Chinese authorities seek to re-establish traditional principles that in strong ways reflect views of restorative justice. Although the Chinese citizenry may share a common social identity, their major challenges appear to be the widening gap in economic well-being and the difficulty of adjusting to the needs of a large migrant population.

America does have a common social fabric, but it is unique in that power and sharing relationships have worked both to offset and to sustain levels of inequality. Yet America shares with China a continuing concern for, and ongoing efforts toward, improvements in its juvenile justice system. Greenwood demonstrates this in his study. Reporting less success with boot camp punitive methods, he discusses evidence-based success for family-based community programs and cognitive-behavioral therapy for youth in institutions. These efforts can be seen as substantiation of restorative justice principles, suggesting that both nations, despite their very different histories and social structures, are moving — however haltingly — in a shared direction.

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