ABSTRACT
Talk about crime in China cannot be understood outside its political context. During the Maoist period (1949–76), for example, Cold War propaganda demanded that China be depicted as tranquil, socially unified, harmonious and crime-free, the opposite of the decadent, crime-ridden, capitalist, ‘West’. Since 1979, however, it is said that China has experienced a ‘crime wave’ and is becoming more like the ‘West’. In 1979, Deng Xiaoping returned China to capitalism and to law. Symptomatic of this was the re-establishment of the Chinese criminal justice system in the 1979 Criminal Law (CL) and Criminal Procedure Law (CPL).
