ABSTRACT
The past and the present 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).
