ABSTRACT
Western scholarship on criminal justice has consistently recognised that a growing number of liberal democracies move towards the ‘administratization of criminal convictions,’ which mainly refers to the defendant’s guilt being determined through plea bargaining and other comparable trial-avoiding initiatives. This chapter provides a theoretical account of how, and to what extent, China is advancing an analogous pattern of bureaucratising convictions through their new system of plea leniency (known as ‘Admission of Guilt and Acceptance of Punishment’). Drawing upon Max Weber’s thesis of exemplary bureaucratic administration, this chapter advances the construct of centralised bureaucracy as the explanatory framework for this burgeoning trend. This paradigm of bureaucracy speaks to China’s criminal justice system morphing into a bureaucratic monolith, where criminal proceedings become increasingly centralised and dominated by prosecutorial case disposals. In short, such bureaucratic centralism is explicable through two conceptual perspectives: 1) it is operationalised on procedural rationality that maximises the power of procuratorates to optimise the chance of conviction through guilty pleas; and 2) it endorses concentrated hierarchical managerialism which features compliance, accountability and subordination of procuratorates by myriad internal regulations and assessments.
