Abstract
By exploring the CECC’s political prisoner database and employing three ARDL times series models and two OLS models, the paper finds that China’s party-state has been dealing with political cases through depoliticization, politicization, and criminalization within and without the judiciary. The author argues that these strategies employed by China’s party-state are a function of China’s modernization, domestic conflicts, and the urgency to sustain political stability. Unlike what happened in the Western history where depoliticization was usually followed with democratization, China’s depoliticization has been strategically utilized to justify the Party’s rule over China mainly through its judicial system. China’s politicization, as a fundamental political strategy, has been often applied to handle those political threats such as Falun Gong practitioners and political/civil rights fighters, who are unable to be publicly criminalized and trialed but can be penalized with covert judicial and/or extra-judicial means by the Chinese government.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
The Party’s Four Cardinal Principles include the principle of upholding the socialist path, the principle of upholding the people’s democratic dictatorship, the principle of upholding the leadership of the Communist Party of China, and the principle of upholding Mao Zedong Thought and Marxism-Leninism.
Data of Figure 1 extracted from: http://info.worldbank.org/governance/wgi/index.aspx#home.
The dataset is available at: https://www.cecc.gov/resources/political-prisoner-database.
The paper refers to those with records of “date of detention,” “sentence date,” and “charge (statute)” in the CECC’s database as “the detained,” “the sentenced,” and “the charged,” and those without charge records as “the uncharged” just for the convenience of discussions, knowing those without charge records may have been charged and trialed secretly, or the database failed to report them on time.
Understandably, because of China’s information censorship and state secrecy, the CCEC’s dataset has some
limitations. It has no codebook telling how data were coded and collected, it may have missed some important information which have been exposed by other sources. For instance, even some literature has exposed that China has used involuntary psychiatric treatment to Falun Gong practitioners, the dataset does not include any Falun Gong case associated with psychiatrisation.
At the time when Li was detained, nobody knew where and why he disappeared, the author does not know whether this is the reason why Li’s case has no “charge(statute)” record, even later, some public reports revealed that he was charged with “subversion of state power.” See: http://wqw2010.blogspot.com/2015/07/blog-post_370.html.
As defined by the Criminal Law of PRC of 1979 from Article 90 to Article 104.
As defined by the Criminal Law of PRC of 1997 from Article 102 to Article 113.
As defined by the Criminal Law of PRC of 1997 and shown in Appendix Table 7 .
Those values attached with a question mark in the original dataset are assumed to be true, and
recoding/calculating methods are shown in Appendix Table 7 .
According to China’s criminal laws, all cases secretly trialed should be sentenced in public.
Multicollinearity should be a big concern for these two OLS models, however, with bigger sample sizes, both two models have an average VIF less than 3, and only 1 VIF value is greater than 5 and less than 8 in both models.
Data is available at: http://www.politicalterrorscale.org/Data/.
References
Hay, Colin. 2007. Why we hate politics. Polity.
Zajak, Sabrina. 2017. Transnational activism, global labor governance, and China. Palgrave Macmillan.
Lee, Grace. 2003. The political philosophy of Juche. Stanford Journal of East Asian Affairs 3 (1): 105–112.
Lam, Willy. 2012. The Maoist revival and the conservative turn in Chinese politics. China Perspectives 2: 5.
Ellul, Jacques. 1979. Politicization and political solutions. In Kenneth S. Templeton, Jr. (Eds.). The Politicization of Society (pp.211–247). Indianapolis: Liberty Fund.
Wang, Hui, and Christopher Connery. 2006. Depoliticized politics, multiple components of hegemony, and the eclipse of the sixties. Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 7 (4): 683–700.
Li, Minqi. 2011. The rise of the working class and the future of the Chinese revolution. Monthly Review 63 (2): 38.
Li, Xi, Xuewen Liu, and Yong Wang. 2015. A model of China's state capitalism. Available at: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2061521 .
Lam, Willy Wo-Lap. 2015. Chinese politics in the era of xi Jinping: Renaissance, reform, or retrogression? New York: Routledge.
Dimitrov, Martin K. 2013. Understanding communist collapse and resilience. In Why communism did not collapse: understanding authoritarian regime resilience in Asia and Europe, ed. Martin K. Dimitrov, 3–39. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Deng, Xiaoping. 1993. Selected works of Deng Xiaoping (volume 3). Beijing: People’s Publishing House.
Xu, Zhun. 2013. The political economy of decollectivization in China. Monthly Review 65 (1): 17.
Lipset, Seymour M. 1959. Some social requisites of democracy: Economic development and political legitimacy. American Political Science Review 53 (1): 69–105.
Sun, Gong, Steven D'Alessandro, and Lester Johnson. 2014. Traditional culture, political ideologies, materialism and luxury consumption in China. International Journal of Consumer Studies 38 (6): 578–585.
Feng, Chongyi. 2012. Universal truth versus Chinese Exceptionalism: An ideological dilemma. Journal of East-West Thought 2 (3): 87–94.
Wen, Jiabao. 2007. 温家宝:关于社会主义初级阶段的历史任务和我国对外政策的几个问题 (Some Issues with regard to the historical tasks during the initial stage of socialism and foreign policies of our country). Available at: http://cpc.people.com.cn/GB/64093/64094/5418168.html.
Sautman, Barry. 1991. Politicization, hyperpoliticization, and depoliticization of Chinese education. Comparative Education Review 35 (4): 669–689.
Deng, Xiaoping. 1994. Selected works of Deng Xiaoping (volume 2). Beijing: People’s Publishing House.
Liu, Di. 2003. 虚拟现实主义方案:上街宣传共产主义 (A Visualized Realistic Plan: Advocating Communism in the Street). Available at: http://archives.cnd.org/HXWK/author/BUXIUGANG-Laoshu/kd030124-9.gb.html.
Zhao, Suisheng. 2016. Xi Jinping's Maoist revival. Journal of Democracy 27 (3): 83–97.
Hou, Qiang. 2013. China Focus: Bo Xilai sentenced to life in prison for bribery, embezzlement, power abuse. Xinhua News Agency, September 22.
Chen, Minglu., and David.S.G. Goodman. 2013. Introduction: Middle class China – Discourse, structure and practice. In Middle Class China: Identity and Behavior, ed. Chen Minglu and S.G. Goodman David, 1–11. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing.
Lee, Bear. 2015. Zhou Yongkang, Bo Xilai wanted to do “something big”: report. Focus Taiwan, January 14. Available at: http://focustaiwan.tw/news/acs/201501140032.aspx.
Liebman, Benjamin. 2014. Legal reform: China's law-stability paradox. Daedalus 143 (2): 96–109.
Fu, Hualing. 2013. Politicized Challenges, Depoliticized Responses: Political Monitoring In China’s Transitions. In Surveillance, Counter-Terrorism and Comparative Constitutionalism, ed. Davis Fergal, Nicola McGarrity, and George Williams, 296–312. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.
Findlay, Mark. 1989. Show trials in China: After Tiananmen Square. Journal of Law and Society 16 (3): 352–359.
Lam, Willy. 2009. The politicisation of China's law-enforcement and judicial apparatus. China Perspectives 2: 42–51.
Jiang, Su. 2016. Punishment without trial: The past, present and future of reeducation through labor in China. Peking University Law Journal 4 (1): 45–78.
Amnesty International. 2013. Changing the Soup but not the Medicine? Available at: https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/asa17/042/2013/en/.
Gunn, John. 2006. Abuse of psychiatry. Criminal Behaviour and Mental Health 16 (2): 77–86.
Lu, Sunny, and Viviana Galli. 2002. Psychiatric abuse of Falun gong practitioners in China. Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law Online 30 (1): 126–130.
Munro, Robin. 2000. Judicial psychiatry in China and its political abuses. Columbia Journal of Asian Law 14: 1.
Richardson, Thomas. 2009. Conceptual and methodological challenges in examining the relationship between mental illness and violent behaviour and crime. Internet Journal of Criminology 4 (2): 09.
Van Voren, Robert. 2010. Political abuse of psychiatry—An historical overview. Schizophrenia Bulletin 36 (1): 33–35.
Chan, Cheris Shun-ching. 2004. The Falun gong in China: A sociological perspective. The China Quarterly 179: 665–683.
Hung, Ho-fung. 2015. The China boom: Why China will not rule the world. In Columbia University press.
Maags, Christina. 2014. Enhancing China’s National Image through Culture Festivals: A case study of China culture years in Europe. Fudan Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences 7 (1): 33–55.
He, Qinglian. 2103. 江泽民的政治遗产:政治问题非政治化处理 (Jiang Zemin’s Legacy: solving political problems through apolitical means). Available at: http://heqinglian.net/2013/09/04/jiangzemin-politics/
Pei, Minxin. 2018. China in 2017: Back to strongman rule. Asian Survey 58 (1): 21–32.
Lu, Chen. 2015. Secret Trials Held Against Persecuted in China. available at: https://www.theepochtimes.com/secret-trials-held-against-persecuted-in-china_1195611.html.
Hu, Jingtao. 2002. 胡锦涛在纪念宪法施行二十周年大会上的讲话 (Hu Jingtao’s Speech on Celebrating the 20 th Anniversary of Implementing the Constitution). Available at: http://www.chinanews.com/2002-12-04/26/250121.html.
Jiang, Zemin. 2006. Selected works of Jiang Zemin. Vol. 2. Beijing: Publishing House.
Chen, H.H., M.R. Phillips, H. Cheng, Q.Q. Chen, X.D. Chen, D. Fralick, Y.E. Zhang, M. Liu, J. Huang, and M. Bueber. 2102. Mental health law of the People's Republic of China (English translation with annotations). Shanghai Archives of Psychiatry 24 (6): 305–321.
Canaves, Sky. 2009. A Professor’s Comments on Mental Illness Draw Ire in China, Available at: https://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2009/04/03/a-professors-comments-on-mental-illness-draw-ire-in-china/.
Pesaran, M.H., Y. Shin, and R.J. Smith. 2001. Bounds testing approaches to the analysis of level relationships. Journal of Applied Econometrics 16: 289–326.
Chan, Tara Francis. 2018. China is secretly imprisoning close to 1 million people — but they've left 2 big pieces of evidence behind. Available at: http://www.businessinsider.com/how-many-people-are-imprisoned-in-xinjiang-china-government-documents-2018-5?amp%3Butm_medium=referral.
PTS. n.d. Documentation: Coding Rules. Available at: http://www.politicalterrorscale.org/Data/Documentation.html.
Reasons, Charles E. 1973. The politicizing of crime. the criminal and the criminologist. The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 64 (4): 471–477.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Dr. Martin Dimitrov who encouraged me to continue this study while I was studying at Tulane University. I am also very grateful for Dr. Aie-Rie Lee’s comments when I presented this study at 2016 Southwestern Social Science Association Annual Meeting in Las Vegas. I really appreciate three anonymous reviewers who provided valuable suggestions to improve this paper. Special thanks to Dr. Dennis Patterson who supports me to do China studies in comparative politics. All errors are mine.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Appendices
Appendix 1
Appendix 2
Appendix 3
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Fong, W. Depoliticization, Politicization, and Criminalization: How China Has Been Handling Political Prisoners since 1980s. J OF CHIN POLIT SCI 24, 315–339 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11366-018-9569-0
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11366-018-9569-0