Crime and Punishment: China and the United States

Abstract

There is broad agreement among Western scholars that under the Communists the criminal process in China1 is arbitrary, highly politicized, and responsive to class and status differences among its targets. It is frequently pointed out, quite accurately, that China has no criminal codes and no public-reporter system of judicial decisions and that important substantive laws often are unpublished or, if published, very vague. Theorists of totalitarianism even doubt the existence of legality within such systems.