The impact of the anti-crime policy of “swiftness and severity” on China’s criminal justice system

Abstract

The aim of this research is to investigate the impact of the anti-crime policy of "swiftness and severity" on China's criminal justice system. Since 1983, the mainland China has experienced four major “Yanda” campaigns. In 2018, the Party Central Committee also promoted a “sweeping away black and elaborate evil” campaign (saohei chue). Throughout these several campaigns, under the guidance of the policy of "swiftness and severity", each campaign has achieved remarkable results, which has seriously devastated criminal gangs and serious crimes. However, the policy of "swiftness and severity" has also affected China's criminal justice system to a certain extent. On the one hand, this policy blindly pursues strict punishment and the speed of handling cases, leading to the judiciary was no longer an independent individual in practice. They jointly handled cases in order to pursue the efficiency of handling cases. Such an approach has led to some false and wrongful cases, resulting in increasing social panic and reducing people’s trust in the judiciary. On the other hand, the judiciary began to think rationally about the policy of "swiftness and severity". They revised the content and status of this policy to propose a new criminal policy of “combining leniency with punishment”. They put the policy of "swiftness and severity" in accordance with the "strict" side of the “combining leniency with punishment” policy to severely combat the serious criminal offender within the law. At the same time, we must pay full attention to the broad side of leniency in the law, for minor offenders and young people who commit crimes we must adhere to the policy of education, probation and rehabilitation. we can appropriately sentence them to probation and actively promote community corrections. Therefore, although the policy of “swiftness and severity” has distorted judicial justice to a certain extent in the process of implementation, it has also given people more rational thoughts on China's criminal justice system and has become the basis for the birth of a scientific criminal policy.