Criminal Law and Justice in the 1950s People's Republic of China: Continuity or Rupture?

Abstract: The advent of the People's Republic of China in 1949 is an established factor of turnover in the politics of China. Communist ideology was widespread among the institutions, but what happened to the practice of justice? The 1950s have been considered the “golden age” of the PRC's practice of justice before the Cultural Revolution. In fact, in that decade the Chinese Communist Party impressed its footprint on the main legal aspect of the country by introducing the first PRC constitution in 1954 and rectifying the arbitrary administration of justice in the previous period from 1949-1953. Though the CCP launched revisions of the criminal code, the code never came into power. Practice dissociated even more from the Soviet model. The 1950s, hence, are a very peculiar period for the history of PRC law because of the rupture with the Soviet model and the two contradictory tendencies to administering justice more and less arbitrarily. This paper aims at comparing the situation before and after the rise of the PRC by focusing on the change of ideology in the codification of the law - strongly influenced by the Soviet Unions model - and its ways to be applied.  Specifically, it compares some “police practice” to clean the “old society” used in the first years of the PRC (1949-1953) with those applied by the Nationalist party during the Nanjing decade (1927-1937), and presents the element of continuity and rupture with the Republican times.