From “Strike Hard” to Legal Reform: The Evolution of China’s Criminal Justice System in the Reform Era

In episode 19, we examined the Hugjiltu case. It occurred during China’s second “Strike Hard” campaign, when the entire criminal justice system was under pressure to punish offenders “severely and swiftly.” Yet only a month before the second campaign began, the National People’s Congress had passed a revised Criminal Procedure Law, which took effect on January 1, 1997.

The second Strike Hard campaign therefore unfolded during an important transition. Campaign-style criminal policy remained in motion even as a new criminal justice system was taking shape. This article looks more closely at the two nationwide campaigns and the development of China’s criminal justice institutions.

Reconstructing the Criminal Justice System of the People’s Republic

In the early years of the People’s Republic of China, there was no comprehensive, unified Criminal Law. Provisions on crimes and punishments were dispersed among a series of stand-alone statutes, including the Regulations on Punishing Counterrevolution, the Interim Regulations on Protecting State Secrets, and the Regulations on Punishing Corruption. An independent sovereign state, however, needed a unified criminal code. Drafting one proved difficult. The Central Legal Affairs Commission began work as early as 1950, but repeated revisions and rewrites produced a thirty-third draft by 1963. The Cultural Revolution then brought the project to a halt.

In 1978, the Third Plenary Session of the Eleventh Central Committee called for strengthening the socialist legal system, giving new impetus to the drafting process. In 1979, the Legal Affairs Commission of the NPC Standing Committee produced the thirty-eighth draft of the Criminal Law. Together with a draft Criminal Procedure Law, it was adopted by the Fifth National People’s Congress and took effect on January 1, 1980. China’s criminal justice system had entered a period in which substantive and procedural law were being rebuilt together.

The 1979 Criminal Procedure Law already contained rules intended to prevent wrongful convictions. It prohibited torture to extract confessions and the collection of evidence through threats, inducements, deception, or other unlawful means. It required emphasis on evidence and investigation rather than unquestioning reliance on confessions; a defendant could not be found guilty solely on the basis of a confession unsupported by other evidence. Once a court decided to hold a trial, a copy of the indictment had to be served on the defendant at least seven days beforehand, and the defendant had to be told of the right to appoint defense counsel. A defendant dissatisfied with a first-instance judgment had ten days to appeal.

These provisions show that China did not lack criminal procedure altogether when the first Strike Hard campaign began in 1983. The policy adjustments that followed were made against an already established legal framework. The question, then, is why a Strike Hard campaign was considered necessary when the country already had unified criminal and criminal procedure laws.

In the early years of reform and opening, population mobility increased while urban life and social administration were changing. Economic restructuring, social transition, and shifts in the distribution of interests contributed to a rise in crime. In a conversation with Ministry of Public Security officials on July 19, 1983, Deng Xiaoping discussed the growth of criminal and other serious cases, public dissatisfaction, and the inadequacy of the existing response. He called for concentrating resources to deal with serious crime lawfully, “severely and swiftly.”

On August 25, 1983, the CPC Central Committee launched a campaign to strike hard against criminal activity. On September 2, the NPC Standing Committee adopted two decisions. The Decision on Severely Punishing Criminals Who Seriously Endanger Public Security addressed the demand for severity. The Decision on Procedures for the Speedy Trial of Criminals Who Seriously Endanger Public Security addressed the demand for speed. Together, the two decisions provided the principal legal arrangements for the first Strike Hard campaign.

Under the severe-punishment decision, offenders convicted of six categories of serious crimes—including hooliganism, intentional injury, and trafficking in persons—could, in specified circumstances, be sentenced above the maximum penalty prescribed by the Criminal Law, up to and including death. This differed from the Criminal Law’s ordinary concept of heavier punishment. Ordinarily, a heavier sentence still had to remain within the statutory range. The decision instead allowed that range to be exceeded, potentially all the way to the death penalty. Through a special decision, the NPC Standing Committee thus displaced the existing statutory sentencing framework and gave direct legislative expression to Strike Hard policy.

Under the speedy-trial decision, offenders who committed murder, rape, robbery, explosions, or other crimes seriously endangering public safety and who warranted the death penalty could, when specified conditions were met, be tried without observing the Criminal Procedure Law’s ordinary service periods, while the period for appeal or procuratorial protest was reduced from ten days to three. Intended to accelerate the handling of these cases, the decision likewise created a special exception to existing procedure.

On September 2, 1983, the NPC Standing Committee also amended the Organic Law of the People’s Courts, allowing the Supreme People’s Court, when necessary, to authorize provincial-level high courts to approve death sentences in certain cases. The Supreme People’s Court issued the corresponding authorization on September 7. Under the 1979 Criminal Procedure Law, death sentences had to be submitted to the Supreme People’s Court for approval. The amendment delegated part of that authority to the high courts, producing a practice in which appeal and death-sentence review could be combined in a single proceeding.

The 1979 Criminal Law and Criminal Procedure Law and the later Strike Hard campaign therefore responded to two needs that existed at the same time. One was to restore a basic criminal legal order; the other was to deal quickly with acute public-security problems. The tension between them soon appeared in the operation of the system.

The Results and Consequences of Strike Hard

The courts handled cases on a very large scale during the first Strike Hard campaign. The Supreme People’s Court’s 1987 work report recorded that, from August 1983 through the end of 1986, courts nationwide concluded more than 1.4 million criminal cases involving over 1.721 million people. Of those sentenced during the period, 39.65 percent received terms of more than five years, life imprisonment, or death; only 0.7 percent were acquitted.

Official assessments at the time reported marked changes in several categories of targeted crime. According to the Supreme People’s Court’s work report, offenders in the “seven targeted categories” declined from 51.86 percent of all criminal defendants tried by the courts in 1984 to 32.79 percent in 1986. Violent crime fell significantly in most parts of the country, and public security was said to have broadly stabilized. These figures formed the principal basis for contemporary official assessments of the campaign’s effectiveness.

The statistics, however, establish only the scale of enforcement and the contemporaneous change in public-security conditions. They cannot by themselves prove that every change was caused by Strike Hard. Equally important was the institutional pressure created by the demand for severe and swift punishment. Case-processing periods were compressed; in some death penalty cases, appeal and death-sentence review were combined; and the space for defense and correction narrowed. Once an investigation went wrong, later proceedings had fewer opportunities to correct it in time.

The first campaign therefore left a dual legacy. On the one hand, it responded in the short term to serious public-security problems. On the other, it exposed the tension between campaign-style governance and ordinary judicial procedure. More than a decade later, the second Strike Hard campaign began almost simultaneously with a major overhaul of criminal procedure, bringing that tension into sharp focus once again.

Old and New Systems in Overlap

In March 1996, the Supreme People’s Court’s work report, reviewing the previous year, stated that public security remained poor in some places and that major violent cases continued to rise. It listed the continuation of Strike Hard and comprehensive public-security governance among the tasks for the next stage. The second Strike Hard campaign began in April, targeting serious crimes including murder, robbery, rape, kidnapping for ransom, major theft, firearms offenses, and organized crime with underworld characteristics.

The second campaign still sought to suppress serious crime over a short period. Compared with the first, however, public explanations of the policy placed greater emphasis on grassroots governance, crime prevention, and other routine work. At least in its stated policy, the campaign addressed not only concentrated punishment but also longer-term prevention and maintenance of public order.

At the same time, both the Criminal Procedure Law and the Criminal Law underwent their first major revisions. On March 17, 1996, one month before the second campaign began, the National People’s Congress adopted a revised Criminal Procedure Law, effective January 1, 1997. On March 14 of the following year, it adopted a revised Criminal Law, effective October 1, 1997.

The two 1983 decisions adopted during the first campaign were repealed in the same period. The speedy-trial decision ceased to have effect on January 1, 1997, while the severe-punishment decision was repealed from October 1, 1997. This chronology shows that legal reform and Strike Hard were not two neatly consecutive phases. For most of 1996, the campaign proceeded under the old procedural law and the 1983 special decisions. After the new laws took effect in 1997, Strike Hard and related special enforcement campaigns continued. Campaign-style policy and institutionalized reform overlapped in practice.

New legislation could not immediately reverse the policy habits of the justice system. Even after the revised law had been adopted, the longstanding emphasis on severe and swift punishment continued to shape individual cases. The Supreme People’s Court’s 1997 work report recorded that courts nationwide concluded 570,000 first-instance criminal cases in 1996, an increase of 14.97 percent over the previous year. A total of 322,400 offenders convicted of crimes seriously endangering public security received punishment; 211,900 of them, or 65.73 percent, received severe sentences.

Nevertheless, a coordinated campaign is temporary. The rules established by legislation continue to shape criminal procedure long after the campaign has ended.

Changes to the Rules of Criminal Procedure

The 1996 revision covered a wide range of matters. Changes directly concerning the prevention of wrongful convictions and the protection of individual rights can be grouped into three areas.

First, it incorporated the central requirement of the presumption of innocence. Article 12 of the revised Criminal Procedure Law provided that no one could be found guilty without a judgment lawfully rendered by a people’s court. Article 162 further required an acquittal when the evidence was insufficient to establish guilt. Together, these provisions supplied a legal foundation for moving away from the habit of entering a conviction when doubts remained. The gravity of a case or the degree of public attention could not substitute for evidence and procedure.

Second, lawyers could enter the criminal process earlier. The 1979 Criminal Procedure Law largely confined legal defense to the trial stage: a defendant was told of the right to appoint counsel only after the court had decided to hold a trial. Under the revised law, a criminal suspect could retain a lawyer during the investigation stage for legal advice, assistance with petitions and complaints, and, when the conditions were met, an application for release on bail pending trial. At the time, however, a lawyer participating during the investigation did not yet have the status later accorded to defense counsel, and the scope of participation was narrower than it is today.

Third, the revision brought custodial measures under closer regulation. By adjusting the conditions governing criminal detention and other compulsory measures, it abolished “custody and investigation,” an administrative coercive measure that had operated outside the Criminal Procedure Law. It also prohibited the “de facto detention” of criminal suspects through repeated summonses or compelled appearances. Custody and investigation had once been used in criminal investigations; it was distinct from the better-known systems of custody and repatriation and reeducation through labor. The revision retained and adjusted criminal detention while bringing the coercive measures needed for criminal prosecution more fully within the framework of criminal procedure.

The centralization of death-sentence approval, complementing these procedural reforms, would come a decade later. On October 31, 2006, the NPC Standing Committee adopted a decision amending the Organic Law of the People’s Courts. From January 1, 2007, authority to approve death sentences was exercised exclusively by the Supreme People’s Court. This was a major reform of China’s death penalty procedure after more than twenty years of delegated review.

Conclusion

Taken together, these institutional changes strengthened the protection of the parties’ rights and reduced, at the level of legal design, the risk of wrongful convictions like Hugjiltu’s. Whether the new rules could achieve their intended effect, however, still depended on their implementation throughout the justice system. The 1979 Criminal Procedure Law already instructed officials not to rely unquestioningly on confessions and required evidence for conviction, yet those requirements could still be weakened by the pressure of the 1983 Strike Hard campaign. The value of procedural safeguards lies in making opportunities to discover, question, and correct errors into rules that every authority handling a case must obey, rather than hoping that every participant will always exercise perfect judgment.

Reform of the criminal justice system did not end there. Over the following two decades, the Criminal Law and Criminal Procedure Law underwent further amendment and development. From Strike Hard to legal reform, the history of China’s criminal justice system offers a clear lesson: procedure must continue to function precisely when society most wants a case resolved without delay.

This article is supplementary reading for episode 19 of Reasoned Talk, “The Hugjiltu Case: Strike Hard Campaigns and the Reversal of a Wrongful Conviction” . The episode traces the case from the crime and original proceedings through retrial and acquittal. This article instead focuses on the two nationwide Strike Hard campaigns and changes to criminal procedure, without repeating the details of the individual case.

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