judicial organs, and on improving the judicial system in which powers and responsibilities were clearly specified, mutually coordinated, and restrained, and which was efficiently operated. In 2008, China started a new round of judicial reforms. The reforms, taking into account the people’s judicial need, took the maintenance of the common interests of the people as the foundation, the promotion of social harmony as the main line, and the strengthening of checks on and overseeing of power as the key points. They focused on the major issues affecting the judicial administration and reducing the judicial ability to solve the systemic, institutional, and safeguarding obstacles in the judicial system, and proposed specific reform measures from aspects of optimizing the allocation of judicial functions and powers, implementing the criminal policy of combining leniency with rigidity, and strengthening the judicial team building and the judicial funds guarantee mechanism. China’s judicial system has been continuously improved, and it has won the public’s recognition and support through several rounds of judicial reforms.
First, optimize the allocation of judicial functions and powers and promote impartial and honest judicial administration, including: reform and improve the implementation system of civil administrative cases, and establish a mechanism with unified management and mutually checked separate powers to effectively solve the difficulty in implementation; comprehensively advance the reform that a procuratorate’s right of arresting the abuse-of-power criminals should be checked by its immediate higher level to ensure that higher-level procuratorates could check and oversee its lower levels in arresting criminals, which helps to prevent wrong arrests and the false conduct of “replacing detection with arrest”; work to establish a guiding system for criminal cases to unify the standards in legal judgment, which helps to reduce the phenomenon of “criminals in the same case yet getting different judgments” and develop the system into a visible impartial frame of reference of justice; strengthen prosecutors’ legal supervision on links like criminal registration and investigation, criminal justice, regulatory sites, and alternative implementation of penalties, so that legal supervision would be more effective; rationalize the relationship between courts of higher level and that of lower level, reform the system of trial committees and collegial panels, and independently judge according to law to ensure judicial justice; build transparency into the judiciary, prosecution, police affairs, and prisoners’ affairs, and realize complete transparency in filing information, the law enforcement information, and the process and results of handling a case to ensure that the judicial power is exercised with transparency; improve the system of people’s assessors, and establish that of people’s supervisors, and continuously advance the work of the board for commutation and parole so that the public can participate in the administration of justice, and the supervisors can be supervised; strengthen the democratic supervision and improve and gradually complete the democratic supervision mechanism for non-communists in judicial work; gradually establish the mechanism for online expression of public opinion and polling to further ensure the people’s right to know, participation right, expression right, and supervision right. Through the multi-channeled reforms, the judicial system of China has been advanced and the judicial openness and legal and democratic supervision enhanced. Consequently, the reforms have built transparency into judicial activities and effectively helped the judicial organs to carry out duties and functions prescribed to them by law while refraining from performing functions and duties that are not authorized by law, and helped to solve such problems that the public shows strong concern about. They have also helped to ensure that law is enforced in a strict, impartial, civil, and honest manner, and improves the judicial credibility.
Second, implement the criminal policy of combining leniency with rigidity to promote social harmony and stability, including: revise and improve important laws such as the Criminal Law and the Criminal Procedure Law in order to adjust the constitutional elements of and statuary sentences for crimes severely jeopardizing the social order and improve the penalty structure, which helps to improve the ability to punish serious crimes, and strengthen judicial guarantees for human rights; establish rules for the exclusion of illegal evidence, and a system of audio and video recording during the entire process of interrogating the suspects; implement defense counsel’s right of meeting with criminal suspects, right of reading files, right of investigation and evidence collection to safeguard the lawful rights and interests of criminal suspects and defendants; carry out the death penalty policy of “killing less and cautiously killing people”, reduce the charges of death penalty, strictly limit and carefully apply the death penalty. The Criminal Law Amendment (8) promulgated in 2011 abolished the death penalty for 13 economic non-violent crimes, accounting for 19.1% of the total death penalties and stipulated that the death penalty should generally not apply to those who have reached the age of 75 at the trial, and set up a system of restricting the reprieve of the execution of the death penalty, which will create legal and institutional conditions for the gradual reduction of the application of death penalty. On October 27, 2014, the draft Criminal Law Amendment (9) was submitted to the Standing Committee of the NPC for consideration. Based on the principle of reducing the application of the death penalty, the Amendment (9) proposed to abolish the death penalty for nine crimes: arms and ammunition smuggling, nuclear materials smuggling, counterfeit money smuggling, counterfeiting money, fund-raising fraud, crime of organizing prostitution, crime of enforcing prostitution, obstructing the execution of military positions, and crime of spreading rumors during the war; explore the establishment of a system of criminal reconciliation, work hard to repair the social relations destroyed by crimes and reduce social confrontation; improve the system of community correction to help criminals actively integrate into society and reduce the rate of recidivism. By the end of June 2012, 1,054,000 criminals were accepted into community correctional institutions and 587,000 were released after correction. The rate of recidivism among those who were released from community correctional institutions after correction was about 0.2%; improve the system of handling juvenile criminal cases leniently, establish conditional non-prosecution system and criminal record seal system to help minor offenders who have committed but petty crimes return to society smoothly, which helps to promote social harmony. As of July 2011, there had been 2,331 juvenile courts across the country. From 2002 to 2011, the rate of juvenile delinquency in China basically remained at 1–2%.
Third, improve the management system of the political and legal team and enhance the level of law enforcement and justice. Implement a standardized national qualification examination system for judicial professionals, and incorporate the exam for new judges, prosecutors, and lawyers and notary qualification into the national judicial exam. From 2002 to the end of 2011, a total of nearly 500,000 people passed the national judicial examination and obtained legal professional qualifications. Measures were also taken to establish law enforcement qualification examination for police officers. In 2011, more than 1.73 million police officers attended the first law enforcement qualification examination, of which 1.69 million passed the examination. By improving the recruitment and cultivation system of police officers, 65,000 people were recruited into police or law colleges or universities, and after graduation they were largely allocated to the grass-roots political and legal units, thus improving the quality of frontline police officers. Through the reform of the national judicial examination system, the reserve of legal professionals in the central and western regions and ethnic regions has been increased, alleviating the shortage of grass-roots judges and prosecutors. The law enforcement force at the grass-roots level has been stabilized by resolving the special difficulties of judges, prosecutors, people’s police, and judicial administrators. At the same time, all political and legal units had continually improved the vocational training system and actively innovated the training concepts, methods, and means so as to bring training closer to law enforcement and meet the requirements of law enforcement. In the past 5 years, over 1.5 million judges, 750,000 prosecutors, and 6 million police officers received training in the country, which has greatly raised the police officers’ ability to handle cases and serve the people.
By improving the lawyers’ system, the lawyers’ professional orientation as socialist legal workers with Chinese characteristics has been clearly defined, and the legal practice rights of lawyers were protected, which helps to promote healthy development of the lawyers’ profession. As of the end of 2011, there were 18,200 law firms in China and 215,000 lawyers. In 2011, the number of lawyers serving as legal advisers reached a total of 392,000 across the
