Studies For Crimes And Social Stratification In China Today

Since 1990s', with the shift from plan economy to market economy, a comprehensive reform has been carried out profoundly in China, during which social resources have been re-allocated and the social interest structure has been readjusted; and accordingly, the social hierarchical structure and social mechanism have changed dramatically as well. At the same time, the crime rate of China today is increasing visibly. Especially since 1988, the crime rate has been on a constant and obvious increase, exceeding that of the highest in America from 1960. There is a sustaining and prominent increase of the crime of the mobile population in lower classes and that of the white-collared population. What are worth studying are the characteristics of the distribution of the crime in social classes in China today, whether there is an underlying reason of the social stratification for the crimes, and how to decrease crimes through optimizing the society, all of which arouse my interest and meditation. In this thesis, the author, taking the historical evolution as the background, studies the features of the crimes in social stratification in China today and the causes related to social hierarchy structure and controlling crime through optimizing Chinese society through the methods of demonstration combining the methods of contrastive analysis and social analysis. Of course, the method of demonstration needs profound knowledge on social statistics, about which I am short of the knowledge; therefore, it is difficult for me to probe deep into the practical problems. I come across some difficulties due to some practical problems in obtaining first-hand data which is also the difficulty in my research of this paper. In the first part of the thesis, an overview is given about the theories on crime and social stratification through the analyses of the concept and types of crime, the concept of social stratification, the present situation of Chinese social hierarchical structure and the relationship between crimes and social stratification. The second part introduces and analyzes the relative theories of western crime and social stratification, including social abnormal theory, label theory, cultural conflict theory, subculture theory and critical criminology. Although these theories cannot explain all types of crimes, they can be applied for reference. As far as the third part is concerned, it analyzes the present situation and features of crimes in China today. The main features are as follows: 1. The constant increase of crime rate which has the tendency of becoming higher and higher. 2. The change of the criminal construction and the distinct increase of economic crimes. 3. The multiple ways to committing crimes and high technological crimes. 4. The criminal stratification no longer consists mainly of the lower classes in the society but manifests a pluralistic pattern. Therefore, conclusions can be drawn from these features: First, the existence of social stratification results in the inequality of social structure which in turn leads to the fact that the social resources unevenly flow to the upper class, indicating pressure for the members of the lower class which causes a higher crime rates among them than the others. 2. It can be learnt from the social stratification theory that not only the lower class members commit crimes, the upper class are also apt to do so as well. The only difference lies in the ways of committing crimes. The fourth part of the thesis analyzes the reasons of crimes relevant to social stratification which are indicated as: 1. The conflict between people's career and their income, due to which a lot of bribery appear. 2. The differentiation of work and the appearance of larger interest gaps, aggravating the confliction and contradiction among interest groups, which leads to a large number of crimes 3. The dramatically widened gap between the rich and the poor adds to the possibilities of crimes. In the last part of the thesis, the author puts forward a crime-controlling model by optimizing the society for the purpose of making the social stratification more reasonable and reducing the causes of crimes from it. Four means are proposed in this part, the first of which is to support the lower income classes, encouraging the economical development for them. The second is that the society can be stabilized through the way of expanding the number of the members of the middle class. The third one is to fight against wealth which is obtained through illegal means and to adjust the taxes among the higher income groups. The last but not the least is that democratic construction and legal systems shall be reinforced so as that the conflicts among all fields of lives can be settled more reasonably and rationally.