Research On The Punishment Of Corruption And Bribery

Amendments of Criminal Law made in March 14, 1997 state that provisions equally applicable to corruptions and briberies are the same and grades of penalty were determined by severity of crimes. In sub-section of this amended law, there are 350 provisions involving 452 charges, six of which explicitly follow the changed rule. The six charges cover producing and marketing fake or substandard products, tax evasion, embezzlement and bribery, as well as smuggling, trafficking, transporting, manufacturing or illegal possessing drugs, which are not penalized for severities or quantities of cases. The rest four charges strictly following the changes contributes a lot to uniformed practice of the new law nationwide and restricts the power of the judge at court. At the very beginning, the amendments play an important role in strictly cramping down corruption cases at various levels. As China becomes stronger economically and people become richer over time, state power controls and affects more and more social resources and values. In terms of property-based or economic crimes, the bigger social wealth is, the smaller social harm the same degree of crime results in. Therefore, in order to keep abreast with social development, filing standards of theft and fraud have been raised repeatedly. The penalty standard of corruption and bribery is defined by Penal Code and can be change only by altering legislative processes. But Penal Code needs to be stabilized. Thus, those standards remain unchanged over the years. In judicial practice, sentencing of corruption and bribery shows imbalances both vertically (time dimension) and horizontally (geographical dimension). Media reports and published documents at various courts show that severity of larger crimes (imprisonment over 10 years or so, life imprisonment or death penalty) is larger for same degree of penalty. In recent years, the standards of sentencing vary a lot with the size of crimes especially for those briberies worth of tens or hundreds of million yuan, greatly affecting public trust over state power. Old-dated punishment model should be changed and quantity-based sentencing should be introduced to better maintain the stability of Penal Code. It is much more appropriate and sensible to crack down on corruption and bribery by increasing fines based on severities. Corruption and bribery are different social crimes in terms of social consequences and should be punished through varied provisions to ensure effectiveness and balances of penalty.