On Rationality Of The Concealment System

Family Concealment System is a part of the Confucian legal thoughts. Thissystem has gradually developed to be a “System” of Family Concealment withsufficient content from the “Principle” of cherishing one’s relatives hidden, throughthe modification, blend, and Sublate of Chinese legal culture over thousands of years.The original purpose to propose this principle is to maintain the family order andrelationship, which is still the reason why we study Family Concealment System’sapplication in Chinese Modern Criminal laws.Family Concealment System is seriously lacked in Chinese Modern Criminallaws because of the misunderstood of Feudal law culture, National collective socialistlegal values, and the evidence system’s dependence on testimony, etc,. This situationis totally different from foreign, which apply this system commonly. Furthermore, thisis quite “uneconomic” in the sight of Law and Economy. The usage of theConcealment System is involved with many Criminal laws; take the Relativesharboring shield behavior for example: it should be innocent or excusing or deductingthe criminal penalty at least when applied the Concealment System. The Relativesharboring shield behavior and other similar behaviors are resulted from the naturalinstincts and family love; moreover, it is rational choice after carefully measuring thecost efficiency. After counting the benefit and loss, harboring shield relatives cancomparatively maximize the benefit., which challenges the legislation for HarboringShield Crime taking the relatives as the subject. If one kind of behavior is ruled to becrime, however, it can’t decrease the criminal amount no matter to increase thecriminal cost or decrease the criminal benefit. Therefore, this criminal penalty isinvalid. And to criminate the Relatives harboring shield behavior is just this kind ofinvalid criminal penalty.In the view of macroeconomics and microeconomics, the Relatives harboring shield behavior is conducted with the considering of “economy”, so it’s necessary tobuild the Family Concealment System; in the sight of cost-benefit analysis, it canmaximize the profit by improving social stability and many other factors affecting thedegree of applying the Family Concealment System. Therefore, bringing the FamilyConcealment System into Relatives harboring shield behavior to take it out of crime isreasonable.