A Study On The Legislation Of The Administrative Fines In Chinese Legal Texts

Administrative fines are commonly used in China’s practice of administrative law enforcement. It refers to the administrative penalty where the administrative department compels the law-breaker to pay a certain amount of money so that some of his or her property right is deprived legally. As a kind of administrative penalties, administrative fines are different from the penalty money in Criminal Law and the fines as a coercive measure in civil proceedings. Compared with other penalties such as warning, confiscate illegal income, confiscate illegal property, order to cease, suspend or revoke the license, and administrative detention, administrative fines are applicable in a wider range. Moreover, due to its involvement with the deprivation of Offenders’ property right, administrative fines have a great number of problems arising in practice. There are many various angles to study administrative fines, including but not limited to the establishment of fines, the legal basis for fines, the conditions of imposing fines, the legal proceedings of imposing fines, the implementation effect of fines and so on. Among all these, the establishment of fines is the key issue to solve the problems. Therefore, if we can improve the establishment of fines from the perspective of legal texts and make them unified and standardized, many practical problems would probably be solved effectively. There are four kinds of common expression of administrative fines clause in China’s legal texts, namely’may be fined’,’shall be fined’,’may be concurrently fined’and’shall be concurrently fined’. These four different expressions reflect the different levels of restrictions on administrative law-enforcement officers’discretion. Usually, the basic ways to establish the amount of fines are fixed fines and proportional fines. And of course, there is also a way of combination of both.As administrative fines is a kind of administrative penalties, it is necessary for us to research the differences between administrative fines and other kinds of administrative penalties when studying the administrative fines. Different countries have different kinds of administrative penalties. For instance, the types of administrative penalties are quite different. And in China, according to Administrative Penalty Law, the common administrative penalties include warnings, fines, confiscation of illegal income, confiscation of illegal property, order to cease, withholding or revocation of a permit or revocation of a license and administrative detention. These administrative penalties can be classified into four categories, namely reprimand penalty, property penalty, conduct penalty and physical penalty. This paper made a comparative study between administrative fines and other administrative penalties based on the above classification, and summarized the advantages of administrative fines as having the widest scope in practice, being very flexible in the range of punishment, having high efficiency in administrative law enforcement, and having low costs in administrative law enforcement and so on.There are a large number of provisions involving administrative fines in China’s legal texts. However, these provisions are not properly unified and standardized, and there are a lot of problems to be solved. Through the study of the recent theoretical research and practical experience on administrative fines, and through the analysis of legal texts and practices of law enforcement in China, this paper summarized four shortcomings of the establishment of administrative fines in China. These deficiencies include that the power to establish administrative fines is not properly centralized, that the number of clauses establishing administrative fines is excessive, that the amount of fines is not all reasonable, and that there is a lack of restraint mechanism for arbitrary imposition of fines.Accordingly, this paper proposed some ideas to standardize administrative fines from four aspects in light of the above shortcomings, in the hope of providing some thoughts to solve the problem of administrative fines being not standardized and being abused in legal practice. First of all, narrow the scope of legislative bodies that have the power to establish fines. Secondly, reduce the types of administrative matters involving fines, and consider using other administrative penalties or management methods instead of fines, or to properly combine the use of other administrative penalties or management methods and the use of administrative fines. Moreover, properly apply legislative techniques such as classifying methods and contextualizing technique, try to use the Hand Formula to determine the amount of fines when establishing fixed fines, and set up reasonable and feasible computing standards when establishing proportional fines. Finally, build an effective restraint mechanism for ultra vires acts of arbitrary imposing of fines, which can be done from three aspects including the improvement of administrative monitoring mechanisms, the introducing of judicial review system and the establishment of relative punishment mechanism.