On Booty Crime In China’s Criminal Law

Booty crime refers to all sorts of crimes concerning proceeds of criminal acts. This accusation is defined only in criminology sense, not a specific crime in China’s criminal law. It is a conception of a specific kind of crimes. In Chinese criminal law, there are three concrete crimes belonging to booty crime,which are concealing proceeds of crime and the income thus obtained( which was described as harboring, transferring, buying and selling proceeds of crimes,and commonly called crimes related to booties and stolen goods before the Sixth Criminal Amendment was enacted), money laundering, Harboring, transferring and concealing drugs or gains from such crimes.The first of aforesaid crimes usually called general booty crime, while the latter two of them are called special booty crime. These three crimes are included in booty crime as a result of the common characteristics they have, the biggest of which is that they are all descendant crimes,dependent on other crimes to come into being, and related to booties.What are the special constitutive elements? The object is obstruction of the criminal proceeding performed by judicial department including recovering stolen goods,criminal detection,charging and judgement. The objevtive aspect is the behaviour of concealing and hiding booties, which takes various forms. The principal forms are harboring and transfering. The subject includes natural and legal persons. AS the criminal law specifies that the units must be clearly stipulated as the subject of crimes, the subject of booty crime consequently must be explicitly specified in the law. At present, all concrete accusations of the booty crime specify units as the subject, except the accusation of Harboring,transferring and concealing drugs or gains from such crimes. The subject aspect takes the intentional form,which is described by the criminal law clause as“Knowing”.For every different concrete accusation of the booty crimes, the degree, content, and object of knowing are consequently different. So in determining the specific charges, the knowings should be distinguished.The existing stipulations in the criminal law about the booty crime which are well interlinked can meet the demand of struggling against booty crimes In ourcountry. However, compared with the legislation that involves booty crimes in some other countries,China’s booty crime legislation still has problems of one kind or another. To consummate the stipulation about booty crime in our country,I suggest that the connotation and judgment standard of the “knowing” should be clearly specified. Furthermore it should be added in the criminal law that what the putative “knowing” is. For the general booty crime, there should be stipulations of “deliberately buying booties” “bandits with long records” and“relatives crime” added in the criminal law. For the special booty crime, subjects of upstream crimes of the money laundering can be explicitly set as the subjects of money laundering. To increase the unit subject of harboring,transferring and concealing drugs or gains from such crimes.