| This thesis examines the practice of ‘criminal reconciliation’ (xingshi hejie) in the People’s Republic of China by means of empirical research. ‘Criminal reconciliation’ is officially understood as a mechanism to promote a ‘harmonious society’ ( hexie shehui) through voluntary offender-victim reconciliation and bringing ‘closure’ (an jie shi liao) to criminal case in a way that empowers the parties. It has been designed as a mechanism that overcomes perceived deficiencies of the ordinary, in principle adversarial criminal justice process.;Based on case examples and interviews conducted in three localities in mainland China in 2008 and 2010, however, this thesis argues that this mechanism may infringe the rights of suspects and defendants as well as of alleged victims (summarily referred to as ‘the parties’) in criminal cases, and that it may lead to injustice. While the case files accessed for the purpose of this research purport to document a well-functioning process of criminal reconciliation in accordance with the rules and principles supposed to govern it, interviews provide a drastically different picture. In practice, the criminal justice process was not characterized by the principle of voluntariness supposed to be one of its main advantages; rather, the officials in charge dominated the process. In addition, the entire process exclusively focused on compensation, so it was potentially unfair to economically weak suspects and defendants. It was also found in some cases that the conflict between the parties still existed or had worsened at the end of the criminal reconciliation programmes.;On the basis of these findings, it is argued that criminal reconciliation throws light on fundamental problems with the wider criminal justice system. First, officials in the criminal justice system, routinely ignore certain legal rules protecting the parties’ rights and to some extent replace these rules with ‘hidden rules’ (qian guize), whose content is largely shaped by politically driven performance assessment criteria, as well as in some cases by intervention from other entities such the Political-Legal Committee. Second, the criminal proceedings in China reflect an authoritarian, paternalistic and educational (thought-reform-based) approach to criminal justice; the parties’ rights are regarded as secondary to this political end. Third, the State does not take sufficient responsibility to protect the victim’s right to get compensation in the civil litigation collateral to criminal proceedings.;In conclusion, this thesis argues that resolving criminal cases through ‘criminal reconciliation’ may aggravate the problems already affecting the ordinary criminal justice process, because it is a mechanism designed to weaken procedural rights protections, and eliminate the adversarial character of the criminal justice process. Thus the promotion of ‘criminal reconciliation’ may be one of several signs that China is deviating from the path of rule of law development that was once the leadership’s clearly stated goal. |
