Re-thinking The Criminalization Of Usurious Lending

In recent years,with the vigorous development of the market economy,the appetite for capital has become more and more exuberant.For the sake of profit,private usury has emerged and intensified,not only seriously disrupting the financial order,but also giving rise to bad violent collection behavior,fueling the arrogance of crimes involving black and evil.At the same time,with the development of the Internet mobile,usury is also parasitic in the dark corners of the Internet along the line,derived from "campus loans","naked loans" and other branches,usury casts greedy eyes on the student community,causing a wave of indignation in the community.At present,there is no special crime of usurious lending in China’s criminal law,and there are still many obstacles to the use of criminal law to combat usurious lending in practice,so there is an urgent need to create a new crime of usurious lending to precisely regulate usurious lending behavior.In October 2019,the opinions on various issues related to the handling of criminal cases for illegal money lending were officially introduced,which criminalizes usurious lending that meets certain conditions by stipulating that usurious lending falls within the scope of regulating illegal economic crimes through judicial interpretation.Although judicial interpretation has solved the problem of criminalizing loan sharking,reading 400 criminal judgments and studying the current legal situation shows that the criminal law regulating usury still has problems such as unclear definition of the scope of regulating related crimes,the scope of the law is not the same as that of illegal transactions,the standard of legal punishment for such cases is not uniform,the expansion of the scope of regulation of illegal business crimes,and the regulation of malicious collection is not enough.In theory,the establishment of the usury offense will clarify the standards of prosecution and punishment,which is in line with the requirements of the principle of legality of crime and punishment and the principle of balance of crime and punishment;as a special offense,it can aim to combat the socially harmful usury and protect the financial and social order,which is in line with the requirements of the principle of protection of legal interests and the principle of modesty of criminal law.At present,however,China’s criminal law does not have a comparable criminal offense of usury,the standards for sentencing and punishment have not yet been established,and there is also a lack of supporting judicial interpretation.In order to make full use of the regulatory role of usury lending crime and improve the efficiency and accuracy of the judiciary,the crime of usury is constructed and improved based on the excellent experience of foreign usury criminal law from the following aspects: First,the criminal subject matter is classified and regulated;second,the criminal composition and statutory punishment are designed;third,the judicial interpretation is improved to refine the sentencing and punishment standards;finally,through comparative analysis,the criteria for distinguishing between crime and non-crime,between this crime and the other crime,and between one crime and multiple crimes are examined.