The Politics of Law and Stability in China

The Politics of Law and Stability in Chinaexamines the nexus between social stability and the law in contemporary China. It explores the impact of Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) rationales for social stability on legal reforms, criminal justice operations and handling of disputes and social unrest inside and outside China's justice agencies. The book presents an extensive investigation into the conceptual and empirical approaches by the Party-state to the management of Chinese citizen complaint and unrest. It explores how the Party-state responds to what it sees as potentially de-stabilizing social action such as public protest, discord, deviance and criminal behavior. This timely and important study reaches across a broad variety of areas within the legal sphere, including substantive criminal law and criminal procedure law reform, labour law, environment and land disputes, policing and surveillance, and anti-corruption drives. The central thread running through all the chapters concerns how the imperative of social stability has underpinned key Party-state approaches to social management and responses to crime, legal disputes and social unrest across the last decade in China. This book will appeal to lawyers, political science scholars and social scientists in the area of China studies. Scholars generally interested in Chinese criminal law and criminal law procedures will also find much in this book that will be of interest to them. Contributors:S. Biddulph, D. Peng, X. He, F. Hualing, G. Zhiyuan, E. Nesossi, M. Palmer, F. Sapio, M. S. Tanner, S. Trevaskes, B. van Rooij, Z. Wanhong