ALSA 2025 meeting

Much literature has already discussed how political factors have impacted China's death penalty since the launch of the Strike Hard campaign in 1983, but existing accounts have rarely explained China's death penalty changes from an economic perspective.
China's economic reforms since 1978 have evolved the country's state-planned economy into a market economy. In this context, the death penalty plays an important role in criminal policy by swiftly and severely punishing those who jeopardize public security.

This paper employs a historical analysis based on archival research within 8 cities in Mainland China, including speeches, memoirs, and anthologies from political and legal leaders; national and provincial yearbooks on crime, law, and justice; and meeting minutes and reports from provincial legislative and judicial organs. It describes the changes in China's death penalty law and practice within the context of the post-1978 economic reforms, and investigates whether and how shifts in economic conditions impacted China's death penalty in any way from 1980 to 2000.

The main findings of the study are threefold. First, China's political and legal leadership played a decisive role in shaping death penalty policy over the period, with both central and local laws and practice closely reflecting their intentions. Second, China's increasingly open market brought about a series of problems during the 1980s and 1990s, such as wealth inequality, unemployed rural migrants, and an immature market mechanism. These economic downsides precipitated notable changes in the death penalty for economic crimes, such as changes in death-eligible offenses, execution numbers, and review procedures. Third, the widespread application of the death penalty in China during this period served as a symbolic tool to showcase the authorities' efforts to combat crime and divert public attention from the structural problems caused by economic reform.