China has been considered relatively progressive on juvenile justice. But several high-profile killings have prompted calls for the law to come down more harshly on minors.
By Vivian Wang
Reporting from Beijing
June 26, 2024, 12:43 a.m. ET
For nearly two years, Gong Junli has been waiting. Since his 8-year-old daughter, Xinyue, was stabbed multiple times and her body left in a grove of poplar trees in northwestern China, he has imagined her killer finally being brought to justice.
But justice is complicated when the accused is also a child.
The boy who the police say killed Xinyue was 13 years old at the time. As his trial opens on Wednesday, it will try to answer a question gripping Chinese society: How should China deal with young children accused of heinous crimes?
Countries around the world have long struggled to balance punishment and forgiveness for children. But the debate is especially notable in China, where a history of relative leniency toward young offenders stands in stark contrast to the limited rights of adult criminal defendants. For decades, the government has emphasized educating and rehabilitating juvenile offenders, rather than imprisoning them.
Recently, though, a backlash has emerged. Following a spate of high-profile killings allegedly committed by children in recent years, many Chinese have called for the country to come down more harshly. And the government has responded. Xinyue’s killing is one of the first cases known to go to trial since the government lowered the age, to 12 from 14, at which children can be prosecuted on charges of murder and other serious crimes.
Several incidents this year renewed the debate. In January, the police in central China dropped charges against a boy accused of killing a 4-year-old girl by pushing her into a manure tank, because he was under 12 and too young to be prosecuted, Chinese media reported. In March, the police said three 13-year-old boys near the city of Handan, also in central China, dug a grave in an abandoned greenhouse, took a classmate there and killed him. The boys were indicted soon after.
On Chinese social media, hashtags related to the Handan killing drew over a billion views in one day, with legal scholars and ordinary social media users alike calling for the perpetrators to be punished severely, even with death. Some suggested that young people were more willing to commit crimes because they knew they could not be legally punished. A professor of criminal law with over 30 million followers on Chinese social media accused those seeking to spare minors from punishment of “moral relativism.”
But others pointed to factors that may have pushed children toward crime, such as parental neglect or poverty. Many in China have worried that poor children in rural areas — who have been the accused in some of the highest-profile cases — are being abandoned as a price of economic progress. Many of those children are described as “left-behind,” because their parents leave them at home while they search for better jobs far away.
As public pressure grew, the Supreme People’s Court last month issued new guidelines on preventing juvenile crime, including by potentially holding guardians responsible for their children’s actions.” . . . . .
David Lindsay Jr.
Hamden, CTPending Approval
Great reporting, thank you Vivian Wang. “But Professor Zhang, in Beijing, said those calls overlooked the reasons parents separated from their children in the first place. China prohibits most children from attending schools outside their hometowns, making it difficult for workers to bring children with them.” It sounds like the government has many intelligent options, if it could wean itself from diverting all its resources to its military buildup agains Taiwan and a takeover of the South China Sea. Allowing migrant workers moving east to bring their families and receive benefits, while pouring resources into the poorer areas to make them more attractive, is available if the military were trimmed.
InconvenientNews.net
I recomend the comment by Gran Torino, that includes: “China’s “Hukou” is like an internal passport system. Many workers from more impoverished provinces like Gansu in this article migrate to more affluent coastal provinces in the east like Guangdong, a manufacturing powerhouse. However, the “Hukou” system means they do not enjoy equal access to healthcare outside their home province and that their children cannot attend schools there as the article mentions.”