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The general remit of this paper is the role of wildlife trade in pathogen spillover. Its underlying assumption is that, so far from being the exclusive domain of the life sciences, the study of pathogen spillover will be greatly enhanced by multi-perspectival approaches, including One Health and those employed here, namely, non-speciesist green criminology and critical animal studies. The paper moves from discussions of zoonosis, anthroponosis and wildlife trade to the emergence of COVID-19 in Wuhan, China. The paper recommends the abolition of all wildlife trade and the reclamation of wildlife habitat and broaches discussion of the extension of legal personhood to wild animals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Once feted, Hong Kong has recently become a centre of civil unrest. In this paper, we situate these emergent politics through a case study of corruption and everyday life in Kowloon Walled City, a mainland Chinese enclave in British Hong Kong, which developed notoriety as a freestanding grey economy. Drawing from oral testimonies of police officers, triad members and local residents, we excavate the lived experience of confinement within this contested space. These accounts reconstruct the Walled City as a 'quasi-carceral' site of enclosure, a zone of colonial exceptionalism and a hybrid cultural space. Through this case study, we historicize current debates in carceral geography, humanize recent interventions in urban scholarship and analyse the shifting politics at the frontier of Chinese expansionism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although an authoritarian regime is often assumed to manipulate its various statistics for political needs and to maintain its legitimacy, we know little about how such manipulation is accomplished and under what circumstances. Using data collected from yearly published official crime reports, a unique source for crime victim surveys, interviews with the police and detailed ethnographic work in Guangzhou city, this paper demonstrates how the manufacturing of official crime statics serves to legitimize the authoritarian regime in China. In particular, I examine the myth of the 'great crime decline' in the first decade of 21st century when official crime statistics declined by more than two-thirds in the city and argue that the decrease is a result of statistical manipulation instead of a reflection of the actual crime situation. I argue that, compared with Western democracies, crime statistics should be more fully understood as part of a legitimization apparatus in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the illegal networks in tiger parts trading from the demand (client's) and the supply (criminal's) perspective by drawing on fieldwork interview data collected from seven tiger parts trading network across three Chinese cities--Lhasa, Xining and Kunming, in 2011. The networks in the three cities were all centralized and independent of each other. Such structure derives from the low risk of arrest and is best suited to deal with the limited number of tiger part products. None of the traders involved were full time, professional tiger parts products traders and should be classified as opportunistic criminals. This article contributes to a broader understanding of criminal networks and to the development of green criminology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the reforms to powers of Chinese state agencies to deal with drug-dependent people introduced by the PRC Drug Prohibition Law 2008. Whilst professing to take a more humane approach to problems of drug dependency, the law retains a police-centred approach to regulation. The law provides for a set of interconnected police powers that include: registration; imposition of a three year term of community rehabilitation; administrative detention for two years; and the possibility of a further supervised rehabilitation order upon release. In the absence of detailed implementing regulations, this paper examines the different ways local agencies are interpreting and implementing these powers. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In view of the smuggling out of democratic leaders after the Tiananmen crackdown in 1989 and China's resumption of sovereignty of Hong Kong in 1997, China applied a ‘united front’ tactic to recruit Hong Kong triad societies to the Communist camp. Consequently, triad leaders were able to set foot in China and bridge up with officials and state enterprises. Against this backdrop, this paper argues that when political dynamics is involved, both the traditional structural and social network approaches are insufficient to explain triad-organized crime. Therefore, social capital perspective is proposed. Using two case studies, it was discovered that the triad leaders converted the social capital they developed in mainland China into economic capital through illegitimate means in the stock market. The paper concludes by highlighting the similarities and differences between this triad-organized crime and other forms of Chinese organized crime. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Using official police records, interviews with motorcycle taxi drivers and the participant observation of their working activities in Tianzhi city, China, this paper examines how and why a dimension of social stratification—household registration (hukou)—is related to the risk of robbery victimization and attempts to evaluate the effectiveness of applying lifestyle/routine activity theory to contemporary urban China. It discloses that migrant motorcycle taxi drivers are highly over represented in robbery victimization. Their night-time working practices enhance their chances of being robbed by both increasing exposure to likely offenders and reducing the presence of capable guardians. The study further explores how a structural factor—motorcycle ban policy—shapes different routine activities between migrant and resident motorcycle taxi drivers and, by extension, differential risks of robbery victimization. The paper concludes by pointing out the importance of locating lifestyle/routine activities in a larger Chinese macro-social structural context. The outcome is one of the very first ethnographic analyses of crime conducted in situ in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One quarter of the world's population live in China. Chinese law is fast shifting into the global arena. China's response to new and emerging crimes over the last decade is now an important international human rights issue. This paper discusses some key concepts for understanding the criminal justice system of a country that is fast becoming the second most economically and geopolitically powerful nation in the world. Thousands of criminals are executed during China's periodic `Strike Hard' anti-crime campaigns. This paper examines the Strike Hard policy of `severity and swiftness seeking to achieve three complementary objectives: to provide insight into the machinations of criminal justice operations in China's anti-crime campaigns, to explain official justifications for the policy, and to give voice to alternative commentaries and opinions of Chinese criminal justice researchers and practitioners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines Chinese students' attitudes about the death penalty in contemporary China. Drawing upon Western public opinion research on the death penalty, samples of Chinese college students at home and abroad are used to explore the magnitude of their pro-death penalty attitudes and sources of variation in these opinions. Both groups of Chinese students are found to support the death penalty across different measures of this concept. Several individual and contextual factors are correlated with pro-death penalty attitudes, but the belief in the specific deterrent effect of punishments was the only variable that had a significant net effect on these attitudes in our multivariate analysis. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of this study for future research on public opinion about crime and punishment in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the influences of worldwide anti-death penalty campaigns in the local institutional environment in China and its implications for China’s capital punishment reforms in recent years. It found a ‘concentric pattern’ of the dissemination of human rights values and anti-death penalty activisms may explain the varying attitudes towards human rights and international activism among different social groups across the Chinese society. Divergent interests of and perceptions held by national-level and lower-level legal elites are likely to be one of the causes for China to adopt an incremental reformist stance. Further, this study shows that the Chinese legal elites were poorly informed of the current status of public opinion on capital punishment. A populist-sentiment-driven administration of capital punishment is closely tied to reliance on capital punishment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the issue of judicial discretion and the role of the Supreme People’s Court (SPC) in death penalty reform since 2007. The SPC has been encouraging judges to give ‘suspended’ death sentences rather than ‘immediate execution’ for some homicide cases. Lower court judges are encouraged to use their discretion to recognize mitigating circumstances that would allow them to sentence offenders to a suspended death sentence. The SPC has used ‘guidance’ instruments which include ‘directives’ and other SPC interpretations and a new ‘case guidance’ system which provides case exemplars to follow. We explore these guidance instruments as a way of deepening our understanding of how law, politics and judicial practices are interwoven to achieve reform goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A sizable literature on crime patterns during periods of social change and modernization has been developed. A number of theories have been proposed to explain variations in crime levels; these theories have largely been rooted in the classical Durkheimian theory of anomie. Most empirical studies of crime patterns examine levels of violent and property crimes and link variations in the levels of these crimes to indicators of social change and modernization using cross-national data. Moving beyond the conventional focus on levels of violent and property crimes, the present study focuses on whether rates of economically motivated crimes (e.g. larceny, grand larceny, robbery and fraud) increased faster than less or non-economically motivated crimes (e.g homicide, assault and rape) during the period of social change from state socialism to a market economy in China. The study finds that economically motivated crimes have increased faster than less or non-economically motivated crimes. The paper is in favour of a structural explanation that expanding economic motivation is a driving force for economically motivated crimes during the transition to a market economy in China. This explanation is more consistent with the patterns of crime found than conventional anomie-based explanations in their accounting for the crime patterns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]