Joomla Solutions Template

Xingan Li

Abstract

In China, development of legislation on corporate criminality has been accompanied by decade-long debate on use of the term, the existence of the phenomena, and the types of penalty. This article recalled development process of practise and theory of corporate crime in China and the debate revolving around whether to criminalize corporate crime and what term to be adopted to denote the phenomena due to a lack of linguistic counterparts of Western terms in Chinese language. Until 1997, the term unit crime was formally stipulated in revised criminal law, with dozens of types of offences punishable according to the principle of “double punishments”. The process was observed empirically as full of influence by ideological contradiction and to some extent factional fighting among researchers. The article concluded that, as a result of the long debate, regulation on corporate crime with Chinese characteristics was accepted as the mainstream approach.

Keywords: criminal law; criminology; unit criminality; corporate crime; crime of legal person; double punishments; Chinese legal system