Criminal Liability of Legal Entities in China: Traditional Approaches and Modern Choices

Abstract

Crime committed by a legal entity is an unavoidable social phenomenon in the process of modern socio-economic development in different countries of the world. The crime of a legal entity in modern Chinese criminal law is called a corporate crime. Since the establishment of the people's Republic of China until 1979, only the criminal liability of individuals has been recognized in the field of Chinese criminal law and criminal law theory. Corporate criminal responsibility in the People's Republic of China was established in a completely new historical context: with the development of the commodity economy and market economy in the new China, corporate crimes appeared in public life and gradually spread in the middle and second half of the 1980s, so that regulation through laws became a requirement for the Chinese society to function normally. In this social context, the Standing Committee of the All-China People's Congress has passed a number of laws that provide for corporate crimes. Before the Criminal Code of the People's Republic of China came into force of in 1997, corporate crimes already accounted for about one third of all offences stipulated in specific criminal and non-criminal laws, which lead to the final establishment of corporate criminal responsibility in the new Criminal Code of China. The author analyzes the problem of criminal liability for corporate crimes in the criminal law of the People's Republic of China from the standpoint of traditional theory, as well as predicts the appropriate trends in the future development of theoretical approaches to bringing legal entities to criminal responsibility in a risk society. According to the author, in a risk society, effective prevention of risks in the activities of legal entities is inseparable from the efforts of legal entities themselves, and criminal law, as one of the tools for risk distribution, is aimed primarily not at punishment, but at increasing the motivation of legal entities to achieve this.