China’s judiciary 2022

China’s conviction rate in 2022 continued to creep upwards to an all-time high of 99.975% while criminal justice data continues to be culled from official reports and the main database.

By analysing the 2022 work reports released by China’s Supreme Court (SPC) and Supreme Procuratorate (SPP) at the annual National People’s Congress in March this year, Safeguard Defenders also discovered that previously included data concerning denied arrests and dropped prosecutions has now been removed from these reports.

While caution is advised in analysing any official data from China, they do provide some valuable insights. We further note that the exact definition for the data provided do occasionally change, further adding reason to be cautious.

Key takeaways

• Conviction rate rises to a new record high;
• Over 85,000 verdicts from criminal judgments spanning 2013 to 2020 removed over the last one year;
• The official work reports from the SPC and SPP contains less information than years prior, further limiting access to data on the functioning of the criminal justice system;
• There was a major drop in number of arrests carried out 2022;
• For 2021 and 2022, the Procuratorate dropped vastly more prosecutions, likely due to less capacity to operate due to zero-Covid policy, and to focus limited resources on serious crimes.

Some 1,430,000 criminal verdicts at court of first instance were issued in 2022. Of those, 354 were not guilty judgments, putting China’s conviction rate at about 99.975% for 2022, a new record since such data were first made available starting in 1980, and a continuation of a general upward trend.

This, in comparison, stand in contrast with the year 2000, when 640,000 criminal verdicts at court of first instance were issued, with 6,600 found not guilty.

Source: Supreme Court work reports 2019-2022

Following the removal of large amounts of data from the criminal verdicts and judicial decisions logged on the SPC-run China Judgments Online database (see China’s Missing Verdicts) and the recent decision to limit access to other databases for anyone with a foreign IP addresses) the SPC  and SPP work reports have also scrapped some of the data they previously released.

Starting with 2021, there is now no longer any data on the reason for denied arrest requests or the reason for dropped prosecutions. While data was patchy in earlier reports, since five-year datasets were also published it was possible to fill in some gaps. That is now becoming more difficult.

Reasons for denial of arrest requests and for dropped prosecutions were previously categorized as because they were deemed unnecessary (usually for minor alleged crimes), because of insufficient evidence. The removal of such data, especially for dropped prosecutions, will make it significantly harder evaluate the reality of China’s criminal justice system.

The total number of arrests, (requested and approved) plummeted in 2022 from 2021, going from ~1,250,000 to ~860,000. They had risen sharply in 2021, compared to 2020, when it was at the lower ~990,000. China’s zero-Covid policy and strict lockdowns are likely a key reason, but only in part.

In 2022, the number of arrests denied was 42.56% of all arrests requested, a big jump from 2021 (30.72%), and 2020 (22.68%). Between 2013 and 2020, it stayed stable at around 20%.

Prior to 2021, when data on the reasons why arrests were denied were provided, insufficient evidence was the most common reason. No data on the reasons for denied requests has been made available for 2021 or 2022, but data on prosecutions dropped for 2020 indicates clearly that there was a major increase in prosecutions being dropped during early Covid period due to being considered Unnecessary. Likely, both arrests and prosecutions were abandoned for a large amount of minor crimes, to free up resources to process, at a much slower pace due to zero-Covid policy for most important crimes.

The SPP work report claims that since “serious crime” (严重犯罪) has “fallen continuously” (持续下降) over the last 20 years, it is now more cautious about approving arrests in general, especially for less serious alleged crimes, especially if it can help to avoid social confrontation (社会对立). It also said arrest requests from the police have declined for the same reason.

The SPP goes on to say that 80% of criminal judgments are now for less serious crimes (defined as those that have a sentence of three years or less). Meanwhile, it adds that the rate of denying arrest requests for more serious alleged crimes is around 7.4% (for example murder, kidnapping, gang-related criminal activities and acts of endangering State security). There is no such similar data in earlier work reports, hence comparison with prior years is not possible.

Source: Supreme Procuratorate work report 2019-2022

In 2022, the number of prosecutions stayed stable at compared with 2021, seeing only a minor reduction, yet the number of prosecutions dropped has increased significantly.

In 2022, the total number of cases dropped during prosecution rose to 26.28% compared with 2021 (16.6%) and 2020 (13.38%). We assume that this dramatic, and continued, increase is due to the need to “write off” minor cases and to free up resources to tackle a growing backlog of criminal justice proceedings due to Covid shutdowns.

In 2020, the first year of Covid, the number of prosecutions dropped due to being considered unnecessary doubled to over 200,000 compared with 2018 (no figure is provided for 2019), likely due to less important cases being dropped to allow the legal system, much reduced in capacity due to Covid restrictions, needed to free up resources. Prosecutions dropped due to being unnecessary, as with arrests denied for the same reasons, tend to focus on minor crimes.

For those facing arrest or prosecution for more serious crimes, or anything deemed politically sensitive, those denied or dropped because they are deemed insufficient evidence is a far more important variable. The number of cases dropped because of insufficient evidence remained stable. In 2019 those stood at roughly 40,000, or at 2.26%. Since the removal of such data from the work reports for 2021 and 2022, it is no longer possible to know how often cases are dropped due to insufficient evidence. However, a five year total is provided in the 2022 report, which places the total number of cases dropped due to insufficient evidence for 2021 and 2022 at ~94,000, indicating it remains stable at around 45,000 per year. It also means of all prosecutions initiated, less than 3% are dropped due to insufficient evidence.

This is a remarkably low figure and coupled with China’s extremely high conviction rate for cases that go to court, demonstrate that once an arrest is approved, it is almost guaranteed that, for anything considered a serious crime, prosecution, trial and a guilty verdict will follow.

Source: Supreme Procuratorate work report 2019-2022

* Note: 2019 contains only partial data on prosecutions dropped, so there is no full data on the total number of prosecutions initiated.

The rate of pre-trial detention (how many of those facing prosecution are kept in detention) has further gone down, by 16% compared to year prior, and reached a low of 26.7%, with instead a greater focus on using alternatives to detention for lighter alleged crimes. However, no specific data is provided, nor has such data been provided in the past, leaving us without enough information to assess this.

More verdicts are now missing from the SPC’s China Judgment Online database. We compared search results for the period 2013 to 2020 conducted in May 2022, September 2022, and May 2023 and found that verdicts related to RSDL (Residential Surveillance at a Designated Location), criminal verdicts at court of first instance, as well as for all judicial proceedings continue to be removed step by step.

Between May 2022 and May 2023, some 692 cases of RSDL for the period 2013 to 2020 were retroactively removed. A total of 86,518 criminal verdicts disappeared over the same period, and covering all judicial decisions and papers, over 450,000 disappeared.

As the rate of upload is slow, and verdicts, for example, often appear one or several years after a case begins, no analysis can be made of 2021 and 2022 data. However, there has been much made of an increase in deletion of old data, and withholding upload of new cases over 2022 and 2023, so it is likely this practice will increase.

For criminal cases (verdicts) at court of first instance, the number of verdicts found has evolved as shown in this table.

For RSDL cases specifically, searching only within verdicts at court of first instance, the development is as follows:

For all judicial proceedings and papers, that is, the entirety of the database, the values are as follows:

Source: China Judgments Online (CJO)