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6 Punishment & Soc'y 5 (2004)

handle is hein.journals/punscty6 and id is 1 raw text is: Copyright @ SAGE Publications LondonThousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi. www.sagepublications.com 1462-4745; Vol 6(1): 5-21 DOI: 10.1177/1462474504039087 PUNISHMENT & SOCIETY Propaganda work in Chinese courts Public trials and sentencing rallies as sites of expressive punishment and public education in the People's Republic of China SUSAN TREVASKES Griffith University, Brisbane Abstract This article explores the nature and function of trials and sentencing rallies as mediums of propaganda in Chinese criminal court work. It looks at trials and rallies as two means through which courts project images and messages outwards to a community of onlookers, spectators and participants. The theatrics of adjudication and sentencing carry images and messages about the State, order, legitimacy and the consequences of punishment. The educative and deterrence tasks of the court in trials and sentencing rallies are therefore perceived as part of a wider program of social control and social- ization in the People's Republic of China (PRC). The main period under examination is a pivotal stage of legal history in the PRC, the first years of the post-Mao reform period in the late 1970s and early 1980s. This examination of trials and sentencing rallies will show that despite the two-decade long push to effect a new modernist legal culture based on professionalism, regularity and bureaucratic rationality, criminal justice practices in China have continued to rely on the crude theatrics of expressive punishment that have been employed since the days of revolution. Key Words courts * China trials * punishment * sentencing To mark the start of China's latest national Yanda (Strike Hard) anti-crime campaign on 11 April 2001, courts across the country simultaneously convened 'mass sentencing rallies' (gongpan dahui) to frighten would-be criminals and to educate the general public. One newspaper article from Guangzhou, southern China, for example, reported that 'the curtain of Yanda was drawn open' with a public sentencing rally organized by the local courts, with an audience of more than 30,000 of 'the masses' who had turned up to the sports stadium to witness a special 'Strike Hard public arrest and sentencing rally'.

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