Making Economic Crime: Criminal Categories and the Construction of Authoritarian Legality in China, 1979–1997

Juan Wang, McGill University

Between China’s 1979 and 1997 Criminal Codes, “economic crimes” were repeatedly redefined as the party-state moved from planning to “socialist commodity economy” and then to the “socialist market economy.” This paper uses that reform-era trajectory as a case to argue that authoritarian legality is not best understood as a coherent toolkit deployed to achieve fixed ends, but as an evolving and contested settlement through which regimes define economic “order,” legitimate economic subjects, and appropriate modes of governance, dynamics that should be expected in authoritarian settings undergoing systemic transition. Drawing on criminal-code provisions alongside party-state policy documents, campaign materials, press conferences, and contemporaneous legal scholarship, the paper traces an asynchronous evolution across three arenas: statutory categories, enforcement campaigns and administrative directives, and expert/legal discourse. It shows that early reform uncertainty was managed through campaign-style enforcement and expansive interpretations of offenses, even as official narratives began to revise their meaning. As reforms deepened, similar behaviors were condemned and punished differently across public and non-public actors, revealing criminal law’s boundary-making role. By the mid-1990s, reformers increasingly framed legality as a routinized, expert-mediated instrument of macro-governance, culminating in consolidation and reclassification of economic offenses. The case demonstrates how criminal law does not merely enforce an economic order; it helps constitute the boundaries of that order during transition, thereby clarifying how authoritarian regimes build capacity and legitimacy through law.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 198. The Chinese Reform as Social Science History (IV): Remaking Modernities