The Long Institute, with the Department of Criminology, Law and Society at UC Irvine, present this special lecture by Dr. Mingyue Su of Beijing Normal University.

In October 1984, the Shanghai Changning District People's Court established the first collegial panel specializing in juvenile criminal cases, marking the beginning of juvenile justice reform in China. After 30 years of development, the philosophy of juvenile justice has changed; juvenile judicial institutions are growing and the juvenile justice system was formed. Different from the practices of juvenile court in Western countries such as the U.S., Japan, and Germany, juvenile delinquency and deviant behavior that does not violate the criminal law would not enter the judicial process, but rather, would be handled by administrative agencies such as the police, and subject to formal mechanisms entailing education, protection, and punishment. Among the many changes, education through custody now allows incarceration for a period of 1 to 3 years, and re-education through labor (RTL) which was used to punish a person with up to 4 years of incarceration was abolished on December 28th, 2013. The police now make the decisions regarding the measures used.  These kinds of punishments are comparatively examined in relation to the famous 1967 Gault case, a landmark ruling that promoted the transformation of the American juvenile justice system. This paper analyzes differences in judicial procedure, administrative power, and due process between the new juvenile justice system in China and other western countries.

Dr. Mingyue (Helen) Su is an Associate Professor in the College for Criminal Law Science at Beijing Normal University. Her research and teaching interests include juvenile justice, probation and parole, and community corrections. She currently serves on the Board of Directors of the Chinese Society of Criminology. In 2011 she was an Edwards Fellow at Columbia Law School, and in 2012 she was a Visiting Scholar in the China Law Center at Yale Law School. She has been a Guest Researcher at Waseda University, Japan since 2005.