The 1983 "Strike Hard" Anti-Crime Campaign

Background: Deng Xiaoping's "Extraordinary Situation"

In the early years of reform and opening, criminal and violent cases in China's cities rose sharply. On 19 July 1983, in a talk with leaders of the Ministry of Public Security at Beidaihe, Deng Xiaoping said that criminal and violent cases had increased dramatically, that "this situation is very unpopular," and that the cause lay in weak enforcement and overly light sentences. "This is an extraordinary situation," he said; "we must strike hard, heavily and swiftly, in accordance with the law — only severity will bring it under control." He called for "one, two or three campaigns of severe blows against criminal activities," with every large and medium-sized city to organize several such campaigns within three years, adding that "a number of offenders must be executed in accordance with the law, and some must be locked up for a long time." The talk was later included in Volume III of the Selected Works of Deng Xiaoping under the title "Strike Hard Against Criminal Activities."

Central Decision and NPC Legislation

On 25 August 1983 the CCP Central Committee issued its "Decision on Severely Striking at Criminal Activities," formally launching the "Strike Hard" campaign. On 2 September the Second Session of the Standing Committee of the Sixth National People's Congress adopted two decisions. The "Decision on Severely Punishing Criminals Who Seriously Endanger Public Security" provided that offenders such as hooligans, those committing intentional injury, human traffickers, and illegal makers and sellers of firearms and ammunition "may be sentenced above the maximum penalty prescribed by the Criminal Law, up to and including the death penalty." The "Decision on the Procedure for Swiftly Trying Criminals Who Seriously Endanger Public Security" simplified trial procedure and cut the time limit for appeals and protests in such cases from the ten days provided by the Criminal Procedure Law to three.

Methods and Scale

The campaign was organized as "three battles over three years," the first running from August 1983 to July 1984. Localities commonly conducted coordinated sweeps at a set time. Zhang Guiding, who led a field infantry company in one such operation, recalls that in his city on the Henan–Shanxi border the public security organs had drawn up arrest lists in advance; more than thirty teams, each made up of two soldiers, a police officer and a neighborhood-committee cadre, moved simultaneously at midnight, and at daybreak hundreds of detainees, roped together in a column, were paraded through the streets. According to the summary report on the first battle dated 31 October 1984, as cited in the book Forty Years of the Chinese Communist Party in Power, the courts sentenced 861,000 people in the first battle, 24,000 of them to death; the report called it "the largest concentrated crackdown since the campaign to suppress counter-revolutionaries in 1950."

"Hooliganism" and Notable Cases

Article 160 of the 1979 Criminal Law defined "hooliganism" as "gang fighting, picking quarrels and making trouble, humiliating women or engaging in other hooligan activities that disrupt public order, where the circumstances are odious," with a maximum penalty of seven years' imprisonment; the 1983 NPC Standing Committee decision made it punishable by death. Because "other hooligan activities" was so broadly defined, the charge was applied extensively during the campaign, and some cases later drew wide discussion. In Xi'an, Ma Yanqin, who had organized dance parties at home, was swept up with hundreds of others in a major "hooliganism" case that concluded in 1984, and she and two others were sentenced to death; Zhu Guohua, a grandson of Marshal Zhu De, was also sentenced to death and executed in Tianjin.

Aftermath and Assessments

The campaign that began in 1983 lasted about three years; further nationwide strike-hard campaigns followed in 1996, 2001 and later, and "strike hard" became a recurrent, campaign-style feature of Chinese criminal policy. On 14 March 1997 the Fifth Session of the Eighth National People's Congress adopted a revised Criminal Law that abolished the crime of "hooliganism," replacing it with specific offences such as gang fighting, picking quarrels and making trouble, and indecent assault, and that explicitly enshrined the principle of "no punishment without law." Official accounts present the 1983 campaign as a necessary, law-based response to an "extraordinary situation" in public order; legal scholars and foreign researchers have focused on the tension between its campaign-style enforcement, its heavy and swift sentencing, and its curtailment of defendants' procedural rights on the one hand, and the criminal justice system that had only just been established on the other.