Depoliticization, Politicization, and Criminalization: How China Has Been Handling Political Prisoners since 1980s

By exploring the CECC’s political prisoner database and employing three ARDL times series models and two OLS models, the paper finds that China’s party-state has been dealing with political cases through depoliticization, politicization, and criminalization within and without the judiciary. The author argues that these strategies employed by China’s party-state are a function of China’s modernization, domestic conflicts, and the urgency to sustain political stability. Unlike what happened in the Western history where depoliticization was usually followed with democratization, China’s depoliticization has been strategically utilized to justify the Party’s rule over China mainly through its judicial system. China’s politicization, as a fundamental political strategy, has been often applied to handle those political threats such as Falun Gong practitioners and political/civil rights fighters, who are unable to be publicly criminalized and trialed but can be penalized with covert judicial and/or extra-judicial means by the Chinese government.