INTRODUCTION

Spanning across a land area of approximately 9.6 million square kilometres, the People’s Republic of China is governed by its founding political party, the Communist Party of China (CPC). Since the late 1970s, China has reopened its doors to the world and has adopted fundamental social and economic changes. As of 2010, it has been the world’s secondlargest economy and its 2019 gross domestic product (GDP) was RMB 99.0865 trillion (equivalent to USD 14.0095 trillion), a 6.1 per cent increase in comparison to 2018.

As the world’s most populous country, China has the largest number of juveniles in the world (under Article 2 of the Juvenile Protection Law of 2020, a juvenile is someone younger than 18 years old). According to the latest national census (2010), among China’s population of more than 1.35 billion, nearly 27.9 million are younger than 18 years. This figure accounts for approximately one-fifth of all the children in the world (22.89 per cent). From the perspective of political geography and the ‘One-China’ policy, China is composed of its mainland, Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan, but their legal traditions differ. Unless otherwise noted, this chapter mainly focuses the issues on mainland China.

Any legal development is not a complete break with the past, and Chinese law is no exception. To understand the nature of Chinese child protection, one must consider the issue in its historical, social and cultural context. Traditional Chinese legal values represented by Confucianism, the dominant intellectual tradition, have long played a central role in the welfare and protection of children. One such value is treating any child as one’s own. Furthermore, the Chinese child welfare and juvenile justice systems incorporate the Confucian doctrine of ‘caring tenderly for the young’. China’s legal tradition first embarked upon modernisation brought about by the first Opium War (1839–42) between Qing (the last imperial dynasty of China, 1644–1912) and Britain, the year marking the beginning of the modern period. Moreover, the Western legal system (largely Germany/Japanese laws) was gradually introduced and, subsequently, the system’s inherent legal provisions on children also penetrated into modern China.