A Study Of Vagueness In The Language Of The Chinese Criminal Legislation

Vagueness, as an inherent feature of language, seems ubiquitous in the legislativelanguage. Criminal law defines conducts that are prohibited by the state because suchconducts are held to threaten, harm or otherwise endanger the safety and welfare of thepublic and sets out the punishment to be imposed on those who breach the criminallaw.“Nullum crimen sine lege”(no crime without a law) and “nulla poena sine lege”(no penalty without a law), which are in consistent with the requirements of themodern society for democracy and the rule of law, have been adopted by manycountries in the world in their criminal legislations. Therefore, criminal legislation hasspecial requirements for precision and definiteness of the language used. However,while the pursuit of precision is still the prime goal of criminal legislation, it is notonly impossible but also undesirable to completely eliminate vagueness in thelegislative language.The Criminal Act of the PRC (1979), the first “true” criminal legislation in thePeople’s Republic of China, has long been criticized by scholars for its vagueness eversince it was enacted. Among the subsequent criminal laws in the PRC are the CriminalAct of the PRC (1997), several single criminal statutes, eight amendments to theCriminal Act of the PRC (1997), and numerous legislative interpretations. This thesisis intended to explore the existence of vagueness in the criminal legislation of Chinafrom the perspective of evolution of law. As of, few researchers, if any, have everprobed into the vagueness of criminal legislative language from the perspective ofevolution of law. This thesis is thus expected ambitiously to fill in this gap.The thesis first justifies the reasons for the existence of vagueness in the legislativelanguage. After this, the functions of vagueness in the legislative language areanalyzed, including both positive and negative functions. Then comes the main part ofthe present study, in which the author observes the existence of vagueness in criminallegislation of China at three levels, namely, the lexical level, phrase-level andclause-level, and explores the role of evolution of criminal legislation while lawmakers endeavor to eliminate the negative functions of vagueness and carryforward its positive functions. Finally, this thesis makes a summary of the findings ofthe present research and some suggestions are proposed for coping with unnecessaryvagueness existing in China’s criminal legislation. Limitations of the present study aswell as recommendations for subsequent researches are also stated in this part.