China makes strides in cutting violent crime, enforcing IP rights, National People’s Congress is told
- Top Chinese legal bodies also single out the problem of wrongful convictions in presenting their annual work reports to the legislature
- Observers question whether China’s courts can ever improve human rights protections
China’s top legal bodies have highlighted improvements in intellectual property rights and violent crime, even as observers question whether the country’s legal system can ever improve protection for human rights.
Two annual work reports, one by the Supreme People’s Court and the other by the Supreme People’s Protectorate, were presented to China’s legislature on Monday, revealing a raft of data on the performance of the legal system of the world’s most populous country. Serious violent crime hit a two-decade low in 2020, according to the Supreme People’s Protectorate report, which attributed the drop to the government’s successful campaign against gang crimes.
The US has long butted heads with China over intellectual property theft but 2020 showed signs of improvement, with a 39 per cent year-on-year increase in the number of foreign IP cases handled by Chinese courts. Prosecution of IP infringements increased 10 per cent, while compensation IP-related offences registered a 79 per cent increase, according to the Supreme People’s Court report.
Deng Yuwen, a former deputy editor of the Study Times, a Chinese Communist Party journal, said the party has to some extent helped China’s courts take more initiative in order to increase popular confidence in the country’s legal system and the party’s political legitimacy.
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“For anything unrelated to politics, China’s legal system has definitely realised a positive turnaround in terms of procedure, but it’s far from enough,” he said, adding that the party could still interfere in any case it deemed a challenge its rule.