Criminal law regulation of liability for bribery in China

The current state of the crimes constituting bribery in China shows such trends and characteristics as diversification of crime methods, the phenomenon of “hunting in the environment”, deep penetration into all spheres of state activity, large volume of bribes and high level of latent crime. Criminal legal regulation of bribery-related crimes, since the Regulations of the People’s Republic of China on the Punishment of Corruption of April 21, 1952 first included these crimes in the sphere of criminal law regulation, has passed from a separate Criminal Law, the Criminal Code of the People’s Republic of China in 1979 to the Criminal Code of the People’s Republic of China in 1997 with Amendments to the Code. China’s system of criminal law regulation of bribery has become increasingly sophisticated, presenting such unique mechanisms as coordinated management based on supervisory law and the right to punish, a “parallel approach” to sanctions for the offenses of bribery and corruption, convergence of criminal law assessment of the crimes of civil servants and employees of private enterprises as subjects of bribery, and differentiation of criminal law response to these offenses from “leniency” – a “combination of leniency and severity” – “tightening” to joint investigation and sentencing for giving and receiving a bribe. The analysis of the status of bribery offenses in modern China and the characteristics of their criminal law regulation leads to a number of suggestions, including the application of a separate sanction model for bribery instead of the current parallel model with the punishment for corruption; the establishment of effective criminal law measures to suppress bribery through reliable mechanisms, strict justice, and improved legislation; the application of adequate penalties for bribery committed by employees of private enterprises; identifying new types of offenses constituting bribery using Big Data analysis.