Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Political offences in the People's Republic of China


 * The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review).  No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was   no consensus.  Sandstein  07:51, 4 February 2012 (UTC)

Political offences in the People's Republic of China

 * – ( View AfD View log )

I feel that this page should be deleted because it violates WP:OR (original research) and WP:INFO (miscellaneous collection of info), and is used to push a particular WP:NPOV (point of view) by the original creator who is now indefinitely banned. It's also poorly sourced as there is little in depth discussion on the mentioned offenses, and contains merely a list of some accused. The material would have served better in alternate articles such as Human rights in the People's Republic of China or Law of the People's Republic of China. LucasGeorge (talk) 09:52, 21 January 2012 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of China-related deletion discussions.  —Tom Morris (talk) 10:43, 21 January 2012 (UTC)


 * Delete because of the POV problems inherent in the title. On the same grounds I oppose redirection to Human rights in the People's Republic of China though redirection to Law of the People's Republic of China would do. The article is about certain classes of offence against the law and constitution of the PRC and needs to be constructed in such as way as to refer directly to the way in which the courts would address these matters. We would not, for example, have an article entitled Political offences in the United States of America not because some of the offences referred to in this article do not have parallels in US law, but because without specific reference to the US constitution and statutes the concept holds little meaning. Anything else is POV. --AJHingston (talk) 17:30, 21 January 2012 (UTC)
 * Question What's wrong with the title? Some states have had laws that were specifically meant to define political crimes (e.g. Article 58 in the USSR), and I'd be quite surprised if nobody has published anything reliable on this subject.  Nyttend (talk) 02:09, 22 January 2012 (UTC)
 * But that article is about Article 58 of the RSFSR penal code, which is precisely the point. If there were a verifiable category of offences identifiable in Chinese law which fitted this description, or even an internationally identifiable class of such crimes, as opposed to offenses against society, public order, or infringing the constitutionally guaranteed rights of individuals, that would be different. To return to the US example, what offences would we include in the hypothetical Political offences in the United States of America? Sedition, treason, espionage on behalf of a foreign power, terrorism, electoral law offences, various types of political protest, or should it include other things marking someone out as a bad citizen? We would say it was absurd to try and create such a category, yet clearly there are all sorts of things that are offences against the body politic. --AJHingston (talk) 10:16, 22 January 2012 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Law-related deletion discussions.  • Gene93k (talk) 19:39, 22 January 2012 (UTC)


 * Comment. The expression "political offences" is not a neologism. For example Card, Cross and Jones Criminal Law has a chapter on "political offences", which, includes in particular, treason and offences under the Official Secrets Acts 1911 to 1989. "Offence of a political character" was used as a term of art in section 6 of the Extradition Act 1989. I am under the impression that that concept was used by other countries as well, and that there was some kind of treaty about it. We have an article on Political crime. Whether the term can be accurately applied to the offences included in this article is a different matter, but needs to be addressed directly, by looking to see if there are reliable sources to support that classification. James500 (talk) 03:03, 23 January 2012 (UTC)
 * Google Books seems to return results, including this. Using different search terms returns a much larger number of results. James500 (talk) 03:28, 23 January 2012 (UTC)
 * As for the title, this article started out at List of offences that attract jail terms in China and was moved to List of political offences that attract jail terms in China and then to its present location by persons other than the creator. James500 (talk) 03:47, 23 January 2012 (UTC)
 * Keep - it appears to be well-cited, and from what has been found online, more sources could be added to show notability. Bearian (talk) 19:39, 24 January 2012 (UTC)
 * Keep, looks like the subject has indeed received significant coverage in secondary sources. &mdash; Cirt (talk) 18:40, 26 January 2012 (UTC)
 * Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion so a clearer consensus may be reached.


 * Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Bryce  ( talk  &#124;  contribs ) 11:27, 27 January 2012 (UTC)


 * Delete This consists of identifying material (any political act that that particular government deems to be an "offense") which should be covered elsewhere as "offenses".  The title is inherently a POV re-classification of other news/material.  That would be like starting a fork from the "Occupy" articles entitled "political park use ordinance violations" and covering the Occupy protests there. This article is inherently a POV fork. North8000 (talk) 13:49, 27 January 2012 (UTC)
 * I do not agree that the title is inherently POV. "Political offences" will refer, in this context, to offences that are considered to be inherently political, i.e. where a political motive is an element of the offence that has to be proved in order to secure a conviction. That presumably isn't the case with park use ordinance violations because, I imagine, it would not be a defence for the person who committed the violation to say "I did not have a political motive". Whereas, if a person was charged with, for example, a constructive levying war under the Treason Act 1351, saying "I did not have a political motive" (or more precisely "it was not my purpose to effect an innovation of a public nature, such as a change in the law, or the opening of all prisons (as opposed to a particular one), or the like") would reduce his liability to riot, which has a lower maximum sentence, because a political motive, in those terms, is an element of that offence, but is not an element of riot. James500 (talk) 16:33, 27 January 2012 (UTC)


 * Keep - I believe that this is an encyclopedic topic, presented historically, sourced well, and written in a neutral tone. I do concur with A.J. Hingston (above) that there needs to be more specificity in terms of underlying legal doctrine and specific code citations, otherwise it comes out as a laundry list of dissident cases. This, however, is a content matter for discussion and modification in an editorial setting and not sufficient cause for deletion. Carrite (talk) 16:18, 27 January 2012 (UTC)


 * Comment/Suggestion We have a baby/bathwater problem with AFDing this article, so please don't delete it too quickly, at least not until a real solution comes up. Issue: we don't have an Outline of Chinese law which would facilitate organizing Chinese legal system data coherently such as that which appears in this article, and there will be more AFDs on such subjects until we do. Because we are not well organized in the subject matter, and because the article itself is not yet well-developed, does not mean we should be so quick to vaporize it. That said, we should be able to fix the problem fairly easily. The information in this article largely reflects (1) the history of both the Cultural Revolution and the general Legal history of China, and (2) the current state of the Chinese legal system as it pertains to criminal law, but the article on the Legal history of China is too general a topic to include some of the important data presented in this article. It seems to me that much of this article's information in the first section could be incorporated into the articles on the Cultural Revolution and Chinese legal history, while the information in the second section (the current issues) should be part of an article on the Chinese Criminal law, which currently does not exist. So if someone would create an Outline of Chinese law and the article on the criminal law of China, similar to the English tort law, and then move this article's data into the appropriate places, we'll have saved the article's important information, but in a more organized fashion. Sctechlaw (talk) 00:08, 29 January 2012 (UTC)
 * A quick Google search for China Chinese 'Criminal justice system' on WP returns many results which could provide a good start to an article on Chinese criminal law. Sctechlaw (talk) 00:21, 29 January 2012 (UTC)
 * We also have the entire Category:Political repression in the People's Republic of China, of which an outline could be made. Sctechlaw (talk) 03:50, 29 January 2012 (UTC)
 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.