Visiting Chinese Log Time in Court : Want to See How U.S. Treats Youths Who Get in Trouble

The Chinese visitors had never seen anything like it.

Two sisters, 15 and 16, were on trial Thursday morning in San Diego County Juvenile Court, accused--among other things--of biting the hand of their high school principal as he tried to break up a schoolyard fight.

Their mother, sitting in the front row of the courtroom gallery, tried to get the visitors’ attention. “Am I allowed to talk to these people so they will know there is no justice for black people in this country?” she asked.

But the request went untranslated--just one more thing the guests, five high-ranking Chinese experts on juvenile delinquency, could not understand during their weeklong visit to San Diego.

“Such cases like beating a person or a fight we probably will not bring into court,” said the head of the delegation, Yang Chunxi, a law professor and vice president of Yantai University in Peking. Instead, they would be handled through neighborhood mediation or resolved informally.

In China, Yang said through interpreter Chen Jinya, “the standard of what is crime is quite different.”

China has been formalizing its legal system under the reformist regime, in power since the late 1970s, and juvenile justice is no exception. As part of an ongoing exchange with the University of San Diego School of Law, the Chinese lawyers came to San Diego to observe firsthand how American courts and law enforcement agencies address juvenile delinquency--in part to get ideas about paths along which Chinese institutions can evolve.

“They want to see how we deal with kids who get in trouble with the law,” Judith McConnell, presiding judge of the Juvenile Court, explained to a group of 19 Juvenile Hall detainees who unexpectedly shared a lunch of tamale pie and refried beans with the Chinese attorneys.

Much of the American system looked familiar to the Chinese, who also split up to ride the streets with a San Diego police lieutenant or walk through residential centers for delinquent youth. Earlier in the week, they visited San Diego High School and met with U.S. legal experts at USD.

Like the United States, China does not impose adult criminal punishments on minors. Serious wrongdoing can land Chinese youths in court, however, and a people’s tribunal can sentence them to terms in detention centers.

There, much like at American juvenile halls and training schools, Chinese delinquents receive moral, intellectual, vocational and ideological training in an atmosphere where they are treated firmly, but with affection: “like parents to their children, doctors to their patients, teachers to their students, to correct their bad habits,” according to a Chinese film shown to the conferees earlier this week.

As in America, too, the Chinese have increasing problems with youth gangs. “Juveniles like to get together to commit crimes,” Yang noted. “It’s the nature of juveniles.”

But while the correctional systems are similarly structured, at least on paper, much about American delinquency problems and approaches to rehabilitating troubled children seemed utterly inscrutable to the Chinese.

In an interview Thursday, Yang said he was taken aback by San Diego’s typically American problems with teen-age drug abuse and pregnancy. Officials at San Diego High, he said, told him as many as three-fourths of all students there have used illicit drugs at least once.

“Up till now, I have no such news about Chinese students who take any drugs,” Yang said. “Three-fourths is a very large number. It made me shocked.”

Child-abuse cases--roughly 40% of the work of San Diego juvenile authorities--also are a lesser problem in China, Yang said.

Punishment for the offense--which in the United States frequently leads to the removal of the child from the parents’ home--takes a different form in China. As with fights and other minor forms of wrongdoing, less severe cases of child abuse often are remedied through mediation or punishment by neighborhood committees, he said. In serious abuse cases, the offending parent’s name may be published in a local newspaper.

“That is a very hard punishment in China,” Yang said. “A person with his name in the newspaper will lose face.”

Chinese statistics--notoriously suspect, in part because of the difficulty of gathering data in a nation of more than one billion people--indicate that delinquency has been on the upswing since the liberalization that began with the death of Mao Tse-tung in 1976, Yang said in a paper delivered at the USD conference.

Juveniles accounted for 70% of the crime in China in the 1970s, he said, but now are responsible for only about 20%, similar to the levels of the 1950s, after the communist takeover.

According to Gan Gongren, research director of the China Law Society, theft is the offense most commonly committed by Chinese delinquents under 25, followed by “hooliganism”--a broad category that includes harassment of women and sexual promiscuity.

Still, the reported rate of juvenile crime in China is barely a 10th of the level in the United States, according to Barry Feld, a University of Minnesota law professor who was one of the American experts at the USD conference.

Like the Americans of the progressive movement who created juvenile courts in the late 19th Century, the Chinese place a heavy emphasis on identifying and rooting out the underlying causes of delinquency. In their conference papers, the Chinese lawyers spoke repeatedly of the importance of crafting a healthy social environment, free of the bad influences of pre-communist culture and protected from the “hedonistic” influences of China’s increasing contact with the West.

Young people can take two paths, said Wang Luosheng, deputy president of the Care For Juvenile Education Assn. of Peking.

There is the “upward path,” he said, where youngsters acquire a “correct world outlook and view of life.” And there is a “downward path”--which may sound familiar to American parents--in which kids develop “laziness, detestable taste and unprincipled desires,” Wang said.

According to Feld, the Chinese’s focus on the moral redemption of youngsters who have taken the wrong path is a marked contrast to American practice.

“They have a much greater confidence in what they’re trying to produce in their people,” Feld said. “We in this country have an extraordinary emphasis on individualism and the rights of individuals, both adults and juveniles, and an insecurity about our cultural values.”

Though translator Chen said the Chinese were shocked by the extreme youth of the offenders they saw at Juvenile Hall--children 13 and younger among them--they nonetheless were impressed by the boys they met at lunch Thursday.

At one table, a red-headed boy explained the daily schedule at Juvenile Hall to Wong. At another table, Yang asked several youngsters if they thought the single rooms they are assigned at the hall were preferable to the 10-man bunks at most Chinese work-study centers.

“Good juveniles,” Chen said after lunch, as he walked through a Juvenile Hall recreation room and admired a Ping-Pong table that recalled an earlier stage of Chinese-American cultural exchange. “Very good juveniles. I hope I get to talk to them more.”