Youth justice in China

China’s well-documented and rapid socioeconomic changes, including largely unmanaged rural to urban migration, form an important pressure on development of an adequate juvenile justice system. This chapter identifies and describes key normative principles that are said to underpin contemporary juvenile justice in China. The development of the modern legal framework is also elucidated. In later sections we identify and analyze the regulatory and organizational limits to the implementation of such principles in everyday practice. We argue that the principles stand as part of professional discourse but remain a largely discursive phenomenon—impinging to a limited extent on the reality of juvenile justice processing in contemporary China.