WANG Xiang;HU Yue;

• 1:Zhou Enlai School of Government
• 2: Nankai University
• 3:School of Social Sciences
• 4: Tsinghua University

Abstract：

This study examines the judicial treatment of domestic migrants in China's criminal justice system. Despite extensive scholarship on migrant criminality, systematic analyses of judicial responses to migrant offenders remain underdeveloped. This research addresses this empirical gap by investigating sentencing patterns as a governance mechanism that reveals how Chinese courts operationalize competing imperatives of public-order maintenance and migrant incorporation.Leveraging over 160000 criminal court judgments from basic-level courts(2020—2021), the study employs a novel identification strategy that uses hukou-crime location discrepancies to classify migrant defendants. Integrating granular data on linguistic distance and municipal economic development indicators, the research conducts a multi-level assessment of how cultural proximity and the local political economy affect judicial decision-making.The empirical analysis reveals, first, that migrant defendants receive systematically longer sentences than local defendants for comparable offenses, even controlling for case-specific factors and jurisdictional characteristics. This sentencing disparity demonstrates a consistent constraining function by which courts impose enhanced penalties on non-local offenders as a result of judicial responsiveness to social stability imperatives and perceived threats to community cohesion.Second, cultural distance exhibits a non-linear moderating effect on sentencing severity. Migrants from linguistically similar regions face harsher penalties, while those from culturally distant areas receive comparatively more lenient treatment. This curvilinear relationship indicates that judicial actors calibrate the intensity of punishment based on categorical boundaries between proximate “threatening insiders” and distant “non-threatening outsiders, ” reflecting cognitive frameworks that shape the perceptions of social risk.Third, the local economic structure significantly conditions the sentencing outcomes. In small, medium, and many large cities with robust labor demand for migrant workers, courts demonstrate greater leniency, revealing judicial accommodation due to economic dependence on migrant labor. Conversely, in mega-cities facing intensified governance pressures, sentencing severity increases markedly, reaffirming the judiciary's social-control function under conditions of demographic density and administrative complexity.These findings illuminate a dual logic of judicial governance wherein Chinese courts simultaneously constrain and incorporate migrants. This duality reveals that judicial decision-making transcends formal legal applications, incorporating implicit calculations about social boundaries, stability maintenance, and developmental priorities. These results advance our understanding of the role of the judiciary in managing a highly mobile society and offer insights for improving crime governance by balancing public security with the long-term integration of migrants.

Key Words： migrants;law and politics;judicial documents;linguistic distance;economic development

Abstract:

Keywords:

Foundation: 国家自然科学基金委面上项目“经济不平等的经济与治理认知塑造机制与行为政策引导策略研究”(项目批准号:72374116);; 司法部2024年度法治建设与法学理论研究部级科研项目青年课题“非诉讼纠纷解决机制的治理效能研究”(项目批准号:24SFB3006);; 南开大学前沿交叉学科研究院青年交叉研究项目“大数据时代的民主参与机制变迁：基于陪审制度的法政治学分析”,南开大学“百名青年学科带头人培养计划”的资助

Authors: WANG Xiang;HU Yue;

References：

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• (1)为了作图简洁,“走私、贩卖、运输、制造毒品罪”在图中简称“毒品罪”;“引诱、容留、介绍卖淫罪”在图中简称“卖淫罪”。 (2)为了作图简洁清晰,根据《关于调整城市规模划分标准的通知》,我们将Ⅰ型小城市、Ⅱ型小城市、中等城市合并归类为“中小城市”,Ⅰ型大城市、Ⅱ型大城市合并归类为“大城市”。 (3)该方法综合方言的语言学特征、地理因素、历史因素等,对其相似性进行量化赋值。其对语言距离的测量有效性已经获得了语言经济学、语言政治学大量研究的支持(Fearon and Laitin,2008;Laitin and Ramachandran,2016)。同时在操作层面,这一方法也被广泛应用于流动人口研究中,方法和成果获得学界认可(刘毓芸等,2015;Hu and Pizzi,2022)。 (4)阻却事由主要包含两种情形,一是正当防卫,二是紧急避险。案件中如果出现任何一种情形,记为1,否则为0。