Opening speech for the third Chinese Finnish seminar

Abstract

Dear colleagues from Finland and China, good morning and good afternoon! It is my great pleasure to attend the Third Chinese-Finnish Seminar on Criminal Law online with colleagues from Finland and China. With the joint efforts of both sides, we held the first and second Chinese-Finnish Seminar on Criminal Law in Helsinki in 2016 and in Beijing in 2018. According to the original plan, the third seminar was supposed to be held in Helsinki in 2020. But the outbreak of COVID-19 completely disrupted our arrangements. Even though the pandemic has been raging for three years, it is still not over. In particular, China is not yet open to the outside world, so we still unable to have offline face-to-face dialogues. Considering that the essence of human is social and the life of academic is communication, we have to hold this seminar online after delay of two years. The topic of this seminar is preventive criminal law. As an important proposition reflecting the postmodernity of criminal law, the specific performance and development trend of preventive criminal law may have significant national differences. However, it is still the common development trend of criminal law in all countries in the world today, and it is full of controversy because of the postmodernity characteristics, especially the erosion of classical liberal criminal law. The development of criminal law in China in recent years also shows an increasingly obvious preventive turn. On the one hand, legislators constantly amended the criminal law, added new charges, expanded the criminal circle, preposed the starting point of criminal law intervention, reduced the threshold of crime, blur the boundary between criminal law and civil law or administrative law, results-based criminal constitution increasingly gave way to dangerous standard and even conduct-based criminal constitution. The function of the secondary legal interest protection of criminal law and the system position of the law of last resort are under constant impact, and the criminal legislation is becoming more and more active. On the other hand, legislators are attaching more and more importance to the use of various legislative techniques to reduce the requirements for criminal proof, reduce the difficulty of the prosecution to charge crimes, and facilitate the flexible and efficient application of criminal law by the judiciary. I call it the invisible activation of criminal legislation. In addition, Chinese lawmakers have enacted a series of laws in recent years, including the Anti-Terrorism Law, the Anti-Organized Crime Law, the Cyber Security Law, the Data Security Law and the Personal Information Protection Law, which have further strengthened the preventive and comprehensive control of terrorist crimes, organized