Scroll through any news website, social media platform, or short video app in China and you’ll probably think that juvenile delinquency is on the rise. Serious cases of violence, from school bullying to murder, have shocked the public and led to much pearl-clutching about the purported “moral decline” of young people, as well as calls for lowering the age of criminal responsibility and introducing harsher penalties.

Many observers have also cited official data as evidence of rampant juvenile delinquency. According to the Supreme People’s Procuratorate, China’s top procuratorial body, 327,000 juveniles were investigated for crimes by the country’s local procuratorates from 2018 to 2022, increasing by an average of 7.7% per year.

However, this does not necessarily correlate with the severity of juvenile delinquency. Some of these cases end in the prosecutors deciding that no crime has been committed or a court finding the defendant innocent.

So what is the reality of juvenile delinquency in China? Is it really getting worse? After collecting and analyzing relevant data, I found that there is a significant gap between people’s perceptions and the facts.

According to official data from the last two decades of China’s official statistical yearbooks and the Supreme People’s Court, while the number of people found guilty of criminal offenses in China each year has increased in the past two decades, the proportion of young offenders — those aged under 25 years old — has actually steadily declined since 2007. The number of juvenile offenders each year — those under 18 years old — has also fallen since 2008.

Despite a slight rise in 2023, the proportion of juvenile offenders among young offenders remains low compared to pre-2020 data. Therefore, juvenile delinquency in China has actually declined as a share of all crimes committed over the past two decades.

Keen to scrutinize the statistic that criminal investigations of juveniles have increased, I analyzed specific case data from 2019 to 2022, which clearly show that the number of investigations of juveniles that resulted in arrests or prosecutions actually fell to a four-year low in 2022: The percentage of juvenile suspects eventually arrested fell from 65.47% to 30.61%, while prosecutions fell from 75.87% to 40.58%. In other words, the majority of juveniles are now merely investigated but not arrested, prosecuted, tried, or convicted.

What explains this curious trend, whereby the number of investigations of juveniles has increased while arrests and prosecutions have fallen in both absolute and relative terms? A possible reason is the different roles of China’s judicial bodies and public security bodies in the governance of misdemeanors. In recent years, China’s courts and procuratorial organs have applied more leniency when handling misdemeanors such as drunk driving and throwing objects from high altitude, opting for community service instead of prosecution, for example.

This judicial trend has not extended to the frontlines of law enforcement, however. Public security bureaus are often tasked with reducing crime levels, which may involve clocking up the number of investigations into specific misdemeanors in response to local priorities and campaigns.

This is borne out by the data on the types of crimes being committed by juveniles. According to official data from the Supreme People’s Court, since 2020, the major types of juvenile crimes in China have been petty crimes such as theft and fraud rather than serious violent crimes. Regarding the hot-button topic of school bullying, data released by the procuratorial organs show that arrests and prosecutions have significantly fallen since 2017, both in absolute and relative terms, as proportions of all arrests and prosecutions.

The problem of school bullying undoubtedly deserves greater attention from society and the authorities. But, judging from the data, it is questionable whether the problem is really worsening as media reports of extreme cases might have us believe.

Case data also show that China’s criminal justice system is helping to prevent juveniles from reoffending. The proportion of those with criminal records among all juvenile suspects has dropped from an all-time high of 3.83% in 2019 to 2.21% in 2022. In other words, the vast majority of juvenile offenders in China are first-time offenders, and the recidivism rate is very low.

Contrary to popular belief, Chinese judicial bodies publicize large amounts of data on arrests and prosecutions that can give us a more accurate picture of the scale and trend of juvenile delinquency in China. This also raises questions about how social media, with its emphasis on views and clicks, can distort this picture, as high-profile reports of extreme cases have intensified public concerns in recent years.

Data-based analysis is important, as harsher punishments, as some are calling for, may in fact not be necessary. Such measures also risk depriving juveniles who committed minor offenses of proper education, resulting in higher recidivism rates. Given the increase in the proportion of juveniles investigated but not arrested or prosecuted, it might be more pressing to assess whether policing or law enforcement resource allocation can be optimized and to promote more nuanced public discussions of juvenile delinquency beyond simplified narratives of moral decline and inadequate punishments — not only by increasing the public availability of data at all levels of the criminal justice system but also improving the ways in which this data is packaged and presented.

Translator: David Ball; portrait artist: Zhou Zhen.

(Header image: Duncan Walker/VCG, reedited by Sixth Tone)