Dilemmas in the Regulation of Minor Violent Acts and Legislative Proposals for Reform

There is an obvious deficiewncy in China’s regulation of minor violent acts: the crime of intentional injury sets minor injury as the criminalization threshold, leaving numerous violent acts below this standard only subject to administrative penalties with insufficient deterrence, while some vicious minor violent cases have to rely on the crime of affray for regulation, leading to the abuse of this "pocket crime" and disparate judgments for similar cases. Rooted in inadequate connection between administrative and criminal sanctions, insufficient attention to personal legal interest protection, and incoherent normative alignment between the Public Security Administration Punishment Law and the Criminal Law, this predicament can draw on South Korea’s experience of hierarchically regulating the offence of assault (폭행죄, Article 260 of the Korean Criminal Code) and the offence of injury (상해죄, Article 257 of the Korean Criminal Code) with a victim’s will filtering mechanism. It is therefore proposed to add a "circumstances of a minor nature" clause to the crime of intentional injury, incorporating repeated injury, injury to multiple persons, injury with dangerous weapons, and home invasion causing slight injury into criminal regulation, with the statutory penalty set as "fixed-term imprisonment of not more than one year, criminal detention, or controlled detention, and concurrently or separately imposed a fine", so as to build a hierarchical and well-connected regulatory system for minor violent acts and balance the comprehensive protection of personal rights with the principle of criminal law subsidiarity.