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Mafia organizations have long been a threat to Chinese society. The development of mafia organizations in China have experienced four stages: formation, dying out, resurgence, and recurrence. The Chinese government has attached great importance to the governance of mafia organizations and has suppressed mafia forces with some notable achievements. In January 2018, the Chinese government carried out a nationwide special campaign, “sweeping and eliminating evils” [sao hei chu’ e], to crack down gangs’ crimes in China. Different from previous actions, the recent campaign has changed its focus from “fighting” [da] to “sweeping” [sao], showing the changing focus of Beijing’s strategy in the crackdown on mafia organizations. In view of this, this study investigates the past, present and future of China’s governance of mafia organization crimes in the current context from a historical, norm-analytical approach. On the basis of a systematic review on the development of mafia organizations in China, this study, drawing on the current situation, discusses the process and main strategies of the mafia organization governance, and analyses the reasons for and the problems in the special campaign “sweeping and eliminating evils” in the new era. This study also provides plans and suggestions on how to advance the campaign from the perspective of the rule of law.

By exploring the cultural discrepancies in Chinese legal texts and their English versions and to what extent legal and cultural discrepancies influence and constrain legal translation, the study argues that it is useful to consider cultural discrepancies within a semiotic framework. Language is a phenomenon and factor that links different cultures; the use of language is crucial to any legal system. Law, as a cultural product, is attended by cultural discrepancies when switched into other languages for the purpose of achieving equivalence. After a brief overview of cultural differences in translation, legal translation in particular, the study is set to examine the role of translation in crossing through different legal cultures and backgrounds and investigate barriers in the process of translation. Investigating cultural discrepancies in legal translation within a semiotic framework allows us to focus on certain interpretations by acknowledging that legal texts are composed with systems of systems and interacting with other cultural aspects in a wider context.

In legislative texts, deontic modality helps define rights, privileges, obligations, and responsibilities. Based on a corpus of Chinese civil laws from 1949 to 2015, the study investigates the development of deontic modality in Chinese civil legislative discourse and examines the variations of deontic modality diachronically from a quantitative, functional perspective, thereby shedding lights on variations of legal text. This study shows that patterns of deontic modality manifest different features in different stages. The changes of linguistic forms of deontic modality show evidence of the adaptive feature in legal language. From a quantitative perspective, the study suggests that a corpus-driven approach helps examine the development and evolution of deontic modality diachronically. It also contributes to an understanding of deontic modality mechanisms by providing both empirical evidence and theoretical insights.

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