Conservation criminalisation and China's evolving wildlife sanctions

Criminal law remains a ubiquitous part of environmental governance and conservation. However, there is increasing interrogation of the risks of over-criminalisation in conservation. There are also calls for conservation to learn more from criminology, as policies seek to navigate impacts on social justice and biodiversity. This study explores the conservation criminalisation debate through a doctrinal legal analysis of significant, recent (2020−2022) legislative changes in China's wildlife criminal legislation. These reforms which, on the surface, seem like widely expanded criminalisation, actually reflected more nuanced responses that have created more pronounced distinctions between serious and minor offences. We employed the fishing net analogy to discuss this bifurcation that created changes to the thresholds that determine what actions are actually criminalised and that determine the severity of crimes and thus define the corresponding penalties. Much of this was achieved through the introduction of a monetary threshold system that introduced a standardised approach to placing monetary values on different species as a way to define criminal offences. These changes illustrate the complexity of legislative drafting to address and balance biodiversity conservation, social justice and socio-economic interests, and the importance of doctrinal legal analysis to both debates on conservation criminalisation and conservation design. • Criminal law plays a vital role in enhancing conservation. • China's recent legal reforms highlight a “Bifurcation” in wildlife crime regulation. • These legal shifts have significant implications for conservation and social justice. • Balancing conservation with socio-economic interests remains a key challenge. • Fostering dialogue between conservationists and criminologists can enhance policy effectiveness.