"Striving to enable the people to feel fairness and justice in every judicial case"is the funda-mental purpose of the concept of fairness and justice of criminal proceedings.The study of subjective procedural justice provides a basic analytical framework for discussing the public's perception of fairness and justice as well as important references for the research on core elements and analytical methods of procedural justice.Based on the data of seven national surveys conducted between 2015 and 2023,this paper depicts the basic picture of the public's perception of fairness and justice in criminal justice in China and summarizes the changing pattern of this perception.On the whole,the public's evaluation of fairness and justice in criminal proceedings has become increasingly positive,but there has also been a differentiated trend of change in different dimensions.From the perspective of internal-external differ-ences in the legal profession,there is a significant differentiation between the legal professionals and the public in terms of the perception of fairness and justice in criminal justice.From the different perspec-tives of respondents involved and not involved in litigation,the perception of fairness and justice in crim-inal justice presents a triple relationship pattern that contains relatively better,basically balanced and relatively worse.From the perspective of the backgrounds of respondents,the perception of the fairness and justice in criminal justice also vary depending on the gender,age group,educational level,and geo-graphical location.The reform of the judicial and litigation systems must be based on this differentiated pattern and provide targeted responses in future institutional reforms.
criminal justicefairness and justicesubjective procedural justiceempirical study