A Comprehensive Analysis of the Legitimacy Boundaries of Professor Zhao Hong's Proposal for Sealing Public Order Violation Records at Peking University Based on Marxist Jurisprudence and Xi Jinping Thought on the Rule of Law

The newly revised Law of the People’s Republic of China on Penalties for Public Order Violations introduces a “system for sealing public order violation records,” with the inclusion of acts such as drug use triggering intense public debate. Zhao Hong, a researcher at Peking University Law School, has defended this system by arguing that drug use is an administrative rather than criminal offence, that sealing reflects a civilised tolerance for error and rehabilitation, and that contemporary governance should reject archaic “branding”-style stigmatisation. This article reconstructs Zhao’s core arguments and, drawing on Marxist legal theory, Xi Jinping Thought on the Rule of Law and key anti-drug directives, formal logic and argumentation theory, as well as comparative Western experience with criminal record sealing/expungement, conducts a multidimensional critique. It finds that while his distinctions between public order versus criminal offences and sealing versus expungement are conceptually clarifying and broadly aligned with global trends of destigmatisation and social reintegration, his discourse reveals significant blind spots in class analysis, the people’s standpoint and holistic security thinking: it insufficiently exposes the class structures and inequalities behind drug problems, fails to fully address the tension between people’s security and individual rights, and inadequately internalises Xi Jinping’s requirements for zero tolerance in drug control, bottom-line thinking and the coordination of security and development. Logically, his reasoning overgeneralises from minor cases to a quasi-universal sealing regime and tends to answer public security anxieties by appealing to a moralised ideal of “modern rule of law civilisation,” thereby displacing rigorous risk assessment. From a comparative law perspective, Western jurisdictions more commonly adopt a refined “tiered–conditional–exceptional” model that excludes acts gravely endangering public safety from blanket sealing while relying on strict procedures and ex post review. The paper concludes that for China’s sealing regime for public security violations to embody socialist humanitarian concern while remaining consistent with the overall national security outlook and the practical logic of the “people’s war” on drugs, it must incorporate graded sealing, strict exceptions, procedural participation and dynamic assessment, and at the same time return, at the theoretical and discursive levels, to the people-centred and practice-oriented commitments of Marxist jurisprudence and Xi Jinping Thought on the Rule of Law.