Abstract: China’s criminal constituent system lacks a decriminalization mechanism, making it challenging to balance legal principles, rationality, and social sentiment in special cases. Criminal responsibility serves as the cornerstone of China’s system of crime, criminal responsibility and criminal penalty. The notion of legal consequences of a crime merely represents a doctrinal understanding of criminal responsibility. Criminal responsibility is not synonymous with culpability. The former bears the functions of examining and guiding the legitimacy of conviction and the principled sentencing. Therefore, it is imperative to substantively interpret its connotations. Given the difficulty of the crime constituent system in fulfilling a decriminalization function, it is advisable to focus on the conviction-examining function of criminal responsibility. Therefore, an approach is proposed. The approach involves incorporating decriminalization factors such as justifications, capacity for responsibility, the possibility of recognizing illegality, and the expectancy of conformity into the realm of criminal responsibility to scrutinize conviction. By doing so, decriminalization thinking is integrated into the system of crime, criminal responsibility and criminal penalty so that problem-solving could be merged with system construction. More importantly, the substantive content of China’s criminal responsibility is enriched, thereby transforming the long-standing hollowed-out and nominal state of criminal responsibility.