LAST year China is thought to have executed about
3,000 people, or roughly four times more than the rest of the world put together.
It is a grim distinction
According to the Dui Hua Foundation, an American NGO that
tracks these things, the 2012 figure is down from 12,000 people executed in
2002—a fall of three-quarters. In other words, though China remains the world’s
chief executioner, it is also largely responsible for a marked worldwide fall
in the number of executions.
The Communist Party considers the execution rate to be a
state secret and has not even publicly noted the extent of this fall. But it
has confirmed it indirectly. In 2012 a deputy minister of health cited the
decline in executed prisoners as a reason for a shortage in organs available
for transplant in China. Dui Hua’s estimates are thus the best figures
available. Western scholars broadly agree with the numbers, behind which lies
an intriguing tale of Chinese reformers working quietly for change.
Historically, the Chinese Communist Party has overseen
horrendous violence. Though not on the scale of Stalin’s Soviet Union, this
started with the purges of landlords and other “counter-revolutionaries” in the
late 1940s and early 1950s. Mao Zedong coolly declared that “the killing of
counter-revolutionaries should usually not exceed 0.1% of the population, and
should be less than 0.1% in the cities.” Millions died in a few short years, as
Chinese villages were encouraged to mete out their own punishment with the aim
of creating a blessed “New China”.
Mao’s death in 1976 brought to an end the last spasm of
violence in his name, the Cultural Revolution. Chinese leaders relaxed
political control over people’s daily lives and encouraged economic change. But
they enforced a rigid system of criminal justice in the name of maintaining
social order. Capital punishment was to be for “extremely serious crimes”, a
category that was open to broad interpretation but which included corruption
and drug trafficking. Starting in 1983, the government launched regular “strike
hard” anti-crime campaigns. Judges—many of them former soldiers without legal
training—were ordered to be severe. In the first campaign 24,000 people were
sentenced to death by firing squad in less than one year. As a result of
similar drives in the 1990s, the country executed about 15,000 people a year,
more than 90% of the world’s total. Public sentencing rallies, and occasionally
public executions, took place.
One man began turning this culture round. Never a household
name, Xiao Yang served as president of the Supreme People’s Court from 1998 to
2008. Exceptionally for that post, Mr Xiao was qualified, possessing a degree
in law. Neither he nor a deputy at the court, Liu Jiachen, who helped him, can
be counted as radicals. Rather, they wanted a more professional, accountable
and methodical judiciary—especially in handling capital offences. Their urge to
modernise found a growing base of support within the system. One of Mr Xiao’s
professors at Beijing’s Renmin University in the 1960s, Gao Mingxuan, was an
influential legal figure and, though viewed as a conservative, was an advocate
of reducing executions. People who graduated from law school in the 1980s and
1990s—some of them avowed abolitionists as young scholars—were now
up-and-coming officials, judges and court advisers.
Daniel Yu, a legal scholar who knew many in this group, says
they were keenly aware of a global mood turning against the use of the death
penalty. They were equally aware how much of an outlier China was. The
country’s taste for execution had become a source of embarrassment.
Quietly does it
That Mr Xiao and his deputies set out to limit executions
became apparent to outsiders only years later. He could not argue the case for
fewer executions before his political masters on the basis of concerns about
China’s image abroad. Hardliners dismissed foreign complaints about
human-rights violations; besides, the party was convinced of the need to “kill
many” so as to keep order. And public opinion has long been for capital
punishment.
According to Susan Trevaskes, author of “The Death Penalty
in Contemporary China”, one of Mr Xiao’s schemes to reduce the number of
executions was to encourage the wider use of suspended death sentences. He and
other officials of the Supreme People’s Court sought to persuade judges to hand
down such sentences in more cases of murder, drug trafficking and violent
robbery. It marked a change of rhetoric. In 1983 officials urged that “when
there is a choice to kill or not to kill, choose to kill”; in 2005 officials
said courts must “kill fewer, kill cautiously”.
Ms Trevaskes argues that Mr Xiao was able to push this line
because he could argue that it would boost the system’s legitimacy. “Killing
many” had not worked to reduce crime, and could lead to challenges to
authority. In small communities, where serious crimes often involved family
members, resolving disputes through compensation and lesser punishments
promised to reduce the risks of tensions spilling over. What is more, a bolder
state media had begun to expose how police framed innocent people for drug
trafficking and murders in order to claim rewards or appear efficient. The idea
of innocent people being executed after wrongful convictions fed growing
popular revulsion.
The harmonious way out
Mr Xiao also cleverly seized on the official rhetoric of Hu
Jintao, the former president and party chief. In 2006 the official document
defining Mr Hu’s ideology of a “harmonious society” called for “balancing leniency
and severity”. This language went unnoticed by most, but the supreme court
appropriated it into national policy.
In 2006 Mr Xiao won a change in the law that had profound
consequences. In a country where local functionaries jealously guard their powers,
he ensured that every capital case had to be reviewed by the highest court in
Beijing. Mr Hu himself seems to have supported the move. The Supreme People’s
Court added several hundred judges and constructed a new complex in Beijing to
take on the task of reviewing so many cases. The impact was immediate. The
number of death sentences was already slowly declining. But it plunged by 30%
in the first year of court reviews; executions fell in turn, to about 5,000 in
2008. Plenty of cases were sent back for retrial.
Executions have declined further since, as the court has
taken other measures to encourage the use of the suspended death penalty,
including the publication of model cases to help guide lower courts about when
they should impose the suspended sentence. On July 8th a former railways
minister, Liu Zhijun, was given a suspended death sentence for
corruption—though many Chinese commenting online deemed that too lenient. In
2011, in a largely symbolic step, China removed 13 crimes from the list of capital
offences, including smuggling, tomb-robbing and stealing prehistoric fossils.
It has also changed the method of execution in most cases from firing squad to
lethal injection.
John Kamm, founder of the Dui Hua Foundation, calls the
reduction in executions “the most significant positive development in the human
rights situation in China in recent decades”. Yet legal-rights activists worry
that the number of executions may not have much farther to fall. Party ideology
unequivocally endorses capital punishment, and Mr Xiao and his allies did
nothing to challenge it. Though executions are less common, the activists say,
the judicial system still lacks any kind of independence and miscarriages of
justice are still commonplace.
Teng Biao, a lawyer who helped form a group opposed to the
death penalty, says he gets little public support for his cause, though people
react to individual cases of perceived injustice. The recent execution of a
businessman convicted of defrauding investors in Hunan province drew a public
outcry when it emerged that his family had not been notified that the execution
was about to take place.
Mr Teng and others argue that abuses of defendants’ rights
are still widespread, and that defence lawyers are often prevented from
properly representing their clients in capital cases. In their view China still
kills thousands too many. It will, says Mr Teng, be at least another 50 years
before China abolishes the death penalty. The Economist
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