2015-04-02
Amnesty activists hold banners outside the South Korean consulate during a protest marking World Day Against the Death Penalty in Hong Kong, Oct. 10, 2011.
AFP
China’s ruling Chinese Communist Party “kills in secret, and with political motives,” according to London-based rights group Amnesty International, and is unlikely to change its approach in the foreseeable future, analysts said on Thursday.
According to Amnesty, at least 2,466 people were sentenced to death in 2014, 28 percent more than in the previous year, while 607 executions were recorded worldwide.
But the figures don’t include death sentences and executions in China, where the authorities are still believed to execute more prisoners than the rest of the world combined.
However, authorities in the troubled northwestern region of Xinjiang did publish news of at least 21 executions in 2014, via the country’s official media reporting on a year-long “strike hard” anti-terrorism campaign, the report said.
“Three of them [were] condemned to death in a mass sentencing rally at a stadium in front of thousands of people,” Amnesty International’s report said.
But it added: “We stopped publishing estimates for the number of executions in China in 2009, as it is impossible to verify figures while the death penalty system in China remains a state secret.”
Sichuan-based rights activist Huang Qi said Beijing is more likely to publish information about death penalties and executions in ethnic minority regions where there are widespread public fears over violence and instability.
Numbers kept secret
But the Communist Party is extremely careful not to let people know exactly how many officials are executed for corruption, compared with ordinary people convicted of violent crimes, Huang said.
“The Chinese public would want to compare the figures for executed corrupt officials with those for common criminals,” Huang said.
“[This would support] the view that the Chinese legal system protects officials, and doesn’t regard them as ordinary people.”
But Huang said there is still widespread public support within China for the death penalty, especially for officials.
“Life may be of higher value than anything else, but the Chinese public is still broadly supportive of executing officials,” he said.
Huang said the government has expressed interest in moving towards a more transparent system for reporting on the death penalty, however.
“I think that the likelihood of China publishing its death penalty statistics in the next couple of years isn’t very high,” he said. “They would want to wait until the situation in Xinjiang stabilizes.”
Deterrent to crime?
Hubei-based rights activist Song Xiangfeng said there is a widespread public perception that the death penalty acts as a deterrent to growing crime rates in China’s cities.
“There is a lot of chaos in society right now, and certain kinds of crime are rampant,” Song said. “Most people, especially people in cities, believe that the death penalty can act as a brake on crime.”
“The bigger the city, the higher the crime rate, and most ordinary people think that crime should be severely punished.”
Bob Fu, founder of the U.S.-based Christian rights group ChinaAid, said executions in China are used to instill fear in the population at large.
“Killing on a large scale is a common occurrence for the regime,” Fu said. “Killing is normal.”
“There has been no change in this attitude in recent times, very little change at all.”
“Even though executions are kept secret, everybody knows they take place, and the key element of a dictatorship is terror,” he said.
“The figures may be secret, but the act itself isn’t a secret.”
