Memo #21
(Chinese translation available here)
By Timothy Brook
China accounts for half the world’s executions. Currently, it is contemplating a reduction in the number of capital crimes. Draft legislation before the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress proposes cutting the number of capital crimes from 68 to 55. But how big is the difference?
It is easy to agree with Amnesty International that the reduction is unlikely to result in fewer executions. As Tsinghua University School of Law Professor Zhou Guangquan notes in a recent interview in the Southern Weekly, the 13 offences coming off the list are mostly white collar crimes. In fact, no death sentences for these crimes have been imposed since 1997.
Where is this change coming from? Professor Zhou acknowledges that the reduction is “to a certain degree a response to foreign concerns.” Cynics might conclude that the revision is merely window dressing, an attempt to appease foreign critics of capital punishment without really addressing its role in China’s punishment system. But that would be to discount what opponents of capital punishment inside the Ministry of Justice are trying to achieve. When the Qing dynasty abolished “death by a thousand cuts” and other forms of extreme execution in 1905, one of the justifications given was that foreigners perceived the Chinese as inhumane. That was certainly part of the calculus, but the abolition in fact rested on a long tradition of opposition to extreme punishments going back to the Song dynasty. Bending to foreign pressure was a feint to outflank opponents of the reform.
Professor Zhou may be making the very same feint in an attempt to defuse the opposition to death penalty reform within the National People’s Congress. Looked at from this perspective, the difference between 68 and 55 is big.
Still, one may wonder whether the government, not the legal reformers, is doing the real feint. The proposed reduction would not affect the 35 death sentences handed down to Uighur protesters in Urumqi a year ago. Nor will it touch the soldiers who shot protesters in the back as they fled. From this perspective, the difference between 68 and 55 doesn’t seem all that big.
About the Author:
Timothy Brook Republic of China Chair in Chinese Research, Institute of Asian Research, The University of British Columbia.
Links:
- Greater Steps Can be Taken to Reduce the Death Penalty, China Digital Times, September 2010. (Interview with Zhou Guangquan)
- Bae, Sangmin, South Korea’s De Facto Abolition of the Death Penalty, Pacific Affairs, volume 82, No. 3, Fall 2009 (for a comparative perspective)
Related Memos:
- See Timothy Brook’s Memo, One Hundred Years of Waiting (Memo #107)
- Our other Memos about China