HONG KONG - It did not happen this weekend, as some overly optimistic analysts
had predicted, but it is only a matter of time before China's top legislative
body votes to reduce by nearly 20% the number of crimes subject to the death
penalty.
After its first reading, an amendment to the criminal code that would drop
capital punishment in the currently effective Criminal Code for 13 economic
crimes was not approved at a meeting of the Standing Committee of the National
People's Congress.
Typically, however, such legislation goes through two or three readings before
approval is given. In the rubber-stamp politics of China, the fact that it has
reached the standing committee virtually guarantees its success.
Under the amendment, crimes such as financial fraud, forgery and
smuggling cultural relics and precious metals out of the country would no
longer be capital offenses. People aged 75 and older will also be spared. But,
once approved, the amendment will hardly amount to an act of mercy, as it has
been characterized in state media.
It will, however, mark a small but important step in the country's legal and
political development. Unlike China's full-on commitment to economic growth
over the past 30 years, progress on these two fronts continues to proceed at a
snail's pace, but it is progress nonetheless.
Even after those 13 economic sins are downgraded, 55 crimes for which the death
penalty is applicable will remain on the books in a nation that is believed to
execute far more people annually than the rest of the world combined. Under the
new legislation, crimes such as bribery, damaging public property and
manufacturing and selling bogus medicine may still exact a death sentence.
It is no surprise, then, that human-rights groups are dismissing the amendment
as a symbolic gesture that lacks any real substance. After all, they note, few
people have ever been put to death for the crimes that will soon be exempted;
thus, the killing will likely continue to mount in a country that carried out
nearly 5,000 executions last year, according to the San Francisco-based Dui Hua
Foundation; other activists put the figure even higher.
A spokesman for Amnesty International, which promotes abolition of the death
penalty, called the amendment "legal housekeeping" that was unlikely to reduce
the number of executions in China.
"Although we would welcome any reform that would in practice decrease
executions in China," said Catherine Baber, the group's deputy director for its
Asia-Pacific program, "we are not yet convinced that these legal revisions will
have a significant impact."
Baber also pointed out that the rest of the world will never really know how
many people die by the hand of the state until executions are no longer
classified as state secrets by the Chinese government. As a way of challenging
this policy of secrecy, this year Amnesty did not include even an estimate of
the number of executions in China in its annual report on the death penalty.
According to that report, 2,001 people were sentenced to death in 56 countries
in 2009, and 714 people were executed in 17 those countries. While China,
deliberately omitted from the tally, is widely believed to rank first among
nations as an executioner, Amnesty places Iran second with at least 388
executions, followed by Iraq (120), Saudi Arabia (69) and the United States
(52).
The report also documents a continuing global trend toward abolition of capital
punishment, with 95 countries now having done away with the death penalty for
all crimes, Burundi and Togo being the latest to do so. The United States was
the only country in the Americas to execute someone last year, and Belarus is
the lone nation in Europe that embraces the death penalty.
Interestingly, of the 18 countries that carried out executions last year, eight
are in Asia: Bangladesh, China, Japan, Malaysia, North Korea, Singapore,
Thailand and Vietnam. Of the 56 countries that issued death sentences, 16 -
including India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Taiwan and Indonesia - are located on
the continent.
So Asia appears to be bucking the global trend - with even fully developed
Japan, Taiwan and Singapore supporting capital punishment as a deterrent
against the most serious crimes. Although Amnesty and other human-rights groups
will object, China's record should be seen in this light.
Granting that context, however, China's figures - albeit hard to pin down - are
still alarming, as is the suspect legal process by which it is decided who
lives and who dies. And the central government's obsessive secrecy about
executions is an unsettling reminder of its habitual lack of transparency on
just about everything else, pointing to the much bigger political problem of
one-party rule.
That said, the proposed amendment, the first one reducing the number of crimes
subject to the death penalty since the current criminal code was adopted in
1979, should be applauded by the international community. Yes, advances on
China's legal front may be glacial, but they nevertheless represent progress
and fit into a recognizable pattern, maddeningly slow though it may be, of
reform.
Remember, China is a nation of 1.3 billion people. Thanks to 30 years of
double-digit economic growth that has lifted tens of millions out of poverty,
it is now the world's second-largest economy, but most of its people still live
in the countryside, and many of them remain poorly educated and impoverished.
The top priority for the leadership is to maintain China's remarkable economic
run so that those remaining tens of millions living hand-to-mouth can also
graduate to the expanding middle class. That is the dream for the future.
Meanwhile, in the rough-and-tumble reality of the present, China's wealth gap
threatens social stability and the rush to riches invites corruption, which has
allowed organized crime to flourish and further widened the economic and social
divide. Chinese leaders have attempted to wield the threat of capital
punishment for economic crimes as a way to lessen that corruption and ease
social tensions.
For example, just last month, Wen Qiang, former chief justice of Chongqing, a
municipality known for its triad culture, was put to death after he was
convicted of accepting bribes, rape and colluding with criminal gangs.
Charlatans running illegal banking and Ponzi schemes have also been sentenced
to death.
But - putting arguments about the effectiveness of capital punishment as a
deterrent aside - the threat of the death penalty has been otherwise undermined
by rampant corruption among Communist Party officials at the local level, where
collusion of the sort Wen practiced more often leads to profit and advancement
than to prison and death.
The amendment may be an acknowledgement of that fact. At the same time,
however, it is a sign of progress in China's legal system. It invites a next
step and comes on top of other important reforms.
In 2008, the Supreme People's Court found that 15% of the death sentences
handed down by lower courts were flawed; the top court now reviews all death
sentences. Last May, the court ruled that confessions made under torture were
inadmissible as evidence.
All of this is good news that may mean China is inching its way toward becoming
a country ruled by law rather than party. But don't count on it as long as
executions - along with anything else that the party doesn't want the Chinese
people and the rest of world to know - are deemed "state secrets".
Kent Ewing is a Hong Kong-based teacher and writer. He can be reached at
kewing@hkis.edu.hk
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