The Chinese government regards how many people it puts to death each year a state secret, making it difficult to gain an exact understanding of the scale of capital punishment in a country long thought to execute more people than the rest of the world combined.
But according to estimates by the San Francisco-based human rights group Dui Hua, about 2,400 people were executed in China last year, far fewer than the 12,000 put to death in 2002. Despite that downward trend, China still leads the rest of the world, Dui Hua said in a statement this week. According to Amnesty International, at least 778 people were executed last year outside China.
Dui Hua said it expected the number of executions in China to remain steady this year, with the broader move away from capital punishment offset in part by its increased use in the far western region of Xinjiang, where tensions have erupted in violence between the authorities and ethnic Uighurs, the mostly Muslim, Turkic-speaking minority who say their religious and cultural rights are being ignored.
Another factor Dui Hua cited is the current nationwide anticorruption campaign, which is leading to many arrests, including of senior officials.
The trend toward fewer executions — in 1983, 24,000 people were estimated to have been condemned to die — was hastened by a decision in 2007 that the Supreme People’s Court in Beijing review all death sentences issued by lower courts, Dui Hua said. In many places, executions dropped about 50 percent within the next four years.
Dui Hua added that it based its estimate for 2013 on data published in Southern Weekly, a Chinese newspaper, and information provided to the organization by a Chinese judicial official. The data were consistent, it said.
Here’s what Dui Hua said on the issue of the Supreme People’s Court, or SPC, overturning death sentences:
In 2013, 39 percent of all death penalty cases reviewed by the SPC were sent back to provincial high courts for additional evidence, Southern Weekly reported, citing an SPC official speaking at a legal seminar.
And:
The SPC currently overturns fewer than 10 percent of death penalty verdicts, a former SPC senior judge told Southern Weekly.
Southern Weekly has reported that a former senior judge of the Supreme People’s Court said at a seminar in July that the number of executions had fallen to a tenth of the highest number recorded since 1979. That came in 1983, the first year of a “Strike Hard” campaign against crime.
Dui Hua said:
In 1983 — the first year of the Strike Hard campaign during which the power to approve capital punishment was given to provincial high courts — 24,000 people were sentenced to death, according to a report by southcn.com, citing The Communist Party of China: Forty Years in Power (Zhongguo gongchandang zhizheng sishi nian). The book called the first year of the Strike Hard campaign the largest centralized attack since the campaign to suppress counterrevolutionaries in 1950.
In its report, Southern Weekly wrote:
When the Strike Hard campaign began in 1983, the then-minister of public security, Liu Fuzhi, said, “In terms of guiding thought, vigor, parameters and results, the Strike Hard campaign is another historic milestone in the maintenance of the people’s democratic dictatorship coming after the suppression of counter-revolutionaries of 1950-1952.” Mr. Liu was referring to mass executions of anyone opposing the Communist Party or suspected of doing so, immediately after the 1949 revolution.