China's Execution Rate Rises

BEIJING  - China calls its anti-crime campaign Strike Hard, and in its name hundreds - 801 in a few weeks by one diplomat's count - are being paraded forth at public rallies and then taken away and executed. Those falling to the executioners' bullets include murderers, drug dealers, and even people like Wu Wei, an insurance salesman who was shot for embezzling the equivalent of $47,000. Foreign critics fear Chinese courts are rushing to judgment, condemning people on possibly shaky evidence or even forced confessions. Judges have been ordered to try cases swiftly and punish crime severely. ``Miscarriages of justice have happened during Strike Hard, when police are under extreme pressure to be seen as performing,'' said Catherine Baber, a Hong Kong-based Amnesty International researcher monitoring China's use of the death penalty. Human rights groups also fear Strike Hard is being used to tighten China's grip on Tibet and the restive western Muslim region of Xinjiang. State media have reported mass arrests in both regions. Those executed in Xinjiang have included convicted separatists. Xinjiang television showed huge crowds at public sentencing rallies, with the condemned paraded on trucks before their execution. Since 1983, there have been four Strike Hard campaigns in China, which in sheer numbers has long led the world in executions. After a five-year lull, the government recently renewed the campaign in the wake of a string of high-profile violent crimes, including apartment bombings that killed 108 people in the central city of Shijiazhuang in March. The Communist Party hopes the campaign will shore up public confidence in its ability to keep crime rates under control. Chinese leaders regard executions as an effective deterrent to crime. The death penalty also enjoys widespread support among Chinese who feel their streets have grown less safe in two decades of economic reforms that have thrown millions out of work. ``The people and the government agree Strike Hard is a good way to ensure social order,'' said Ke Gezhuang, a criminal law expert at the Academy of Social Sciences in Shanghai. Amnesty International and other human rights groups say more than 500 people have been executed since April 11. A Western diplomat counted 801 deaths in the final three weeks of April alone - basing his tally on reports in China's state-run media. He asked not be named. China keeps nationwide execution figures a secret and has not said how many have been killed. The campaign appears to be gaining steam. State media daily report new rounds of executions. In 1996, during China's last Strike Hard campaign, more than 4,400 were shot, said Amnesty, a London-based group that opposes the death penalty. Last year, by contrast, at least 1,000 people were put to death - still more than the rest of the world combined. On a visit Wednesday to a provincial police station, the Communist Party's top law and order official, Luo Gan, ``urged all localities to carry out the Strike Hard campaign ... and to severely and promptly punish the forces of evil,'' the government's Xinhua News Agency said. But ``it is strictly forbidden to use torture to extract confessions,'' Luo said. In Strike Hard, Beijing has borrowed a few tricks from its mass political campaigns of the 1950s and 1960s. Red banners and trucks with loudspeakers exhort even remote villages to take part. The public is also being involved in sentencing rallies. On April 20, hundreds watched in a gym in the southwestern city of Chongqing as an official read death sentences to 33 people lined up on the floor. They were among 55 people condemned and shot on the same day, the official Chongqing Daily newspaper said. Like most campaigns, this one also has a model hero: paramilitary policeman Su Wei, who disguised himself as an itinerant trader to seize armed train bandits in northwestern Gansu province, the People's Liberation Army Daily said. Experts agree that the March blasts in Shijiazhuang helped spur the recent campaign. The lone man accused of setting the bombs, Jin Ruchao, and two others convicted of selling him explosives were executed by gunshot April 29. Others were condemned for far less. On April 26, two men were executed in the southwestern province of Yunnan for robbing a U.S. diplomat of $50. Wu Wei, in his early 30s, was shot April 12. Arrested in 1998, he used the funds he embezzled to gamble, according to the Intermediate People's Court in Kunming, Yunnan's provincial capital. China was one of 28 nations that executed people last year as punishment for crime, according to Amnesty International, which says the number of countries executing prisoners has been gradually falling, from 32 in 1991. The United States executed 85 people last year, 80 by lethal injection.