The comprehensive reform of China's criminal law constitutes a key components of the Chinese Communist Party's plan for legal development. Since 1979, lawmakers in China have defined criminal acts and sanctions with increasing sophistication to prevent arbitrariness in arrest and prosecution. The Chinese also have codified criminal procedures to enhance predictability and provide some protection for the accused, and have increased the number of criminal courts, lawyers, and judges to handle this new reliance on an organized criminal justice system.

As the Chinese leadership has attempted to regularize the system of criminal punishment, it has also adopted a very severe policy toward criminals. Campaigns against crime have become a hallmark of China's criminal justice system during the past decade. This severity is also reflected in the increase in the number of capital offenses since 1979 ; moreover, certain procedures which protected defendants charged with capital crimes have been weakened. Capital punishment appears to be widely used in China today and is generally regarded by the Chinese leadership and people as an effective means to promote stability and, in turn, modernization.

This note illustrates how the widespread use of the death penalty in China today in fact undermines the important objectives of fairness and predictability which have been central to most legal reforms in recent years. The policy of "quickly and severely punishing criminals" runs counter to the spirit of the new criminal laws designed to enhance regularized adjudication and protect against erroneous judgments. This note does not argue for the abolition of the death penalty in China. Rather, it details the scope of capital punishment in China and highlights issues which must be explored if the death penalty is to comport rationally with other current legal reforms.

The first section of this note reviews both the historical and current use of the death penalty in China. The second section examines the legal and political justifications for the use of capital punishment in China today. The final section analyzes the widespread use of the death penalty in the context of China's current legal reforms.

Methodological qualifications must first be noted. No comprehensive public PRC government report concerning the death penalty in China is available, nor are criminal proceedings recorded in a manner that facilitates gathering such information. Therefore, reports of executions and estimates of the scope of the practice have been gleaned from Chinese and foreign press reports. More statistics and information on capital punishment will hopefully become available in the future.