China's security tsar has quietly ordered fewer executions in keeping with a drive by the new leadership to cultivate a gentler image for the authoritarian government, two independent sources said on Tuesday.
China executes more people than the rest of the world put together, for crimes ranging from rape to corruption, to maintain order among a diverse population of 1.3 billion.
"If it's possible to execute fewer people, then execute fewer people," a judicial source quoted the directive by security chief Luo Gan (羅幹) as saying.
"If it's possible not to execute people, then don't execute people," said the source who asked not to be identified.
"This reflects that our society is advanced and civilized," the source said. "Executions lead to family members of death row convicts looking upon society with hatred."
A group of Chinese academics will in May debate whether the government should do away with capital punishment, said Ruan Qilin of the China Politics and Law University.
But analysts said the death penalty would not be scrapped in the face of soaring crime spawned by widening income disparities after 20 years of economic reforms that have left millions of state workers unemployed and eroded ethics.
The London-based human rights watchdog Amnesty International recorded 2,468 executions in China in 2001 based on state media reports. Amnesty logged 18,194 executions in China from 1990 to 1999 to give an annual average of 1,819.
China has never announced statistics on the death penalty, a tightly guarded state secret.
But the source said that China executed about 5,000 people last year.
About 90 percent were convicted of violating the criminal code, which covers murder and other crimes of violence and contains about 60 articles warranting capital punishment.
The rest were mostly executed for economic crimes, including corruption, the source said, adding that China had more than 300 courts that can mete out the death sentence.
The People's Supreme Court and the cabinet spokesman's office declined to comment on the figures or on Luo's directive to hand down fewer death sentences.
In a landmark move, China's parliament will amend the constitution during its annual session this week to protect human rights for the first time.
Robin Munro, a Hong Kong-based expert on China's human rights, said he was unimpressed by Luo's directive.
"It's hard to interpret or construe statements like that when the central government insists on keeping as a so-called top-level state secret the overall number of executions that actually occur in China each year," Munro said.
"Ballpark figures are really meaningless and don't substitute for genuine judicial transparency on this key point of major international concern," he said.
A second source confirmed the new policy by Luo, who oversees judges, prosecutors, police and the intelligence apparatus as head of the Communist Party's powerful Central Commission of Political Science and Law.
"There has been no `Strike Hard' since the new leadership took office," the party source said, referring to the code name for a series of nationwide campaigns against crime in recent years that has resulted in a rise in the number of executions.
"The current leadership is more moderate," the source said of President Hu Jintao (胡錦濤) and Premier Wen Jiabao (溫家寶), who are cultivating a man-of-the-people image.
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