Capital punishment in the People's Republic of China is usually administered to offenders of serious and violent crimes, such as aggravated murder, but China retains in law a number of nonviolent capital offenses such as drug trafficking. The People's Republic of China executes the highest number of people annually, though other countries (such as Iran or Singapore) have higher per capita execution rates. Watchdog groups believe that actual execution numbers greatly exceed officially recorded executions; in 2009, the Dui Hua Foundation estimated that 5,000 people were executed in China — far more than all other nations combined. The precise number of executions is regarded as a state secret.
Chinese government have recently been pursuing measures to reduce the number of capital offenses and limit the use of the death penalty. In 2011, the National People's Congress Standing Committee adopted an amendment to reduce the number of capital crimes from 68 to 55. Later the same year, the Supreme People's Court ordered lower courts to suspend death sentences for two years and to "ensure that it only applies to a very small minority of criminals committing extremely serious crimes.”
Read more about Capital Punishment In The People's Republic Of China: Chinese Cultural Context, Legal Procedure, Executions Procedure, Rates of Execution, Criticism
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“We saw the machinery where murderers are now executed. Seven have been executed. The plan is better than the old one. It is quietly done. Only a few, at the most about thirty or forty, can witness [an execution]. It excites nobody outside of the list permitted to attend. I think the time for capital punishment has passed. I would abolish it. But while it lasts this is the best mode.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)
“It is a bore, I admit, to be past seventy, for you are left for execution, and are daily expecting the death-warrant; but ... it is not anything very capital we quit. We are, at the close of life, only hurried away from stomach-aches, pains in the joints, from sleepless nights and unamusing days, from weakness, ugliness, and nervous tremors; but we shall all meet again in another planet, cured of all our defects.”
—Sydney Smith (1771–1845)
“Confession is always weakness. The grave soul keeps its own secrets, and takes its own punishment in silence.”
—Dorothy Dix (1861–1951)
“I became increasingly anarchistic. I began to find people of my own class vicious, people in clean collars uninteresting. I even accepted smells, personal as well as official. Everyone who came to the studio smelled either of machine oil or herring.”
—Margaret Anderson (1886–1973)
“No republic is more real than that of letters, and I am the last in principles, as I am the least in pretensions to any dictatorship in it.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)
“Whether the nymph shall break Diana’s law,
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Or stain her honour, or her new brocade,”
—Alexander Pope (1688–1744)