Few social issues have received more public attention and scholarly debate than the death penalty. While the abolitionist movement has made a successful stride in recent decades, a small number of countries remain committed to the death penalty and impose it with a relatively high frequency. In this regard, the People’s Republic of China no doubt leads the world in both numbers of death sentences and executions. Despite being the largest user of the death penalty, China has never conducted a national poll on citizens’ opinions toward capital punishment, while claiming “overwhelming public support” as a major justification for its retention and use. Based on a content analysis of 38,512 comments collected from 63 cases in 2015, this study examines the diversity and rationales of netizens’ opinions of and interactions with China’s criminal justice system. In addition, the book discusses China’s social, systemic, and structural problems and critically examines the rationality of netizens’ opinions based on Habermas’s communicative rationality framework. Readers will be able to contextualize Chinese netizens’ discussions and draw conclusions about commonalities and uniqueness of China’s death penalty practice.

By all accounts, China is the world leader in the number of legal executions. Its long historical use of capital punishment and its major political and economic changes over time are social facts that make China an ideal context for a case study of the death penalty in law and practice. This book examines the death penalty within the changing socio-political context of China. The authors'treatment of China' death penalty is legal, historical, and comparative. In particular, they examine; the substantive and procedures laws surrounding capital punishment in different historical periods the purposes and functions of capital punishment in China in various dynasties changes in the method of imposition and relative prevalence of capital punishment over time the socio-demographic profile of the executed and their crimes over the last two decades and comparative practices in other countries. Their analyses of the death penalty in contemporary China focus on both its theory - how it should be done in law - and actual practice - based on available secondary reports/sources.

This project uncovers the causes and consequences of China’s death penalty reform in the 21st century. China is the world’s leading executioner state. Yet in recent years China has also become a leading death penalty reformer. This reform took place through the courts. In 2007 the Supreme People’s Court (SPC) reinstituted a process of central review and approval of death sentences that reportedly led to a significant decline in death sentences nationwide.Why did a one-party authoritarian state empower the judiciary to restrain state punishment? And what were the political effects of this shift? I adopt an explicitly comparative method to answer these questions. Throughout, I consider China’s court-focused death penalty reform in light of another country that also used the judiciary to regulate capital punishment: the United States. My findings rest on a diverse body of evidence including case verdicts, statutes and Chinese-language scholarship. The centerpiece of my materials is an original data set of more than 70 interviews I conducted with death penalty stakeholders in China.The first part of the project explains the causes of reform in China. In Chapters One and Two I examine the politics and functions of capital punishment administration in late Imperial China and the People’s Republic of China (PRC). I show that in late Imperial China the administration of capital punishment was tightly controlled through an extensive process of hierarchical review with relatively few executions. I argue that this process served a crucial and under-recognized auditing function in helping the state regulate hazards from its own local bureaucracy. In Chapter Two I show that by contrast the political environment of the early PRC produced a heavy reliance on capital punishment with little central oversight. I contend that the implementation of death penalty review in the 21st century was not driven by concerns over the scale of capital punishment, but by a need to reassert central state control over local government.In the second part of this project I turn to the consequences of China’s authoritarian regulation of the death penalty through the courts since 2007. I identify a series of resultant contradictions in four domains: the judiciary, the legal profession, penal legislation and state secrecy. In each of these domains I begin by showing how the Chinese case of death penalty reform diverges from the US example. In Chapter Three I explain how the SPC expanded its administrative capacity in order to handle the additional work of death penalty review. In Chapter Four I show that the process of death penalty review created a new national venue for death penalty defense. While lawyers were not the focus of death penalty reform, reform is shaping the development of a capital defense bar as part of China’s legal profession. In Chapter Five I examine the introduction of a new sanction—life without parole (LWOP)—as an alternative to death for only one capital crime: bribery. The creation of this sentence for a non-violent crime showcases the ways that seemingly obvious rationales for capital punishment, such as permanent incapacitation for dangerous offenders, differ in China and the US. In Chapter Six I explore China’s refusal to reveal data about capital punishment. I show that death penalty reform puts death penalty secrecy at odds with other Chinese legal initiatives promoting transparency, legal representation and due process protections. I conclude by arguing that death penalty reform may have reduced executions, but it has also further institutionalized capital punishment in China, making the practice harder to abolish.

China's infamous death penalty record is the product of firm Party-state control and policy-setting. Though during the 1980s and 1990s, the Party's emphasis was on "kill many," in the 2000s the direction of policy began to move toward "kill fewer." This book details the policies, institutions, and story behind the reform of the death penalty.

Featuring experts from Europe, Australia, Japan, China, and the United States, this collection of essays follows changes in the theory and policy of China's death penalty from the Mao era (1949–1979) through the Deng era (1980–1997) up to the present day. Using empirical data, such as capital offender and offense profiles, temporal and regional variations in capital punishment, and the impact of social media on public opinion and reform, contributors relay both the character of China's death penalty practices and the incremental changes that indicate reform. They then compare the Chinese experience to other countries throughout Asia and the world, showing how change can be implemented even within a non-democratic and rigid political system, but also the dangers of promoting policies that society may not be ready to embrace.

The central purpose of this article is to illuminate the process and politics of China's sentencing process for capital murder. Since 2007, China's death penalty reform has resulted in a recalibration of the convicted murderers' eligibility for execution. The reform heralded a substantial decline in the number of capital sentences, as well as a rise of the alternative to executions - the suspended death sentence. In the reform era, how do Chinese courts determine who should be spared from execution and who deserves the ultimate punishment of death? This article uses quantitative analysis of 369 capital murder cases, as well as elite interviews with 40 judges - from China's provincial-level Higher People's Courts and the Supreme People's Court - to analyze the political logic behind Chinese courts' approach to defining the execution-worthiness of convicted murderers. While there is rich literature on capital sentencing in the U.S., there is a dearth of comparative analysis of the challenges Chinese courts face in drawing the distinction between life and death sentences in the country's unique social and political context. This article seeks to make a contribution to this crucial topic.