Seminar paper from the year 2015 in the subject Law - Comparative Legal Systems, Comparative Law, University of Cologne (Institute of East Asian Studies Seminar / Modern China Studies), course: The political System of VR China, language: English, abstract: “Kill fewer, kill carefully.” According to the wishes of the Chinese Politburo, these two political guidelines are to be implemented in the future in order to simultaneously maintain harmony and order in China. As with any passed laws – independent of country or government –, two questions arise here: 1. What did the prior evolution look like and can obligatory reform prevail? 2. Which competences are the judiciary’s responsibility and is there a guarantee that secure monitoring of law enforcement will be carried out? I will pursue these questions in this paper. For this purpose, I will start by addressing the term “death penalty”, the legal provisions in China as well as its evolution with a particular focus on the “Strike Hard” Campaign and the decentralization process of the courts, which substantially contributed to the need for reform. Furthermore, I will analyze the reformation of the Supreme People’s Court and assess the current state of the political guidelines being strived for and their actual executive implementation. The conclusion should allow for an assessment of the reformation measures, if they have indeed been successful, if there is a need to catch up or if they failed entirely.

The issue of capital punishment will not go away. This new book presents new and significant analyses related to recent Supreme Court cases and new books on the topic.

This book examines the death penalty within the changing socio-political context of China. The authors' treatment of China's death penalty is legal, historical, and comparative, focusing on its theory and the actual practice.

Since the Cold War ended, China has become a global symbol of disregard for human rights, while the United States has positioned itself as the world’s chief exporter of the rule of law. How did lawlessness become an axiom about Chineseness rather than a fact needing to be verified empirically, and how did the United States assume the mantle of law’s universal appeal? In a series of wide-ranging inquiries, Teemu Ruskola investigates the history of “legal Orientalism”: a set of globally circulating narratives about what law is and who has it. For example, why is China said not to have a history of corporate law, as a way of explaining its “failure” to develop capitalism on its own? Ruskola shows how a European tradition of philosophical prejudices about Chinese law developed into a distinctively American ideology of empire, influential to this day. The first Sino-U.S. treaty in 1844 authorized the extraterritorial application of American law in a putatively lawless China. A kind of legal imperialism, this practice long predated U.S. territorial colonialism after the Spanish-American War in 1898, and found its fullest expression in an American district court’s jurisdiction over the “District of China.” With urgent contemporary implications, legal Orientalism lives on in the enduring damage wrought on the U.S. Constitution by late nineteenth-century anti-Chinese immigration laws, and in the self-Orientalizing reforms of Chinese law today. In the global politics of trade and human rights, legal Orientalism continues to shape modern subjectivities, institutions, and geopolitics in powerful and unacknowledged ways.

Capital punishment is irrevocable. It prohibits the correction of mistakes by the justice system and leaves no room for human error, with the gravest of consequences. There is no evidence of a deterrent effect of the death penalty. Those sacrificed on the altar of retributive justice are almost always the most vulnerable. This book covers a wide range of topics, from the discriminatory application of the death penalty, wrongful convictions, proven lack of deterrence effect, to legality of the capital punishment under international law and the morality of taking of human life.

Today, two-thirds of the world's nations have abolished the death penalty, either officially or in practice, due mainly to the campaign to end state executions led by Western European nations. Will this success spread to Asia, where over 95 percent of executions now occur? Do Asian values and traditions support capital punishment, or will development and democratization end executions in the world's most rapidly developing region? David T. Johnson, an expert on law and society in Asia, and Franklin E. Zimring, a senior authority on capital punishment, combine detailed case studies of the death penalty in Asian nations with cross-national comparisons to identify the critical factors for the future of Asian death penalty policy. The clear trend is away from reliance on state execution and many nations with death penalties in their criminal codes rarely use it. Only the hard-line authoritarian regimes of China, Vietnam, Singapore, and North Korea execute with any frequency, and when authoritarian states experience democratic reforms, the rate of executions drops sharply, as in Taiwan and South Korea. Debunking the myth of "Asian values," Johnson and Zimring demonstrate that politics, rather than culture or tradition, is the major obstacle to the end of executions. Carefully researched and full of valuable lessons, The Next Frontier is the authoritative resource on the death penalty in Asia for scholars, policymakers, and advocates around the world.

With the strengthening focus worldwide on human rights, there has been a rapid increase in recent years in the number of countries that have completely abolished the death penalty. This is in recognition that it is a violation of the right to life and the right to be free from cruel, inhuman and degrading punishment. There has, simultaneously, been pressure on countries that still retain capital punishment to ensure that they at least apply the United Nations minimum human rights safeguards established to protect the rights of those facing the death penalty. This book shows that the majority of Asian countries have been particularly resistant to the abolitionist movement and tardy in accepting their responsibility to uphold the safeguards. The essays contained in this volume provide an in-depth analysis of changes in the scope and application of the death penalty in Asia with a focus on China, India, Japan, and Singapore. They explain the extent to which these nations still fail to accept capital punishment as a human rights issue, identify impediments to reform, and explore the prospects that Asian countries will eventually embrace the goal of worldwide abolition of capital punishment.