Yesterday, China almost experienced reality television in its most extremely realistic form. CCTV, China's government-owned television broadcaster, announced that it would run a live broadcast of the execution of 4 men from Myanmar, Laos and Thailand. A South China Morning Post story can be found here.
CCTV News coverage (in English)
The men executed (by lethal injection) were drug traffickers in the Golden Triangle area responsible for killing 13 Chinese fishermen on a ship on the Mekong River last year. The victims were ambushed, tied up, shot, then dumped in the river. Violent crime is relatively rare in China and the Chinese public were shocked and outraged when this story was covered in Chinese media.
The CCTV show was apparently a well planned and extravagant production, involving pre-execution segments summarizing the murders, live reports, interviews with the police chief and a Renmin University professor, and live coverage of the men being taken to the execution area by guards. An Al Jazeera reporter was also shown asking one of the prisoners "Do you miss your kids/" and "Did you think about the kids of the men you killed?"
Most interestingly, the TV program encouraged viewers to participate in a Weibo poll asking whether the executions should be televised or not (Weibo is a very popular Chinese microblog site, similar to Twitter). At first, poll results indicated that the majority of viewers were in favor of the publicly broadcast executions. However, as the program progressed, a significant majority expressed disagreement with CCTV's intention on showing the executions. The Chinese cybersphere was apparently full of comments with most supporting execution of the men, but many critical of televising their execution. For example, Chinese lawyer Liu Xiaoyuan, posted on his microblog "This carnival on CCTV was a violation not only of ethics, but of Chinese criminal code regulations that the death penalty not be carried out in public."
In the past, public execution was common in China (as in many countries), the most common methods being strangulation and decapitation (as well as the much less common death by a thousand cuts). While the death penalty is still applicable for a number of crimes in China and it's estimated that more people are executed in China than all other countries combined (possibly 3000 to 4000 a year), use of the death penalty as well as the number of crimes subject to the death penalty have been decreasing in recent years. Further, executions are no longer carried out publicly which is prohibited by Article 212 of China's Criminal Procedure Law.
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| Illustration of a public beheading - from The Punishments of China (1801) |
As in other societies, the main goal of allowing the public to witness executions was to deter criminal conduct by letting people see the dire consequences. In this specific situation, I think the Chinese government may have been more concerned with showing the public that it had brought these men to justice, especially since the crimes were committed by foreigners in a foreign country. However, when it became apparent (through the Weibo poll) that most Chinese were opposed to showing the executions on TV and especially considering some of the vehement online comments in opposition to doing so, the government may have thought better of their initial decision and instructed CCTV not to air the actual executions. While this is merely my own speculation, if true, it seems to indicate two positive trends - (1) that the majority of Chinese people, although in favor of the death penalty for serious crimes, are against making corporeal punishment a public exhibition; and (2) that the government is at least to some extent willing to listen to public opinion and evaluate and modify its actions accordingly.
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