Canada erupted with outrage on Wednesday as it claimed four of its citizens had been executed in China on drug smuggling charges.
Notably, the executions were only said to have taken place earlier this year. And China stopped short of confirming they had happened at all.
The veil of secrecy is in keeping with state policy; rights groups estimate the country executes thousands each year, but the true figure remains closely-guarded.
A spokesperson for the Chinese embassy said Beijing ‘fully guaranteed the rights and interests of the Canadian nationals concerned’.
But the news sparked international outrage, with critics decrying China’s ‘inhumane’ system and pointing to the vast array of alleged killings reported in recent years.
China’s ‘conveyor belt’ of executions remains a deeply unsettling, and elusive, product of the courts and tendency to pursue the harshest possible punishment for even non-violent crimes.
Executions are traditionally carried out by gunshot, although lethal injections have been introduced in recent years.
But in a more disturbing development, the country is said to have rolled out ‘mobile death vans’ to expedite its killings – an industrial-scale method of execution with a troubling evocation of Nazi Germany.
China is believed to execute more prisoners each year than the rest of the world combined. Pictured: Archive image shows Chinese police presenting a group of convicts for sentencing, many of whom went on to be executed
Chinese police lead a condemned man into a special execution van (file image)
Image allegedly shows the inside of one of the converted police buses used in China
Capital punishment was once a public affair. Hangings in 19th century Britain and executions by guillotine in revolutionary France attracted huge crowds who would, it was hoped, be deterred from crime by the brutal spectacle.
These days, state killings in public are mostly resigned to Afghanistan, Iran and Saudi Arabia. In Japan and the United States, they are carried out behind closed doors.
But China‘s approach remains uniquely shrouded in mystery. The country does not share figures on who it kills, though rights groups warn thousands are being killed each year by firing squads, lethal injections and, allegedly, in mobile ‘death vans’.
While critics warn of the disturbing frequency of ‘wrongful’ executions, later finding the condemned innocent, China’s application is streamlined by a justice system notorious for favouring prosecutors. Courts have a 99.9 per cent conviction rate.
On top of this, death sentences are frequently handed down for dozens of crimes – ranging from drug trafficking to murder, but also white collar crimes such as corruption.
According to a report published in 2021, China’s Penal Code of 1997 – which is still in force today – has 46 crimes punishable by death, including 24 violent crimes and 22 non-violent crimes.
Criminal law in the country is as severe as it is obfuscated, with many crimes punishable by death under Beijing’s draconian legislation.
There have also been recorded examples of summary executions in China – where a person accused of a crime is executed immediately upon being deemed guilty, although often without the benefit of a fair and free trial.
At the junction between a wide range of qualifying offences, a high prosecution rate, and a population of 1.4bn, the country is poised to execute more prisoners each year than the rest of the world combined.
In 2022, the World Coalition Against the Death Penalty said that at least 8,000 people per year were executed in China from 2007.
Over the years, videos and pictures have emerged of public ‘execution rallies’ and summary killings.
While the practice was meant to have been discontinued in 2010 in favour of the use of lethal injections, the use of firing squads have been recorded since.
In one case, a man who stabbed nine school children – Zhao Zewei – was shot dead by a firing squad in 2018, in front of a crowd of villagers.
Canada’s foreign affairs minister Melanie Joly said she and former prime minister Justin Trudeau had asked for clemency for the dual citizens
An inmate screams before being taken to execution in Ghanghzou in 2001
A vehicle marked ‘Zunyi City Middle-Level Court: Penal Vehicle,’ like the converted death vans
China is also claimed to use mobile death vans in some cases, allowing roaming death squads to carry out the state-sanctioned killings of civilians without the need to move the prisoner to an execution ground.
Minghui, a volunteer operation reporting on the Falun Gong community, said the buses had been in use in China since 2004 for their expediency in killing political dissidents.
‘In the eyes of CCP officials, the biggest advantage of the execution vehicle is the convenience of taking organs from criminals for profit: their eyes, kidneys, livers, pancreas, lung and all other useful body parts, are harvested,’ they concluded, referencing China’s alleged organ harvesting trade.
On the outside, they appear as normal police vehicles, with no external markings to indicate use.
On the inside, the vans are said to be equipped to function as a mobile execution chamber.
The rear of the vehicle houses a windowless chamber where the execution itself takes place.
CCTV cameras are also present in the van, meaning the execution can be recorded or watched if officials desire to monitor it, Amnesty reports.
A bed slides out from the wall of the van, to which the convicted criminal is strapped.
A syringe would then be jabbed into their arm by a technician, before a police official administers a lethal injection by pressing a button.
Police parade prisoners during an execution rally at a stadium in Kunming, the capital of China’s southwestern Yunnan province, 26 June 2001
Police officers stand guard behind suspects during a public sentencing rally in Baokang, central China’s Hubei province September 28, 2007
According to Amnesty International, Chinese provincial authorities distributed 18 vans in 2003. Some reports suggest they have been used since the 1990s.
The rights group says they were introduced ‘in an effort to improve cost-efficiency’ and were ‘replacing the traditional execution method of firing squads’.
On March 6, 2003, as the use of the vans was approved in Yunnan province, two farmers were executed by lethal injection in the back of a mobile execution van.
Liu Huafu, 21, and Zhou Chaojie, 25, had been convicted of drug trafficking.
What started out as a trial in Yunnan soon became a national affair after gaining the backing of the Supreme People’s Court in Beijing.
The court urged all provinces to acquire the vans ‘that can put to death convicted criminals immediately after sentencing’.
Amnesty noted concerns that the system heralded as being more ‘efficient’ and ‘cost-effective’ could ‘facilitate an even higher rate of execution’.
The vans are reported to be a key part of China’s organ trade, with a 2012 estimate suggesting 65 percent of donated organs came from executed people.
Activists say bodies are quickly cremated – making it impossible for the families of those executed to determine if their organs have been removed.
The vans have drawn comparisons to larger models developed by the Nazis in the Second World War to gas prisoners during the Holocaust.
The concept of a truck re-equipped with a gas chamber emerged around 1940. Soon, improvised gas vans patrolled the streets.
More than 100,000 Germans with mental and physical disabilities had been euthanised by August 1941.
Sex workers and Romani people were also murdered in staggering numbers.
In 2012, a spectator appeared to capture an execution by firing on camera (pictured)
Footage showed police officers leading a man out into a clearing near a village, as a crowd of people watched from a nearby overpass, before shooting him in the back of the head
Convicted murderer Naw Kham is seen being taken to his execution in March 2013 in China
China insists that those on death row are treated fairly.
Amid outrage over the reported killings of four Canadian nationals, the embassy spokesperson said Beijing ‘fully guaranteed the rights and interests of the Canadian nationals concerned’.
China also sent a clear message to Canada to stay out of its business.
Canada should ‘respect the spirit of the rule of law and stop interfering in China’s judicial sovereignty,’ Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning said yesterday.
But with a judicial system that overwhelmingly favours prosecutors, and with dozens of crimes eligible for the death penalty, the introduction of mobile death vans only makes it easier for the state to kill.
The right of the state to take the lives of its citizens – or indeed foreign nationals – remains a controversial issue of law and philosophy.
As a deterrent, the penalty does not fulfil its purpose.
Remarking on the 19th century hangings in Britain, French philosopher Albert Camus noted that the spectacle of brutal killings did not seem to dissuade criminals; hangings often attracted as many pickpockets, drawn to the large crowds of people.
Of 167 condemned inmates at Bristol prison in 1886, 164 had themselves watched the horrific means of execution already, he noted.
And there remains the most pressing challenge of exoneration; for every eight people executed, one person on death row has been found to have been wrongfully convicted – leaving countless people wrongfully sent to their deaths with no hope of compensation.
China is believed to execute thousands of people each year, by firing squad and lethal injection. Beijing demands others stay out of its business, but new methods of fast-tracking killings only complicate the challenges inherent to its system of state-sanctioned executions.