More than 1,000 criminals have been put to death since April 28 as part of an anti-crime campaign called Strike Hard. Trials are a bare formality, the verdict usually foreordained. Groups of convicted criminals are paraded before a ““mass sentencing rally’’ in a public place. Then they are taken to a vacant field, where they kneel in neat rows and are shot in the head. Relatives often are required to pay for the bullets.
Nobody disputes that China is weathering an unprecedented storm of lawlessness. Crime rates have been climbing by an estimated 10 percent a year since the early 1980s. Economic reforms have widened the income gap, creating both a middle class with money and an underclass of the newly poor. At the same time, about 120 million peasants have flooded cities in search of jobs, weakening a household-registration system that used to keep track of everyone.
Yet Chinese campaigns are never quite what they seem. American Sinologist Dru Gladney says Strike Hard is ““a deliberate effort by leaders to show strength when China is unstable both politically and economically.’’ It draws attention away from the struggle to succeed senior leader Deng Xiaoping, 91, and dampens speculation about Beijing’s ability to manage Hong Kong after next year’s handover, he says.
Along China’s periphery, the campaign is going after ethnic minorities alleged to harbor ““splittist’’ ambitions. Crackdowns are underway against Buddhists in Inner Mongolia and Muslim Uighurs in Xinjiang. In Tibet, authorities have closed monasteries linked to the exiled Dalai Lama, and about 90 monks have been arrested, rights groups estimate. The official newspaper Tibet Daily has warned of ““a long-term, bitter, complex, “you-die, I-live’ political battle.''
Already, Strike Hard has sidetracked efforts at legal reform. Last March Parliament revised China’s criminal-procedure law to guarantee the right to counsel and add the principle of presumption of innocence. The current rush to judgment, with its mass trials and speedy executions, shows that for most accused criminals, such protections still exist only on paper.
