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[OG Note: Bear in mind that the EU has agreed to extend full trading rights to China and that Bush was severely criticized for the US stance on capital punishment. Now, do you think the Europeans will be aghast over this little news nugget? Neither do I.]

China shoots criminals to 'frighten the monkeys' By David Rennie in Nanning

THE convoy of open lorries rolled slowly down the tropical city street, carrying nine condemned prisoners to their deaths.

The seven men and two women, each trussed with a cord wound tightly around their neck, shoulders and arms, had only minutes to live. Held upright between steel-helmeted, white-gloved police, they were being driven to an execution ground on the outskirts of Nanning, a sleepy south-western city not far from the Vietnam border.

Once there, away from public view, they were shot at close range, just before noon yesterday. Minutes earlier, the men - drug dealers caught with as little as two ounces of heroin - had been condemned at a rally in a sports stadium, in front of 10,000 invited spectators.

Two of the executed men, Gan Yuan and Chen Falong, were named by local media as the worst of the offenders. The audience was carefully tailored to maximise the rally's "educational value", including young policemen, doctors, medical students and 610 12-year-old schoolchildren with red "Young Pioneers" scarves neatly tied round their necks.

China keeps such propaganda spectacles strictly for domestic consumption; armed officers turned away anyone not invited by Chinese "work units". The spectators saw 220 drug offenders sentenced - some to long jail terms, some to spells in labour camps, or "re-education through labour houses", as Communist officials like to call them.

It had as much to do with political theatre as criminal justice. Rule by fear is an ancient tradition in China, as is making an example of selected offenders - "killing the rooster to frighten the monkeys", the proverb says.

And now, in a bid to combat rising crime and mounting public anger at crime, Beijing has unleashed its "Strike Hard" wave of executions. The stadium was ringed, inside and out, with paramilitary police in camouflage fatigues, carrying submachine-guns. Inside, hundreds more grim-faced officers sat and stood in rows, beneath a red banner reading "Strike Hard must be severe, so society will be stable".

The rank and file prisoners were led through in large batches, their arms tightly tied. Some wore orange offenders' waistcoats. The condemned men and women - most of them in their 20s, though one looked in his early 40s - wore their own clothes. Their belts and socks had been removed, and they wore cheap yellow plastic sandals on their feet.

Until recently, they would have worn large white placards round their necks, with their names crossed out in red - the mark of a man facing execution. Now, in a minor mercy, their names were written on small pieces of paper, pinned to their shirts.

They were accorded scant dignity. The oldest man, the flies of his thin cotton trousers gaping, was too tightly trussed to board the line of four green military lorries waiting outside the stadium.

Photographs of the scene, taken by official Chinese media, but not for publication, show the man's gaze registering humiliation, pain and powerlessness all at once, as he was hoisted from beneath by police guards, like a animal bound for market.

Not all of those taking part in the rally's menacing drama enjoyed the experience. A group of medical students were told that morning to attend, and to wear their white coats so everyone could see who they were. One of them, a young woman, said: "I felt frightened, and sorry for the families of the men."

Mrs Lei, a shopkeeper who watched the lorries drive past her small store, spoke of her sympathy for the children sent to the rally. "I was sent to one of these events when I was a teenager. It's a scary thing to see - those men are going to die in a short time."

A group of male students from the local Guangxi Sports Vocational Training College disagreed. "Maybe in Britain, you think it's too young, but it's important education for those children," said a hulking 20-year-old, who gave his surname as Wang. "I didn't see any of them cry."

No one interviewed in Nanning opposed capital punishment. "I felt good when they were sentenced to die," said Mr Wang, to nods from his friends. "Their crimes were very serious, and now society does not have them within it." It was his second sentencing rally in a month. Strike Hard campaigns are at the centre of a groundbreaking, if muted, debate among lawyers and academics.

Reformists are troubled by the knowledge that the same crime will bring only a fine or jail term at one moment, then a death penalty when it is the focus of a political campaign. But ordinary Chinese, especially the generation of students educated after the Tiananmen protests of 1989, have not been raised to question things for themselves.

Mr Wang and his friends looked startled when asked if "Strike Hard" was fair. "That's a question for the state," he replied, as he headed back to classes. "That's above my level."

-- Anonymous, June 22, 2001