"Vic Dura" wrote in message
...
On Mon, 23 May 2005 17:40:24 GMT, in alt.home.repair
HarborFreight - am I just unlucky? "dadiOH"
wrote:

Hard to compare apples and oranges. US dollar amounts are unimportant;
what *is* important is what can be purchased with the money.

Now, even in the PRC, $100 a year isn't a munificent sum but they have
their bed and board, probably health care too, so the cash earned is
walking around money.

Good points.

Oh yeah. Life is good in China. There are a few people in this discussion
who really ought to shell out some big money for a grownup newspaper now and
then.

September 9, 2001, Sunday



FOREIGN DESK



Chinese Fight Crime With Torture and Executions



By CRAIG S. SMITH (NYT) 2314 words



HEFEI, China -- Liu Minghe paused in a hospital room here to let a nurse
take his blood pressure, which had surged dangerously in the few minutes
since he began talking about how he had won his freedom from China's death
row.



After she left, he begged off recounting in greater detail the torture that
he said had led him to confess to a murder he did not commit.



''Let's just say it was 'forced interrogation and confession under duress,'
'' Mr. Liu said, his speech slurring slightly because he is missing several
of his lower teeth, which he said had been knocked out during his five-year
incarceration.



Mr. Liu has been recuperating in a hospital in Hefei, 560 miles south of
Beijing, since winning his release last month after having been sentenced to
die in 1996 in one of China's ''strike hard'' campaigns, a frenzied national
effort to purge the land of lawbreakers.



He managed to overturn his conviction on the grounds of insufficient
evidence, thanks largely to his former Communist Party membership, his
family's relatively high social position, and money. But many other people
who are wrongly convicted and condemned to die in China may not be so lucky.



China routinely executes more people than all other countries combined.
This year, though, has been far from routine. Without much notice at home or
abroad, the government has begun sending unknown thousands of people to
execution grounds, often after they have been tortured into confessing
crimes that to foreigners seem minor.



Today China is in the midst of its third great wave of executions in the
last quarter century, a campaign in which as many as 191 people have been
executed in a single day, according to the state news media. Since President
Jiang Zemin announced the crackdown in April, at least 3,000 people have
been executed, and double or even triple that number have been sentenced to
death. The pace of executions shows no sign of abating.



The wrongful conviction of Mr. Liu, and others like him, suggests that by
the time the campaign ends in 2003 dozens -- if not hundreds -- of innocent
people will have died in the capital punishment spree.



These periodic nationwide crackdowns, in response to rising crime and
concerns about weakening social order, place huge pressures on the local
police to solve crimes quickly, which they often do by extorting confessions
through torture. In Hunan Province, newspapers recently reported that the
police solved 3,000 cases in two days in April.

Police in Sichuan Province reported that they had solved 6,704 cases,
including 691 murders, robberies or bombings, in six days that same month.



The campaigns also pressure the courts to try the accused quickly, record
the maximum possible number of convictions and show little mercy in
sentencing.



Convictions are sometimes handed down within days of arrests. Appeals are
processed briskly and executions are normally carried out within an hour
after a sentence is confirmed. Usually, just a few months pass between an
arrest and execution, occasionally only weeks.



The monthly tally of death sentences has become a kind of grim score card
showing how each province is doing. But the real numbers remain a closely
guarded secret. They are believed to be far higher than the confirmed tally,
which has been compiled from press reports by people like Catherine Baber, a
researcher at Amnesty International based in Hong Kong, or a Western
diplomat in Beijing who does not want to be named.



Many, if not most, executions are not reported in the press at all. And
many of the reports that are published simply say that a ''group'' of people
were executed on a given day. A group can include anywhere from a few people
to dozens. Amnesty International usually counts each group as just two.



Neither Ms. Baber nor the diplomat will venture to guess what the true
number of executions might be. But both agree that this year's total will
probably surpass 5,000. Some observers say the number could reach as high as
10,000.



It is also impossible to say how many of the people executed might be
innocent.



Signs of Wrongful Justice



Certainly, many of them have been ordered to die for crimes, like bribery,
that would earn them only brief jail terms in the West. But several wrongful
convictions, like Mr. Liu's, have recently come to light, suggesting that
many among the condemned are not guilty at all.



Mr. Liu, 63, married and a former associate professor at a technical
institute in Wuhu, Anhui Province, was arrested during China's last great
sweep in 1996, for the murder of Tao Ziyu, who was reputed to be his lover.



Her body was found floating shoeless in a shallow lotus pond not far from
his campus residence. She had been strangled by someone's left hand, the
police concluded.



An elderly woman reported seeing a woman arguing with a man near the pond
shortly after Ms. Tao was last seen alive, visiting a friend who lived
nearby. Mr. Liu, who is right handed, protested his innocence and said he
could account for his whereabouts at the time.



But just before the end of the three-month period that police are allowed
to hold suspects, Mr. Liu says they plunged him into brutal, round-the-clock
interrogations.



His wife says he was handcuffed to a window so he had to either stand or
hang from his wrists. She says he was only allowed to eat a few bites of
food by lowering his head to a bowl. A document submitted to the court by
his lawyers said that Mr. Liu had not been allowed to drink or close his
eyes during the interrogation.



The police told him the questioning would continue for 10 days and that if
he did not confess he would probably be executed, and offered him a lighter
sentence if he did, according to his lawyers.



On the third day, Mr. Liu broke. In the videotaped confession, which his
wife has seen, interrogators did most of the talking while a dispirited Mr.
Liu answered ''yes'' to the scenario they presented.



Suspects in China are not allowed legal counsel, or any contact with the
outside world while under interrogation. Mr. Liu's wife says her husband
disavowed the confession as soon as he was allowed to see a lawyer.



''I couldn't bear it,'' she said he told the lawyer. ''If I didn't confess,
I would have died.''



Despite the lack of physical evidence and Mr. Liu's alibis, the Wuhu
Intermediate People's Court found him guilty of murdering Ms. Tao based on
his videotaped confession. On Dec. 30, 1996, he was sentenced to death.



Mr. Liu appealed his conviction and his family enlisted the help of a legal
expert from Beijing who focused on, among other inconsistencies in the
prosecution's case, Mr. Liu's alibi and the coroner's estimated time of Ms.
Tao's death.



A higher provincial court sent Mr. Liu's case back for a retrial in Wuhu,
which found Mr. Liu guilty a second time but reduced his sentence to life in
prison.



Retrials Without Limit



There is no limit in China to how many times a case can be retried, and Mr.
Liu appealed his case twice more before the provincial court overturned his
conviction. Before he was finally released on Aug. 8, his wife had nearly
lapsed into despair. ''I have no tears left to cry,'' Ms. Wang said in an
interview in July, squatting in her small living room, her knees bearing
thick, plum-size scabs left from kneeling outside the courthouse to plead
for her husband's life.



During the five years he was jailed, Mr. Liu says he was held in a series
of 200-square-foot rooms crammed with as many as 26 people. He slept on
boards or on the floor. He was rarely allowed outside and given few
opportunities to exercise. For 16 months both his hands and feet were
shackled, he says. He saw about 30 people sent to their deaths.



''My four limbs could barely move,'' he said last week, sitting in the
hospital room, his white hair recently died black in an attempt to erase the
wasted years. He said he collapsed shortly after he was released from prison
and has since been hospitalized with severe diabetes and high blood
pressure.



Mr. Liu might be dead today had not his longtime Communist Party membership
and social position encouraged the provincial court to look more carefully
at his case, his family and lawyers say. Money also helped. Mr. Liu's family
has spent more than $36,000 on his defense, an enormous sum here.



But the vast majority of people executed in China have neither position nor
money and their cases often get less scrutiny than Mr. Liu's, defendants'
lawyers say.



Part of the problem is that Chinese prosecutors rely less on physical
evidence than confessions to win convictions. According to a recent state
press report, a government investigation found 221 cases of confessions
extorted in six provinces during a two-year period ending in 1999. In 21 of
those cases, the prisoners were tortured to death.



Even if the prisoner shows signs of abuse, prosecutors rarely question how
the confessions were obtained.



Du Peiwu, a policeman in Yunnan Province, was released from death row last
November after a group of car thieves confessed to shooting his wife and
another police officer in April 1998, crimes for which Mr. Du had been
convicted despite a clear alibi and lack of physical evidence linking him to
the murders.



During his trial, he dramatically stripped off an outer layer of clothes to
reveal the tattered garments in which he said he had been beaten, hung by
his handcuffed wrists and shocked with a cattle prod to force his
confession. The judges ignored his claim, according to press reports after
he was freed.



Though forced confessions are technically illegal, the country's Public
Security Ministry -- whose local bureaus are charged with investigating
crimes -- rewards officers who extract confessions, while usually only
lightly punishing those whose abuse goes too far.



The two policemen who tortured Mr. Du into confessing were sentenced last
month to suspended one-year and one-and-a-half year sentences respectively.



Compounding the problem is an untrained and politically beholden judiciary.



Judges in China are not required to have any legal training, and few do.
Most hold their positions because they have close connections with local
government officials, who are eager for quick convictions.



''Veterinarians, drivers, anybody can get that job if they have good
relations,'' said He Xing, a lawyer who teaches at the North China
University of Law in Shijiazhuang, capital of Hebei Province.



People have been executed in recent months for everything from tax fraud to
drug trafficking to stealing diesel fuel.



In China's far western province of Xinjiang, where a small but persistent
separatist movement percolates among the mainly Muslim population, people
have been shot for ''separatism,'' according to local newspaper reports.



Similarly intense spates of executions have played a grisly role in China's
political upheavals over the last half century. In the first few years after
the Communist Party came to power, as many as five million people were put
to death, most after summary trials by makeshift tribunals.



A Third Wave of Executions



This year is the third surge in executions since the end of the 1966-1976
Cultural Revolution.



The first came in 1983 when Deng Xiaoping announced the first ''strike
hard'' campaign. Large white posters bearing the names and crimes of the
condemned were pasted in public places across the country. Western observers
estimated that more than 10,000 people died that year. The second ''strike
hard'' campaign, the one that swept up Mr. Liu, began in 1996.



These periodic crackdowns and the widespread use of execution have received
broad popular support in China, despite the likelihood of wrongful
convictions.



A 1995 academic survey of 2,661 people found that fewer than 1 percent were
in favor of abolishing the death penalty, while more than 90 percent thought
there should be more.



Their opinions are colored, however, by underreporting of executions in the
press and the government's secrecy about the annual total.



With increasing frequency, prisoners are formally arrested or sentenced at
public rallies. Nearly two million people attended such rallies in Shaanxi
Province in April and May. On June 25, more than 5,000 people attended a
rally in Hubei Province, at which 13 people were sentenced to death, 8 of
whom were executed immediately.



The condemned are normally paraded through town on the beds of open trucks,
before being driven to the execution ground, often trailed by a caravan of
onlookers.



Usually at an open field outside of town, the prisoners are made to kneel
and are then shot at point blank range in the back of the head. Their organs
are sometimes removed on the spot by medical staff and rushed to nearby
hospitals for transplant operations.



The condemned are not allowed to see their families before they die. Once
they are picked up for questioning, they never speak to a loved one again.



Often, the family does not even learn of the final sentence until the
execution is over and they are notified to collect the prisoner's ashes from
a crematory.







Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company