Video Reignites Death Penalty Debate in China

Screenshot from the video

An online video purporting to show a public execution in the Chinese countryside has reignited debate about the death penalty in a country consistently singled out by human rights groups for executing vastly more people than any other.

The video, posted to the Sina Web portal Monday evening, is shot from a ridge overlooking a field and shows a group of onlookers watching as a line of police cars drives into a field, sirens blazing. The camera zooms in to show blurry images of what appear to be police removing a figure from a van wearing a white placard around the neck. Onlookers can be heard talking casually as the figure is led into a field, made to kneel and is shot in the head.

China Real Time was unable to verify the authenticity of the video (warning: graphic content). A short line of accompanying text said the footage was originally posted online prior to November 2012 but gave no other information. Onlookers, described in the video’s title as local villagers, speak a dialect found in the region of southwestern China’s Guizhou province.

The video had been viewed more than 2 million times and attracted thousands of comments by Tuesday evening.

Many of the reactions to Monday’s video reflected recent controversies, including one in April in which a local court overturned the death penalty for a man coerced into confessing to the murder of a woman in the eastern city of Hangzhou.

“The most important reason to get rid of the death penalty is that you can’t undo the damage done to those who are wrongly convicted,” wrote one commenter on the Sina video site.

Most of the criticism, however, focused not on the morality of the purported execution, but instead on the manner in which it was carried out – and on the reactions of the onlookers, many of whom can be heard talking casually and laughing before and after the shooting.

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Source: Josh Chin, China Real Time Report, WSJ, August 13, 2013