In China, public executions still a part of village life

Screenshot from the video

CENGONG COUNTY, China--The clip posted on a Chinese video-sharing website was intriguing: "Villagers watch shooting of death row inmate."

There was no information on the identity of the criminal, the crime or place and date of the execution. Chinese media did not report on it, either.

I scrutinized the hundreds of comments posted to the site and looked at the video footage from every angle. It seemed likely the execution took place in a rural area of eastern Guizhou province.

I contacted local authorities and law enforcement officials there and learned that a man was executed in a field in September of last year. It was carried out with a single pistol shot.

The village is in the mountains of Cengong county. It is surrounded by fields of corn and terraced rice paddies.

The villagers said the sentence was carried out in a field on the bank of a river.

Wang Tangjun, 61, lives close to the spot where the execution took place.

He recalled it was a gloriously sunny day when "we heard that morning there would be an execution by firing squad, and a throng of villagers rushed over."

In the video, laborers, women with parasols and mothers and their children can be seen standing on a hill and the roofs of homes overlooking the field as the death row inmate was escorted to the spot to be killed.

A dozen or so vehicles marked with the word "justice" show up, sirens blaring. They stop near thick undergrowth.

According to local law enforcement officials, 27-year-old Pan Yanlong was put to death for murdering three men, including one with whom his wife had been having an affair. The crimes were committed in 2010. Pan was born in the village of Liyuan, also in Cengong county.

He was led by five uniformed guards, weaving their way through the weeds. They pointed to the side of a footpath between two fields and ordered Pan to kneel. Two seconds later a gunshot rang out. Spectators up on the hill, some laughing, ask, "Is it over already?" Just over a minute after the group arrived, Pan was dead.

His body was left where it fell. It was only retrieved later by his relatives.

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Source: Asahi Shimbun, November 2, 2013

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