© Wang Shen / New China News AgencyNaw Kham, a drug gang leader from Myanmar, is led to the chamber in Yunnan province where he and three others were executed Friday. The last moments before they received lethal injections were broadcast live on Chinese state TV.
Beijng- It was reality television in the extreme.
Chinese state television Friday broadcast live images of the last moments of four foreign drug traffickers who were about to be executed for the 2011 killings of 13 Chinese fishermen on the Mekong River. Although the cameras pulled away before the lethal injections, the coverage was unprecedented, unleashing a storm of criticism and debate about the death penalty.
Psychologists decried the coverage as distressing to children. Lawyers complained that it violated a clause in the criminal code against parading the condemned before execution.
"This carnival on CCTV was a violation not only of ethics, but of the criminal code regulations that the death penalty not be carried out in public," wrote human rights lawyer Liu Xiaoyuan on a microblog. Many others, however, applauded the execution of the four drug traffickers for unusually heinous slayings that had galvanized the public.
The execution coverage appeared to a large extent intended to illustrate
China's rising power to both the domestic and foreign public. The drug traffickers had been captured in
Laos after an extensive manhunt that some commentators likened to the U.S. search for Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, who was killed in
Pakistan in 2011 by U.S. forces.
China executes about 4,000 people each year, more than all other countries in the world combined, although the numbers and the crimes carrying the death penalty are gradually being reduced.
