In many countries, the death penalty is formally prohibited, even if it exists in reality. Oppressive governments may ban the death penalty for ordinary crimes, while covertly killing political prisoners or using death squads to kill their enemies.
On the other hand, the U.S. formally has the death penalty in various states, but it is almost never carried out in many states that have the death penalty on the books, because jurors typically cannot reach on consensus on finding a criminal eligible for the death penalty. In states like New Mexico and Virginia that abolished the death penalty, it had been years since any criminal had actually been sentenced to death when they abolished the death penalty.
Only 24 people were executed in the U.S. in 2023 — all unusually cruel murderers — even though thousands of murders occurred in the U.S. in 2023.
By contrast, China has both the death penalty for crimes in general, and also has concentration camps where people are covertly killed for political reasons, such as members of northwest China’s Uyghur minority. Tens of thousands of Uyghurs have been killed in concentration camps despite not being convicted of anything:
Mobile death vans, firing squads, lethal injections: These are all methods used by China to carry out more state-sanctioned executions than all other nations combined.
While the communist state does not release its official figures, rights groups believe many thousands of people are executed each year – more than the likes of Iran, Saudi Arabia and the US, even when tallied together.
Criminal law in the country is as severe as it is obfuscated, with many crimes punishable by death under Beijing‘s draconian legislation.
Death sentences are frequently handed down for crimes ranging from drug trafficking to murder, but also white collar crimes such as corruption.
According to a report published in 2021, China’s Penal Code of 1997 – which is still in force today – has 46 crimes punishable by death, including 24 violent crimes and 22 non-violent crimes.
While the number of such crimes has slowly reduced (in 1979 it was 74, according to the Taiwan Alliance to End the Death Penalty), executions remain widespread, creating what Amnesty International calls a ‘conveyor belt of executions’.
Although China, the world’s second most populous country, executes far more people than any other country in absolute terms, there are probably a few other countries in the Third World that kill a higher percentage of their citizens, once you take into account covert killings by death squads.
