In Case You Missed It: Death by a Thousand Cuts

By David Porter

Review of Timothy Brook, Jérôme Bourgon, and Gregory Blue, Death by a Thousand Cuts, Harvard University Press, 2008. $29.95

In the months leading up to the Beijing games, as Tibet protests flared and t-shirts derided the “Genocide Olympics,” Jill Savitt, the Executive Director of the human rights group Dream for Darfur deployed a striking phrase in a New York Times interview about her group’s plans to pressure Beijing to take action on Sudan. Promising a broad-based campaign that would be far more sophisticated than a mere “ham-fisted boycott,” she explained, “From start to finish, what we want China to fear is death by a thousand cuts.”

In a coincidence tinged with historical irony, an important book published in the same month as this article began with the observation that the form of capital punishment known in China as “lingchi” and in English as “death by slicing” or “death by a thousand cuts” has served the Western imagination for over a century as a vivid emblem of Chinese barbarism. Read in this context, Savitt’s comment, by implicitly linking a notorious penal practice with atrocities in Darfur, reminds us of the continuing power of collective images of “feudal” China to inform current discussions of global politics, and suggests that much of the current passion concerning the human rights situation in China may have roots in a century-old preoccupation with peculiarly Chinese expressions of state power.

Arising out of a symposium on the comparative history of torture, Death by a Thousand Cuts offers a rich, wide-ranging examination of the histories of both the actual practice of lingchi and of the resonances of this and other forms of (often fantastical) punishments in the Chinese and Western imaginations. In some ways, the story is considerably more banal than one might expect: lingchi was used relatively rarely, and when it was, death was brought on quickly with a stab to the heart; the remaining cuts being mostly for show. In others, it poses unexpected challenges to the familiar pieties that are the continuing legacy of Western visitors’ descriptions of late Qing society. Like footbinding, the historical spectacle of lingchi has reassured generations of European and American observers of the comparative decency and humaneness of their own social practices. The flattering stories we tell ourselves, however, may merit additional scrutiny when they turn out, as the authors argue in the case of lingchi, to have been constructed for this purpose.

The book begins with a graphic account of the public execution of a prisoner condemned in 1904 for the murder of twelve members of a family with whom he had been involved in a property dispute. The event was notable both for being one of the last uses of lingchi—the punishment was abolished in 1905—and for being one of the first recorded by an amateur photographer. The coincidence was crucial in the consolidation of a powerful trope in the Western “understanding” of China. “By preserving images of cruel punishments from the last execution season of the old penal regime, European photographers preserved the gap between Chinese and European penal practices that the Qing state was about to close, making these shocking deaths a permanent memorial of cultural difference.” The crucial point here, as the authors demonstrate, is that an awareness of cultural difference did not so much arise out of the observation of lingchi as require and compulsively feed upon this observation to sustain a belief in essential, irreducible alterity. At times, this belief has taken the form of judgments that Chinese culture breeds an unusual capacity for (and insensibility to) bodily cruelty, but it has also informed, one might argue, the continuing insistence on depicting it as fundamentally lacking in qualities (democracy, human rights, rule of law) deemed necessary to civilized society.

A first step in complicating narratives of essential difference is to demonstrate deeply rooted similarities. Turning to the annals of European history, for example, the authors point out that the abolition of cruel and unusual punishments was a relatively recent development, and that it has only been through the convenient forgetting of this history that Western observers were able to make of tormented execution an icon of Chinese inhumanity and a proof of the cultural superiority of the West. The number of crimes warranting capital punishment seems also to have been comparable: the Ming legal code lists 241 capital offenses; as late as 1819, English law had 223. In the light of recent debates on Bush-era interrogation practices, it is interesting to read that “Chinese and European courts shared a concern to limit the use of judicial torture,” and that Chinese magistrates frequently warned of the unreliability of evidence given under torture. Various forms of sanctioned violence, it is clear, have played a role in the formation of every state; sensationalizing certain instances while downplaying others can only distort historical understanding.

Given the high instrumental value of essentializing narratives, they are unlikely to be dislodged, however, by the mere counter-assertion of parallels and congruencies. The authors rightly devote the bulk of their efforts to the more promising strategy of demythologizing lingchi by tracing, in painstaking detail, its historical evolution as both practice and symbol. Several chapters, then, offer careful studies of the recourse to capital punishment in the Chinese legal code, key portions of which remained in place from the late sixth century through the early twentieth. The most common crimes resulting in the death penalty in the late imperial period were murder, robbery, official malfeasance, and failure of military duty; the most serious crimes were those that threatened the dynasty, the emperor or the state, followed closely by those attacking the authority of parents, elders, husbands, officials, and teachers. From its earliest recorded uses in the Song period, the penalty of lingchi—the rarest of several recognized methods of execution—was closely regulated and authorized only in extraordinary circumstances. Its use in the Song, in fact, was viewed by both contemporaries and subsequent generations of legal scholars as a sign of moral regression, as the death penalty had been abolished altogether by the Tang in 747 (a thousand years before its abolition was proposed in Europe).

The symbolic valences of lingchi are perhaps the most compelling—and challenging—aspects of its history. The ethical significance of the punishment seems to have attached less to the physical pain involved (the coup de grace was typically administered on the third cut) than the dismemberment and exposure of the corpse. To desecrate an individual’s body was ritually to destroy his entire family as well as the continuity between this life and the next. The imaginative resonances of this destruction are explored in a fascinating chapter on representations of the Buddhist underworld, which graphically depicted atrocities that vastly exceeded punishments authorized under the Qing code. Similar imaginative elaborations characterize the history of Western accounts of Chinese punishments explored in the following chapters. The authors trace the origins of stereotypes of Chinese judicial cruelty back to the sixteenth century, demonstrating how they were subsequently refracted through Enlightenment notions of Oriental despotism, colonialist historiography, missionary tracts, and the ruminations of Georges Bataille to create an idée fixe as essential to European self-knowledge as the liberal ideals of Locke or Mill.

Any book by three authors is bound to show a few seams, and there are discontinuities and repetitions among some of the chapters that are occasionally distracting. But on the whole, the argument presented in these chapters and buttressed by thorough and wide-ranging historical scholarship, is as focused as it is forceful. Death by a Thousand Cuts will stand as a significant contribution both to East-West comparative history and to the critical interrogation of those intricate legacies of Orientalism that make it so hard to do well.

Dead Man Talking

China is reducing death sentences but problems remain

By Zhang Lijia

On July 1 this year, a masked man named Yang Jia forced his way into the Zhabei police bureau in Shanghai, armed with a knife. In a killing rampage, he left six policemen dead and four injured. Last Wednesday, the 28-year-old unemployed man from Beijing was executed by lethal injection after the Supreme People’s Court decided to uphold the death sentence.

There was little surprise for the fate of a cop-murderer in a country where more people are thought to be killed by the capital punishment than the rest of the world combined. Yet the accused seems to have become an unlikely hero. At the second hearing hundreds gathered outside a Shanghai court, some holding signs that read “Long live the hero with a knife!”

In October 2007, Yang was questioned by a policeman in Zhabei district for riding an unregistered bike and was later detained for six hours. Claiming to have been beaten and mistreated by the police, he filed multiple complaints, demanding a formal apology and 10,000 yuan compensation for psychological damage.

Ever since the bloody July day, the Yang Jia saga has weighed on the Internet. Now his execution has sparked more discussions. One man wrote that the whole Yang Jia fiasco was an insult to the Chinese people. Another blogger urged people to mourn him for three days by not eating meat. Yang’s humiliation at the hands of policemen and his effort in seeking justice resonated with a public sick of the security force abusing its power and easily getting away with it.

The death penalty has always been used by the Chinese Communists as a harsh tool to maintain social security and political order and to curb crime. Partly because top Chinese leaders feel uncomfortable with the accusation that China applies capital punishment too readily, partly because the international community has pressured China persistently, reforming capital punishment has been made a priority within the Party-run judiciary system. There’s been heated debate among academics as to how to reform. One of the suggestions is precisely to restrict the power of police, to the displeasure of hard-liners.

“Ever since January 2007 when the Supreme Court took back the sole authority in reviewing the death penalty, I have noticed a substantial decrease in issuing death sentences, especially cases of immediate execution,” said professor Chen Weidong, a top expert on death penalty from Renmin University. “Killing fewer and killing with extreme caution is also the guidance from central government.”

The precise number of executions is a state secret in China. Amnesty International reported that last year 1,860 were given death sentences and at least 470 were executed, a remarkable reduction from 2006’s 1010, or 2005’s 1770, but still 80 percent of the world total, though the real numbers are believed much higher.

Despite progress, there’s still widespread fear that death sentences are passed without proper procedure and innocent people are convicted.

“There will always be problems when cases are handled with this behind-the-curtains judiciary style,” said human rights lawyer Li Jinsong in Beijing. Li, a tiny, soft-spoken man, explained that he became outraged as he followed the unfolding drama: Yang’s mother inexplicably “disappeared.” Yet Xie Youming, one of two lawyers appointed by the court as Yang’s defense lawyer and also a counsel for Zhabei district government, a potential conflict of interest, was able to contact her.

“Yang killed people, which should be condemned. But he deserved a fair trial,” Li said. A well-known lawyer and a winner of the French government’s “Liberty, Equality and Fraternity” award, he managed to persuade Yang’s father to retain him. Li went to Shanghai several times but failed to meet Yang Jia on the ground that Yang had made statement that he would only accept lawyers appointed by his mother. In the company’s website, Li has written a detailed account of his involvement and raised many questions: Why did the court try to cover up Yang’s real motives of crime? Did Yang have adequate legal presentation?

Li’s biggest question is Yang’s mental state. The lawyer was present at the second trial. (the first trial was closed) When asked if he regretted what he did, Yang replied flatly: “No!”

“See, Yang didn’t even try to rouse any sympathy,” Li said. “He struck me as mentally unsound.” But the evaluation of his mental competence was performed by a research institute under the Department of Justice, which lacks the judicial testimony qualifications required according to Chinese law.

There was another bizarre twist. Four months after her “disappearance,” Yang Jia’s mother Wang Jinmei was recently found at Ankang Mental Hospital in Beijing, Southern Metropolis News reported. No one seems to have any access to her. Li suspects that she was detained by Beijing authority in cooperation with Shanghai police because she is the only person who knows the whole story of Yang’s dealings with the police in the lead up to his brutal killing.

“The real problem with China's legal system is that it's under the Communist party's control,” said Danny Gittings, an academic who specializes in the Chinese legal system at the University of Hong Kong. “The procuratorate, public security and judiciary are separate organizations but all under the control of the same arm of the Party – the political-legal committees which exist at every level of the state. And there's still no sign of any willingness to address the fundamental problem – the lack of a legal system independent from the state.”

Yang Jia’s case also shows how little protecting mechanism there is for the convicted murderer in a legal system built for conviction.

Zhu Zhanping, a lawyer from Xian, strongly advocates for the abolishment of capital punishment altogether, and as soon as possible. “It’s too easy to convict an innocent person to death and too difficult to overturn once the verdict is passed,” he said.

In 2001, Zhu tried to defend another defendant facing death. Dong Wei was a young migrant who got into a fight at a cinema with a man who insulted his girlfriend. In his self-defense, Zhu believed, Dong accidentally killed that man. “Dong probably over-reacted a little but absolutely didn’t deserve to die.” Zhu discovered that the sole evidence the judge relied on was full of contradictions. Shortly before Dong’s scheduled execution, Zhu, in desperation, rushed to Beijing to turn to the Supreme Court’s for help – an unprecedented act. Having agreed there were too many unanswered questions, the Court ordered to halt the execution. But only for 130 days. In the end, the provincial Higher Court upheld the original verdict.

“Being a Chinese, I was brought up with the belief: to replace a teeth with a teeth and to repay blood with blood. After witnesssing the pain endured by Dong and his family, I changed my mind. No human should put another human to die. It won’t achieve anything.” Zhu has been writing articles advocating his belief. The vast majority of Chinese support capital punishment, not a surprising fact for a cultural tradition that places less importance on individual life than does the Western ‘humanist’ tradition.

In recent years, there have been a lot of reports of innocent people being sentenced to death. In one case, a farmer was given the death sentence for killing his mentally disturbed wife, who then after eleven years, returned home. Luckily, the farmer had not been executed yet.

Professor Chen Weidong doesn’t think it is the time to abolish capital punishment yet. “China is going through drastic social and economic changes, which has led to rising crimes, including violent and serious crimes. And there’s no religious or moral obligations. To abolish it now, the crime rate will soar and it may cause social instability.” What the experts are trying to do, Chen said, is to reduce the number of offences punishable by death, to reduce the number of death sentences, and to set up detailed and precise guidance for when a death sentence can be issued.

Currently China uses capital punishment for 68 crimes, including non-violent crimes such as tax evasion, drug trafficking and panda-poaching. Two days after Yang Jia’s execution, another high-profiled defendant, medical scientist Wo Weihan, was executed as well, triggering worldwide condemnation. Wo’s family wasn’t even given the opportunity to say goodbye.

Professor Chen, who has been following Yang Jia’s case, believes the overall handling was more or less fair.

The claim pains Yang Jia’s father, Yang Fusheng. “The trail wasn’t fair! I sort of expected this might happen but I still found it hard to accept,” he said in a telephone interview in Beijing. He doesn’t wish to meet any journalist, fearing being monitored. He described his son as quiet and law-abiding, living with his mother since the couple’s divorce. He said he will follow his son’s path – fighting for justice but without violence, and trying to bring every one of those who wronged his son to court. He previously tried to sue one of the court appointed lawyers.

“Now my only child is dead. I hope that people can learn lessons from it and improve the rule of law in China,” said Yang Fusheng.