Red China Blues (reissue): My Long March from Mao to Now (43 page)

“Would the leather jackets and miniskirts appeal to foreigners?” Zhao Lixin asked. “We’ve had a hard time finding export markets. Can you help us?”

I dutifully translated for Caroline, who widened her blue eyes and said innocently, “I think there are bans in Western countries on goods made with forced labor. My country, Holland, would have a problem with prison-made goods.”

“No problem,” said Zhao Lixin. “We can change the labels.”

Suddenly, a uniformed policeman walked in. We froze. Had we been followed here? But Zhao Lixin introduced the policeman as his team leader. We relaxed.

“How about a wholesale discount?” I asked.

“I can’t give you better than five percent,” the policeman said. “The price of hides has been going up.”

To follow the gulag story to its inevitable conclusion, I had to find an execution ground. Armed only with some vague, outdated directions, I spent an afternoon in Beijing’s outlying areas getting lost with Lena Sun. A friend had told me to look for a certain section of the dry, stony bed of the Yongding River, but the local peasants directed me instead to a secluded hillside. Apparently, someone had decided that shooting people in public was bad for China’s image.

A twelve-foot-high gray brick wall topped with barbed wire rose from the side of a scrub-covered hill. A black and white sign identified it as Beijing Supreme Court Project 86, blandly named for the year it was built. Even though it was a warm spring afternoon, I felt chilled. We had found Beijing’s secret killing field. Project 86 was about as isolated as it was possible to be in a city of eleven million.
Behind the wall, an unseen guard dog barked. There was no other sign of life. In the distance I saw the perpetual haze from the smokestacks of Capital Iron and Steel. The nearest village was beyond the next hill. The only people in sight were two peasants scavenging steel rods from chunks of discarded reinforced concrete.

“Anybody executed here lately?” I asked. In the context, it seemed a perfectly normal question.

“They shot a bunch of people here about ten days ago,” said one of the peasants.

“What did you see?”

“We’re never allowed to watch,” he said, pausing to look me over. “They always shut down the entire area. Impose a curfew. No one is allowed near. We can only hear the shots.” The soldiers had AK-47 assault rifles, he said, and would fan across the mountain sealing off the area as a precaution against last-minute rescue attempts. Then the condemned would arrive in a speeding convoy of jeeps and trucks.

In the distance, Lena spotted a security guard wearing sunglasses, a blue padded coat and a red armband. The peasant saw him, too, and abruptly fell silent. The guard, still several hundred yards away, blocked the path back to my Jeep. “Let’s go farther up,” I whispered.

At the top, we had an even better view of Project 86. Looking down, I saw that it was an irregular hexagonal wall surrounding a dusty field. There was nothing aside from some corrugated tin-roofed shacks, a circular dirt road in the center and a long line of concrete V shapes at the base of the hill that reminded me of a row of giant books, opened in the middle and propped upright. We took turns standing in a half crouch to snap some photos. Below, the security guard was still waiting. I emptied my camera and dropped the roll of film down my shirt, annoyed I had forgotten to bring an extra roll as a decoy. Then Lena and I crawled down the far side of the hill, through thorn bushes and weeds, into a dusty gully and back over a couple of steep hills, eventually reaching the main road, and my Jeep.

Only after interviewing several people involved in executions did I understand what we had seen. The circular dirt road had been worn down by trucks carrying prisoners. The condemned knelt against the concrete Vs so that stray bullets lodged safely in the slope
of the hill. After I developed the photos, I counted the Vs. There were thirty.

I was not against the death penalty in principle. But in China, state executions were more like wholesale slaughter. Not only was the Chinese justice system an abyss of perfunctory trials, near-certain conviction and rejected appeals, the death penalty was used for a vast array of offenses, from cattle rustling to copyright infringement. By the 1990s, the Beijing regime led the world in per capita executions. With 22 percent of the world’s population, China accounted for 63 percent of the world’s executions. Each year it executed about seven thousand people, compared with a few hundred a year during the Qing dynasty (1644–1911), according to Bernard Luk, a history professor at Toronto’s York University. Even allowing for a tripling of the population since Qing times, Communist China’s rulers are far more bloodthirsty than the feudal emperors they replaced.

“At this stage in our history, we need the death penalty. We can’t afford not to have it,” Xiao Yang, the governor of Sichuan province, told me, citing the soaring crime rate sparked by a growing gap between the haves and have-nots.

When Lena and I requested an interview with a judicial official to ask about the death penalty, a spokeswoman for the Beijing Supreme Court snapped, “That is not within the acceptable realm of reporting.” On our own, we interviewed justice officials, ex-prisoners and a former execution-ground worker and, from their accounts, pieced together a picture of the final hours of a condemned convict’s life.

Holidays, the traditional time for settling accounts in China, are also the most common time for executions. On death row, the footsteps come just before dawn. As the condemned sits shackled to the floor, police make a final identification check. Name? Work unit? Age? Crime? Sentence? A jailer takes mug shots. If the prisoner’s organs are to be used for transplants, a medic gives an injection of anticoagulant. Another officer checks the locks on the handcuffs and leg irons to make sure they can retrieve their hardware afterwards. Other officers truss the prisoner like “a pig for slaughter,” in the words of one witness. That way, a sharp jerk of the rope throttles any prisoner who tries to shout anti-government slogans. Someone binds
the shoes so they don’t fall off if the prisoner has to be dragged along the ground at the end. Then someone ties the pants at the ankles with twine to prevent a mess in case the prisoner loses control of his or her bodily functions. “Otherwise, it would look too pathetic,” said a government official who witnessed thirty-two executions.

After being shackled and trussed, the condemned are loaded onto military jeeps, right behind the executioner and between the soldiers who will march them to their deaths. There are no blindfolds, no masks, no sanitized rituals as in the West, where the message is that the prisoner is being killed not by a person but by the state. The feelings of the Chinese guards and executioners, all rank-and-file soldiers rotated through the task, aren’t considered. Carrying out an execution is supposed to be an honorable task, a glorious blow dealt to a class enemy.

In the early days of the People’s Republic, citizens were urged to attend public executions: “If you really love the people, then you must hate the people’s enemies.” By the 1990s, death rallies had replaced public executions. Scheduled just before executions, the rallies are usually held in sports arenas. “They are supposed to educate the living,” one court official said. While the prisoners and guards wait for the invitation-only seats to fill up, they mingle like actors backstage. No one has had time for breakfast. The guards sometimes munch steamed compone grabbed from the prison canteen. Because the hands of the condemned are manacled behind, a guard may offer to feed them, an intimacy so raw compared to the anonymity of executions in the West.

At the death rally, the condemned wear placards around their necks identifying their crimes: “rapist,” for instance, or “drug dealer”. The placards also bear their names crossed out by a big X, indicating they are about to die. Dissent, not normally a capital offense, is labeled “counter-revolutionary crime.” Led by an emcee, the audience shouts slogans such as “Shoot to death the rapist Wang!” Then the prisoners are loaded back into the jeep and driven to the execution ground. Three soldiers frog-march each prisoner to a concrete V. Last statements are forbidden. “Once a young man started singing the pop song ‘Good-bye, Mama!’ ” said another official. “He got badly beaten up. Then they shot him.”

When more than one prisoner is being executed, a squad leader
coordinates the shooting with a flag. “Sometimes they beg us, ‘Please shoot accurately,’ ” an official who took part in more than a hundred executions told me. “Often, the soldiers miss the first time. They’re standing very close, aiming at the back of the head, but maybe they’re nervous.”

Afterwards, a medic checks for a pulse, and sometimes orders a second bullet. A police photographer snaps pictures of the wound and the face, even if there is not much of it left. To stop excessive bleeding, a soldier might toss a shovelful of dirt over the wound. A clerk notes the date, the time and the names of the executioners and presiding officers. The jailers, wearing gloves to protect them from the gore, unlock the handcuffs and shackles and toss them into the jeep. Soldiers wrap the corpses in bags or stuff them into gray coffins. Then a truck hauls the remains to the crematorium. It is all over in fifteen minutes.

For a long time, death sentences that stripped a person of “political rights for life” confused me. If the person was dead, what rights remained? Finally, a Chinese friend explained: Authorities can remove organs with impunity. No one can accuse the government of mutilating a corpse.

Harvesting inmates’ organs is a taboo subject. Asia Watch, a human rights group, obtained a secret 1984 document issued by the Ministries of Justice, Health and Public Security that stated: “The use of the corpses or organs of executed criminals must be kept strictly secret. Security must always be tight.” A friend who is a military surgeon in Beijing confirmed that China performs thousands of kidney transplants a year. But he backed off instantly when I asked whether prisoners were the source. “Don’t even touch that,” he warned and refused to say anything more.

However, in 1989, the official
Legal Daily
publicly confirmed the practice: “Since in China there are relatively few donors of human organs, some medical units and people’s courts get together and use … organs of executed prisoners without obtaining the agreement of prisoners’ families. By so doing, they can obtain relatively healthy human organs and they do not need to spend money. This method is incorrect from a legal point of view.”

“We do remove organs, but only when the family gives permission,”
said Governor Xiao Yang of Sichuan. In a speech in Geneva, China’s ambassador to the United Nations also confirmed the practice. But Ambassador Jin Yongjian insisted it happened “in rare instances” and “with the consent of the individual.”

Amnesty International estimates that executed criminals are the source of 90 percent of transplant organs. The government official who witnessed thirty-two executions said that because organs deteriorate rapidly, doctors hook up the corpses to mechanical ventilators or remove organs at the execution ground. Wei Jingsheng, who spent eight months in a punishment cell on death row, said prisoners sometimes had their organs removed
before
execution. “The prison would phone up the hospital each time an execution was planned [to find out what organs were needed]. They would give the prisoner an injection, remove the organ, stitch him up and shoot him in the head.”

To be sure, from one perspective, harvesting organs is smart recycling of a scarce resource. “Some of the criminals are quite young and in good health,” a Chinese legal scholar told Lena. But because transplant operations are expensive, recipients tend to be senior officials. That raises the question: Is the rate of executions up because important people need organs? Perhaps. Prisoners are usually executed with a bullet to the back of the head. But several sources said that when a hospital wants corneas, the prisoner is shot through the heart.

China uses a bullet, not because it is more humane than the gas chamber or the electric chair but because it is cheap. Still, it seems unimaginably cruel to bill families for the bullets. The practice, which originated during the Cultural Revolution when heartless-ness was politically correct, persists today, according to several friends. I didn’t believe them. Then someone told me a family in Yunnan province had shown the receipt for the bullet that killed their son to Nick Driver, a UPI reporter. I called Nick and asked him to describe it.

“It was a small slip of paper printed with the Chinese characters
zi dan fei
, [bullet fee],” said Nick. “It was dated 1991, and was issued by the local police station. The charge was 50 fen.”

I did the math. Fifty fen was equal to 6 cents.

An addict’s wife in Handeng village, near the Burmese border, labors to water a rice crop, which has already been sold to buy opium for her husband. The couple has not been told that he is dying of AIDS
.
Photo: Jan Wong/
Globe and Mail