Wednesday, May 30, 2007

[china] wrath of the dragon

Not content with killing their citizens with lightning:

Saturday, May 26, 2007

Lightning has killed 56 people in China this year, 17 more than the same period last year, Yu Rucong, deputy chief of the China Meteorological Administration, said on Friday. Another 65 people were injured, 26 more than in the previous year.

... they are now executing their government ministers:

Tuesday, May 29th, 2007

China has sentenced the former head of the State Food and Drug Administration to death after he was convicted of corruption, state media has reported. Zheng Xiaoyu was sentenced after being found guilty of taking bribes and dereliction of duty, state Xinhua news agency reported.

Zheng, 62, who was sacked in 2005 after seven years in the job, could have his sentence reduced on appeal. He was expelled from the Communist Party earlier this year. The death sentence is unusually harsh for such a senior figure, says the BBC's Quentin Sommerville in Shanghai. Last month Zheng was accused of accepting more than 5m yuan ($650,000) in bribes to approve hundreds of drugs.

Thirty-one other people were also alleged to have been involved in the scandal, including Zheng's wife, Liu Naixue, and his son, Zheng Hairong. The sentence comes amid a food safety scandal that has hit Chinese manufacturers. Two company managers have been detained, accused of adding melamine to food additives. US inspectors allege this led to the death of a number of cats and dogs after they ate contaminated pet food.

The Chinese seem to like execution as a penalty and they do so much of it that some years back they decided to take it to the streets:

March 13 2003

China is equipping its courts with mobile execution vans as it shifts away from the communist system's traditional bullet in the head, towards a more "civilised" use of lethal injection.

Intermediate Courts of the southern province of Yunnan were issued with 18 new execution vans on February 28 and a court official said some have already been used.

"We cannot tell you how many executions so far, otherwise you could work out from the daily rate how many we carry out," the official said.

Chinese authorities keep execution numbers a secret, but Western human rights monitors believe it is about 15,000 a year, more than the rest of the world's judicial executions combined.

Living in China. Let's pack our bags and emigrate now.

5 comments:

  1. Let's not be too hasty here. Think about this. A government minister being punished for something he has done. There are many things we could learn from the Chinese.

    On the serious side it would not surprise meto find Blair is looking at these vans for his next announcement.

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  2. ...found guilty of taking bribes and dereliction of duty

    If only we could execute ministers for such things, it would be sure to improve performance?

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  3. That is extreme. If they executed corrupt ministers in Italy, there'd be no one left!

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  4. As my Min said, they're a different people over there and he should know - he's visiting them all the time.

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  5. C'mon. 100 people died in Panama as a consequence of tainted Chinese medicine. Babies died all over China for baby formula with no nutritional value. I am not a fan of the death penalty. But if a guy is going to be executed for murder then a government official can be executed for crimes of that magnitude.

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