FOR better or worse, China shares with America both vigorous support for capital punishment and an infatuation with reality-television programming. The two came together in macabre fashion on March 1st when state television carried a live broadcast of the final moments of four convicts as they were paraded and led away for execution by lethal injection.
The case has gripped the country, provoking sharp commentary online about the merits of the death penalty as well as the decision to broadcast the spectacle. It also highlighted a new point of similarity between China and America: a determination to act aggressively, even in foreign lands, in going after baddies.
None of the condemned men were Chinese. But they were convicted in November, in Yunnan province in south-western China, for the murder in 2011 of 13 Chinese crew members serving on two cargo boats hijacked on the Mekong river in northern Thailand. The bodies of the victims were found floating, bound and blindfolded, in the river.
A Burmese drug lord, Naw Kham, was identified as the ringleader. Of the three others executed moments after the cameras cut away on Friday, one was Thai, one was Lao, and another was identified as stateless.
After the murders, China launched armed patrols on the Mekong extending beyond its own borders. Chinese police were also part of an operation that apprehended Naw Kham in Laos in May 2012. He and the other suspects were dispatched to China for trial. They were convicted in November, and lost their final appeals in December.
One report in the state media compared the pursuit of Naw Kham to America’s hunt for Osama bin Laden. “It was the first time that Chinese police were conducting a manhunt for criminals who were all foreigners based overseas,” reported the Global Times.
The newspaper also revealed that China had considered using a drone attack to kill Naw Kham’s gang, after coming to believe that they had tracked the men to a mountainous area of north-eastern Myanmar. The plan was rejected, "because the order was to catch him alive”, the paper claimed, quoting the director of the anti-drug bureau in China’s public-security ministry.
An American expert on unmanned aircraft told the New York Times that China is not yet “ready for prime time" when it comes to using armed drones and may still lack confidence in its devices, operators and control systems. But the expert, Dennis Gormley of the University of Pittsburgh, predicted this could change with “a few more years of determined practice”. When that time comes, he added, the Chinese "surely will have America’s armed-drone practice as a convenient cover for legitimating their own practice.”
