In an article published on the "Asian Wall Street Journal"...

In an article published on the "Asian Wall Street Journal" it was reported that fifteen thousand people were put to death for alleged crimes in China every year between 1998 and 2001. The figure is staggering, more than four times the highest Western estimates of the annual judicial carnage in China and higher than at any time since the Cultural Revolution. It comes from the book "Disidai," or "The Fourth Generation," an account of China's high-level politics, written by a party insider using the pseudonym Zong Hairen and to be published in New York next month. If his figures for last year are accurate, China accounted for more than 95% of the world's state executions.. However, inside China, a small but growing group of lawyers led by Liu Yunlong of Nanchang are now campaigning to restrict or abolish the death penalty. They argue that the present criminal code, which includes 68 capital crimes, 28 of them non-violent, is too draconian, especially given that the appeals system is a shambles. But without a major liberalization of the political system, they fight an uphill battle.
The article said there is a world wide indifference towards the judicial genocide in China is appalling. It is one the grossest manifestations of the inequality of justice faced among peoples of the world. Abolitionist groups devote huge resources to the criminals on death row in the United States - where there were only 66 executions last year - and barely a penny on China. The European Union, which maintains a ban on the death penalty as a prerequisite for membership, also directs its gaze at the U.S. - with the exception of former Hong Kong governor and present EU External Affairs Minister Chris Patten, who has been a lone voice calling attention to China. The same goes for the normally vigilant Amnesty International, whose anti-death penalty Web site is noticeably light on China content. Not just Westerners but ethnic Chinese as well suffer from the same look-the-other-way syndrome. Hong Kong, for example, sits idly by as thousands of its compatriots are sent to the gallows every year. This inaction is despite the fact that it is uniquely positioned with a strong and supposedly morally committed legal profession which could lobby on this issue. The inattention is just plain wrong. To quote Marco Pannella, director of the Rome-based abolitionist group, Hands Off Cain, writing in the group's annual report: "The practice of the death penalty has two facets: one, in the United States, in the spotlight of international media attention, and the other, in China, hidden from view. Often, for the media, and also for many European abolitionists, only the first exists ... Western intellectuals bite their tongue on all of this, or tend to justify such practices on the grounds that, well, everybody knows that such countries are governed by authoritarian regimes, and that their culture and traditions are vastly different from our own. They seem not to realize that this cultural relativism is a form of acquiescent and dangerous racism."