By IPS Correspondents
BEIJING, Mar 25 2007 (IPS)

Their numbers are taboo. Their stories condemned to oblivion. The world of China’s death row prisoners is too forbidding, the execution grounds too sordid to yield a compelling book that would escape the scrutiny of the communist state censors.

But by virtue of its modesty, the recently-published ‘Letters From The Death Row’ succeeds where other more ambitious works would have perhaps failed. It tells the stories of 22 Chinese death row prisoners – men and women. It relates them straight from their prison cells. The account is gripping because it exudes the rare honesty of condemned people in the last hours before their death.

The book does not aspire to become what Truman Capote’s fictionalised account of sensational murder “In Cold Blood” became in the United States of the 1960s. Huan Jingting, the author, professes his intention was not to debate the value of the death penalty. Neither was his work intended as a commentary on social divisions.

“This book was written as a tribute to human life,” he says. “In my view, there is nothing more humbling than human life.”

What draws parallels with Capote’s work though, are Huan’s sympathetic observations of the criminal mind. His pages are populated with petty criminals – robbers and drug smugglers, whose struggles through life somehow inexplicably and cruelly end up in the execution chamber.

Such is the story of Wen Shou, the naive 19-year-old from Chongqing, central China, who is used by unscrupulous drug dealers as a go-between in the trade chain while being slowly converted into an addict. When first given an expensive “foreign” cigarette offered with a patronising pat on the shoulder, Wen is not aware that this is the beginning of his downward spiral, which would lead him to the death row.

Or the country boy Liu Yuan, who by the age of 20 had been detained and re-educated in labour camps so many times for petty theft, that he fails to land any job in his home village. He leaves the countryside for the booming southern city of Shenzhen where millions of migrants work in manufacturing sweatshops.

His rough edginess of a country thug appeals to the suave boss of a Shenzhen modelling agency and instead of working on a conveyer, Liu becomes a “gangster role model”. To keep the “cool” of his new image, though, Liu is eventually forced to become a real gangster.

Huan Jingting was not allowed to record the last words of high-ranking officials, sentenced to death for corruption, as those, he says, were imprisoned in a special jail. His book remains a study of death in the lives of the underprivileged. Even the murderers he profiles are all cast in a compassionate light – the majority being inadvertent perpetrators of the crime.

“Mum, my dear Mum, I hope you will not grieve for long and you will quickly forget this ignorant son of yours,” reads the farewell letter of Ai Qiang, a barely 20-year-old boy awaiting death for robbing and murdering a stranger in the street. “Because of ignorance I ruined my life. Because of ignorance I’m going to leave this world. I hope to be a better son in my afterlife. Farewell. Your un-filial son.”

“I dare say this is the first book in China that portrays the human side of people we are accustomed to seeing as innately bad,” Huan told IPS in an interview. “There are piles of crime reportage but the writers’ angle has always been that criminals were born as such”.

In China more than 60 types of crime – including non-violent offences like corruption and tax evasion, are punishable by death. Human rights activists have complained that death sentences are handed out far too freely and lead to terrible miscarriages of justice.

Chinese authorities do not disclose the number of court-ordered executions. In 2005, Amnesty International recorded 1,770 executions in China, or more than 80 percent of all death sentences carried out worldwide. But Chinese legal experts believe the actual number of executions is as high as 10,000 a year.

While recent years have seen an intensifying public debate about the need to curtail the broad application of the death penalty, experts believe the public overwhelmingly supports capital punishment as the only way to ensure that major criminals get what they deserve.

A book project about such a sensitive topic as the death penalty was not something that Huan Jingting planned to embark on at his own free will. But sentenced for fraud in the late 1990s, he became a prisoner himself, serving a year and a half in jail in Chongqing. Because he could read and write, Huan was asked to write the last wills of prisoners sentenced to death toward the end of his term.

He also took down the stories of the death row prisoners. “It was an experience that changed my life irrevocably,” Huan recalls. “It made me more tolerant.”

He learned to bring a packet of cigarettes with him when entering the cells of death row prisoners in the evening hours before their executions. There is a superstitious belief among death row inmates that if given cigarettes in their last hours, death is painless and rebirth in a good family assured.

Huan wrote down only the basic facts and spent more time listening to their stories. In true Capote fashion, his accounts successfully blend journalistic reportage of fact with the writing-style of fiction.

He changed the names of all the prisoners while meticulously recording the topography and real names of places. The first dozen stories were published in 2001 but the complete collection came out only in the autumn of last year.

While he disclaims any attempts at social criticism, Huan’s volume stands as a powerful depiction of China’s underclass whose members bear the brunt of the economic reforms.

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