Tom Phillips - Outcry as China executes symbol of injustice Jia Jinglong
Chinese authorities
faced a bitter outcry after executing a villager who became a symbol of
injustices endured by the country’s disenfranchised masses. Jia Jinglong, a
farmer from the northern province of Hebei, was put to death on Tuesday for the
murder of a Communist party official he blamed for destroying his life. Jia had
been convicted in 2015 of using an adapted nail gun to kill He Jianhua, the
55-year-old chief of the village where he lived.
Jia, 29, claimed he
carried out the killing in February 2015 in retribution after the official
masterminded the illegal demolition of his home two years earlier on the eve of
his wedding, which Jia’s fiancée subsequently called off. Jia’s lawyers did not
dispute that he was responsible for the killing but instead sought to portray
him as the victim of an unjust and ineffective judicial system that frequently
fails China’s poor.
The country’s legal community rallied behind the farmer as
he waited on death row and, unusually, state-run newspapers also attempted to
stave of the threat of execution. “Jia would probably
not have acted as he did if his loss had been properly taken care of,” the
China Daily argued in
a recent editorial which urged authorities to halt the execution and
“avoid the double tragedy to which we are dangerously close”. The newspaper
claimed Jia had killed the official in response to “the ruthless, illicit
forced demolition of his home”, adding: “We feel strongly that the [execution]
order must not be carried out”. Those pleas for mercy fell on deaf ears, to the
dismay of campaigners and supporters who viewed his sentence as a travesty of
justice.
Xinhua, China’s
official news agency, said Jia was executed
on Tuesday morning in the northern city of Shijiazhuang after a local court ruled the
sentence should be carried out. The prisoner was reportedly allowed to meet
relatives shortly before being executed. Zhang Qianfan, a Peking University law
scholar who was among those calling for Jia’s life to be spared, said he felt
disappointed and heartbroken.
“The legal community
and the whole of society have been calling for the death penalty not to be
carried out. But in the end even this wasn’t able to change the court’s
decision. I think it shows indifference towards a citizen’s right to life.” Zhang
noted that the wife of the disgraced Communist party politician Bo Xilai had
escaped execution for the 2011 murder of British businessman Neil Heywood and her attempts to
cover up the crime. “She was not sentenced to death so what is the reason to
sentence an ordinary person to death?” Zhang asked.
Criticism also rained
down from the general public who saw Jia as a
symbol of the commoner’s struggle against rampant injustice. Writing on
Weibo social media, one critic said the decision to follow through with the
punishment made clear the stance of Zhou Qiang, the president of China’s
supreme court: “If it is an ordinary person who we can choose to execute or not
execute, then we will choose to execute him; if it is an official … we will
choose not to.”
Zhang, the legal
scholar, said many Chinese citizens empathised with how Jia appeared to have
believed that such drastic action was “the only way to vent his emotions”
having failed to secure compensation through legal channels. In an interview on
the eve of his execution, Jia’s sister, Jia Jingyuan, said the wrongdoing he
had suffered resonated with many citizens who felt justice was beyond their
reach. “Because my brother is
part of this society’s underclass, he represents the lives of many ordinary
people,” she told the Associated Press. “What he has experienced is what many
are going through or will be going through … There is a lot of injustice in
society and people’s basic rights haven’t been upheld.”
Forced demolitions and
evictions have become a recurrent feature of China’s breakneck urbanisation
process, with corrupt local officials often acting in cahoots with property
developers.
A
2012 Amnesty International report claimed there had been a spike in
such demolitions, with local authorities using suspect land deals to offset
huge debts. The result was a wave of “deaths, beatings, harassment and
imprisonment of residents who have been forced from their homes across the
country in both rural and urban areas”, Amnesty said. “Some were in such
despair they set themselves on fire in drastic protests of last resort.”
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