Executions in China

A couple of days ago the Wall Street Journal reported that, following the execution of Zheng Xiaoyu the former head of China's food and drug safety agency, there has been a lot of discussion about the number of executions in China.

Even though "execution numbers are murky", it says that apparently China carries out more executions than the rest of the world combined.

However, in a gnomic final aside, it says that "there is evidence that China's rate of executions, which is high, is dropping". It would be interesting to know what the evidence is and, if the overall picture is "murky", how anyone can conclude anything at all from whatever evidence exists.

But there is something in the human mind that yearns to make sense of everything around us, because of which we tend to believe whatever we hope or fear might be the case.

It would be much better to call on the Chinese government to make all the facts available - then we would have at least something like a proper factual basis for coming to some unarguable conclusions. Sphere: Related Content