Common Criminals Given Swift Justice in China--a Bullet to Back of the Head : Legal system: Judgment is pronounced at a rally of 30,000. It is the method that the Communist Party has used for decades.

More than 30,000 Chinese men, women and children looked on as 31 men in uniform paraded before them at a soccer stadium in the southern port city of Guangzhou.

The men were not soccer players, and this was no game.

The uniforms were drab prison garb, and what was taking place in this stadium last Thursday was a trial--what the Chinese call a “mass rally to pronounce judgment.”

Each man stepped forward as his name was called out along with the charges against him: rape, murder, robbery. All were pronounced guilty. Moments later, in a field behind the stadium, the men knelt and a policeman shot them with a pistol, one by one, in the back of the head.

This exercise by the Guangzhou Intermediate People’s Court was a dramatic example of criminal justice, Chinese-style. It is the method that the Communist Party here has used for decades against common criminals.

It took place on the same day that authorities in Beijing lifted martial law, which had been imposed last June at the time of the crackdown on China’s pro-democracy movement. And it helps to explain why many analysts believe that the lifting of martial law has little meaning.

“When you look at the power already in the hands of the party here, such as the death penalty, mass trial and the absence of the rule of law, you realize why so many people are saying that the martial-law debate is purely superficial,” a foreign scholar in Beijing said.

He noted that the party hierarchy had announced last week that there will be no change in the way justice is carried out in China.

It is not clear just how many criminals have been put to death in recent years. In its last official report on the subject, the state-run New China News Agency said that 10,000 people have been executed in the four years ending in June of 1987.

China’s senior judicial official announced last week that 144,900 criminals were given sentences ranging from life imprisonment to execution between January and November of last year alone. He did not specify how many had been executed.

Every month since then, the state news agency has reported at least one mass “people’s trial” and execution for crimes ranging from petty theft to murder. After the June massacre of pro-democracy demonstrators, scores of suspected leaders and supporters of the movement were brought before people’s courts and executed.

In recent weeks, dozens of people have been put to death as part of a nationwide crackdown on the so-called six vices: prostitution, pornography, gambling, drugs, selling women and children and “profiting through superstition.”

The crackdown has been so sweeping that authorities reportedly have arrested, tried and executed habitual prostitutes, pimps and drug dealers in more than a dozen Chinese provinces, and even gone so far as to put to death the keepers of cricket-fighting dens in Shanghai. Cricket-fighting, as popular here as cockfighting elsewhere, is outlawed, yet it continues to flourish, and gamblers continue to wage huge sums on it.

Last year in Sichuan province, two farmers were sentenced to death for selling seven panda pelts. This sort of thing continues to appall international human rights organizations. Amnesty International, the London-based human rights group, regularly takes China to task for its use of the death penalty.

Still, as the executions last week in Guangzhou made clear, the government has no intention of changing its policy.

China’s highest-ranking judicial authority announced last week that the courts must continue to bow to the party’s decisions in all matters. Several analysts said this was the first time since the party took power in 1949 that it formally renounced the rule of law.

“It is a mistake to think that, because there is the law, justice can be executed without the guidance of (party) policies,” Ren Jianxin, president of the Supreme People’s Court, was quoted as saying in a report carried by the state-run news agency.

Ren noted that the separation of the legal system and the party hierarchy was a major demand of the pro-democracy demonstrators last June, but he made it clear that there will be no changes in the system under the present leadership.

“In the course of last year’s counterrevolutionary rebellion, some people hoisted the flag of ‘judicial independence,’ ” he said. “In actual fact, these people were advocating the concept of ‘the tripartite division of power’ of the bourgeois class.”

Understanding China’s judicial system is not easy. In his 1986 book “Human Rights in Contemporary China,” Columbia Law School professor R. Randle Edwards said the Chinese government showed its “preference for social order over procedural concerns” in June, 1981, when the party’s Standing Committee ruled that the death penalty can be carried out, with no right of appeal, immediately after a verdict by an intermediate people’s court.

“The justification,” Edwards said, “was the need to set a stern and swift example for other criminal elements. And the execution in August, 1982, of five would-be plane hijackers, four weeks after their aborted effort, demonstrates how swiftly criminal retribution can operate in China.”

Nonetheless, consistency seems sometimes to be lacking. Among the 31 men put to death after the mass trial last week in Guangzhou was a burglar who stole about $10,000 from government warehouses. He had served time in a labor camp on an earlier theft charge, and there were several other repeat offenders.

But on the same day, the state-run China News Service reported the case of Deng Zhengping, a rapist who managed to survive. It said that Deng, a private businessman, had lured a 20-year-old woman to his house under the pretense of offering her a job. Instead, Deng locked her up and, over the next six months, raped her, beat her with iron chains and burned her with red-hot pokers. He was sentenced to 13 years in prison, but the People’s High Court, on appeal, increased the sentence to life in prison.

Whether China’s harsh sentences and liberal use of capital punishment has had a deterrent effect--the primary goal of the Communist Party, which calls it “killing the chicken to scare the monkey”--is somewhat easier to measure.

The government boasted last week that China has the world’s lowest crime rate, citing statistics that there are six crimes per 10,000 people in China compared with 515 in the United States and 106 in the Soviet Union.

Most foreigners in Beijing support the claim that China is among the world’s safest countries. A diplomat said he never locks his car “because anyone who tried to steal it would be blown away by the police within hours.”

“Now I consider that a deterrent,” he added.

Last week in Guizhou province, on the day after the mass executions in nearby Guangzhou, a man attempting to rob a bank with a homemade shotgun was captured by dozens of citizens. “Having no way out,” the state-run news agency said in its report, “the man sank to the ground and shot himself through the head.”