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AbstractAlthough China remains the world's most prolific death-penalty jurisdiction, it has also reportedly reduced executions in the twenty-first century. China achieved this reduction in part through the use of a nominal capital sentence called "suspended execution." The success of suspended execution as a diversionary tool has produced calls for its introduction elsewhere. However, there has been no empirical research on suspended execution outside China. This article fills this gap by identifying neighbouring countries where suspended-execution proposals have been considered, determining why these countries considered it, and examining how proposals were structured. We identify four Asian jurisdictions—Taiwan, Japan, Vietnam, and Indonesia. We find that all of these countries looked to China for inspiration; each did so independently and for reasons unrelated to China's death-penalty reforms. Our findings provide insights about capital punishment in Asia, the appeal of suspended execution, and the role of China in regional penal practice.

In 2015, the People's Republic of China introduced the sentence of lifelong imprisonment for a single, non-violent crime: corruption. Although life without the possibility of parole statutes were increasingly common in the US and across the world by the late 20th century, this is the first such statute ever introduced in China. While introducing the new punishment for corruption, China, the world's leading executioner, retained the death penalty for corruption as well. This study examines the reasons for China's adoption of life without the possibility of parole and situates China in global debates about the punitive turn and capital punishment. It also provides insights for understanding how the adoption of life without the possibility of parole fits into a wider constellation of penal practices.

In this paper, we investigate the death penalty in the People's Republic of China in the Xi Jinping era (2012–). Unlike previous administrations, Xi does not appear to have articulated a signature death penalty policy. Where policy in China is unclear, assessing both the quality and frequency of discourse on the topic can provide evidence regarding an administration's priorities. Therefore, we analyse death penalty discourse during Xi's tenure and compare it with discourse under his predecessors. We base our analysis on three large datasets assembled for this project—the collected works of China's leaders, a complete corpus of The People's Daily and a database of academic publications in China. We find no references to the death penalty in Xi Jinping's speeches. We also find a decline in The People's Daily coverage of the death penalty beginning in 2015 and a sharp decrease in academic publications on capital punishment beginning in 2011. Our findings indicate that discourse on the death penalty has declined in the Xi era. We argue that the death penalty has been demobilised under Xi as a discursive site of political signalling. Finally, we conclude with some observations about discursive silence.