The Death Penalty in Chinese Law

Abstract The starting point of this paper is an outline of the Chinese perspective on the status of the death penalty in international law. According to Article 1 of the Chinese Constitution of 4 December 1982 (revised 2018), the People’s Republic of China is led by the Chinese Communist Party and guided by Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought and the contributions of other Chinese leaders. Therefore, in the second part of the contribution the relationship between Sino-Marxist ideology and the death penalty is discussed. The third part is dedicated to the death penalty in Chinese legal history. The topic of the fourth part is the death penalty under the PRC ’s law. In the fifth part, a few aspects of the death penalty considered negative by legal scholars in the PRC are discussed. Finally, it is noted that the death penalty has been abolished in certain regions of the PRC . Not all the nuances and details concerning the death penalty in the PRC could be discussed here, with some simplification proving inevitable.