Four Canadian citizens convicted of drug offenses in China did not have a chance: They were executed with no serious right of appeal. Nor did the Chinese apparently care about pleas for mercy from Canada before the executions or the protests afterward.

“China is a country governed by the rule of law and treats defendants of all nationalities equally,” the Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman, Mao Ning, said in dismissing the outcry after Canada, not China, disclosed the executions.

No one knows for sure how many are executed annually in China, but the number goes into the “thousands,” according to Amnesty International. That’s many times more than Iran, ranked a distant second in executions with 853 in 2023, the last year for which we have the total. Many more may have died while being interrogated and tortured, and still more are killed by police unfettered by constraints on abuses.

“Significant human rights issues,” the State Department’s annual report on human rights says, include “arbitrary or unlawful killings by the government; enforced disappearances by the government; torture by the government; involuntary or coercive medical or psychological practices; harsh and life-threatening prison and detention conditions; arbitrary arrest and detention by the government.”

That record makes China far worse than other Asian countries — with the notable exception of North Korea, which China nurtures with oil, food, and other vital needs.

By comparison, the number killed in China, with or without the formality of a trial, surpasses that of the Philippines when under the thumb of its former  president, Rodrigo Duterte. Now held in the Hague awaiting trial by the International Criminal Court, he’s accused of promoting the extra-judicial killing of as many as 30,000 people during his “war on drugs” while mayor of the port city of Davao and then president between 2016 and 2022.

“China is undoubtedly the country with the most death sentences and executions,” according to a report by the Taiwan Alliance to End the Death Penalty, published in the independent island province of Taiwan. “The state media and courts only report or publish a very small number of death penalty cases. They do not officially publish the number of death sentences, executions, or death sentences by province, crime, age, gender, income, etc.”

With the courts “under the command” of the Chinese Communist Party’s “Political and Legal Committee,” the report says, “the head of the public security department ranks higher and has more power than the president of the court.” The result: “a strange phenomenon in criminal justice” that “the police have more say than the judge.” Murder cases must be solved, leading to “unfair, false and wrongful convictions” in a system bereft of  “democratic accountability, separation of powers and controls.”

It was against that background that Canada’s present and former governments fought for two years for the lives of the four men, all dual Chinese and Canadian citizens. China may not have informed Canada of their arrests right away, arguing that they were not Canadian and subject only to Chinese law. Canada’s foreign minister, Mélanie Joly, said that she had “asked personally for leniency,” to no avail. 

The Chinese responded in tones of indignation that showed the futility of begging for mercy. The Canadian Broadcasting Company quoted the Chinese embassy in Ottawa urging “the Canadian side to respect the rule of law and China’s judicial sovereignty, stop making irresponsible remarks, work in the same direction with China and jointly promote the improvement and development of China-Canada relations with concrete actions.”

Those non-diplomatic words may reflect problems going back to 2018, when the daughter of the founder of a multinational high-tech giant, Huawei, was arrested at Vancouver airport on an American request for her extradition to face charges of fraud. Held under house arrest at Vancouver, she was freed when the Chinese agreed to release two Canadian businessmen who had been jailed on flimsy charges.

It’s not known how the four Canadian citizens were executed, but normally those given death sentences are shot or put to death by lethal injection and cut apart for organ donations. An article in the American Journal of Transplantation concludes that “brain death could not have properly been declared” in a number of cases in China and “removal of the heart during organ procurement” had been the cause of a number of deaths. “These donors,” it adds, “could only have been prisoners.”