U.S. News & World Report, Sept. 2, 1996 - By Brian Palmer in Beijing

More than 1,000 have been executed in China's crackdown on crime in Xinjiang, China's hardscrabble far-northwestern province, hapless hooligans Fang Yu and Wang Xinkuan were convicted recently of stealing 993 beepers, worth about $200,000, from a telecommunications office. Their sentence: death. Huo Kefei was convicted of lifting 97 gold bracelets from the store where he worked. His sentence: death. Before execution the three were paraded before a public rally at the provincial capital's Youth Palace.

Strike Hard, an anticrime drive launched at the end of April, has so far resulted in more than 160,000 arrests across China and more than 1,000 executions. Among the offenses, great and comparatively small: violent crimes such as murder and rape, as well as graft, bribery and embezzlement; firearms possession; larceny; drug trafficking; destruction of public property; prostitution; pornography. Under Chinese law, courts may order execution usually a single bullet to the back of the head not only for violent crimes but for any offense by which individuals "seriously endanger public security."

Yet Strike Hard (Yanda in Chinese) is about more than catching crooks. In China, as elsewhere, law and order is good politics and that is what President Jiang Zemin needs as he continues to consolidate power during the transition from the Deng Xiaoping era to what he hopes will be the Jiang Zemin era. Yanda overlaps with other high-profile party-directed campaigns, including an anticorruption drive; a crackdown on ethnic separatist activity in Tibet, Inner Mongolia and Xinjiang; and jailings of labor activists and dissidents. Jiang has also launched a "spiritual civilization" drive to restore socialist values and promote civility.

Strike Hard, like many of Jiang's ideas, is borrowed from his mentor Deng, who launched an anticrime campaign in 1983. The reformist Deng, says Jonathan Hecht, a researcher at Harvard Law School's East Asian Legal Center, "didn't want to be open to charges he was soft on crime." Jiang, a lifelong bureaucrat not a respected old revolutionary like Deng must work even harder to head off any such charges by redder- than-thou leftists eager to capitalize on his missteps. Accordingly, Jiang has cast himself as a squeaky-clean socialist crimebuster, determined to stamp out social and capitalist evils that are streaming into China through the economic door he reluctantly holds open.

Fear of disorder. Indications are that his tactics are paying off.

"Chinese have gotten so used to living in such a safe society that they are getting alarmed by increases in crime we would consider fairly moderate," says Hecht. A 31-year-old Beijinger confirms that sentiment: "Look at today's young people! Look at the disorder. Yanda is necessary." Still, the wide scope of the campaign, liberal use of the death penalty and the swiftness with which verdicts are carried out have raised alarm among legal scholars and human- rights monitors. According to Xiao Qiang of Human Rights in China, a New York-based group, local authorities are given quotas and other anticrime targets that they are expected to fulfill. Given the pressure to produce results, "it is absolutely inevitable that there is going to be a high proportion of . . . miscarriages of justice and even wrongful executions," says Robin Munro of Human Rights Watch/Asia's Hong Kong office. A spokesperson at China's Ministry of Public Security denies that there are any arrest quotas and adds: "This campaign is strongly su

pported by the masses. We carry out all judicial procedures according to the law."

A revised Criminal Procedure Law effective next year takes steps toward establishing the presumption of innocence and improving detainees' access to legal counsel. Police no longer will be permitted to hold suspects incommunicado, a common practice that h uman-rights advocates say encourages mistreatment.

But only the most optimistic think these revisions will end abuses, because the Communist Party still stands above the judicial process, unbound by principle or precedent. The new law, for instance, still requires judges to refer "all difficult, complicat ed, or major" cases to an adjudication committee, which is accountable to the party and advises the court before the trial "on what the appropriate ruling should be." The court is bound to implement the committee's ruling. That doesn't bode well for the likes of Fang Yu and Wang Xinkuan or for prospects that genuine rule of law will come soon to China.