BEIJING, 26 August 1997 (Reuter) - China has executed more people in the 1990s than the rest of the world put together and with the number of capital crimes soaring, Chinese now face the death penalty for offenses ranging from tax fraud to cattle rustling.

The rapid increase in executions has been fueled by swift summary trials, by officials zealous to show results and by others eager to satisfy public opinion, the London-based human rights group Amnesty International said in a report Tuesday.

China imposed more than 6,100 death sentences and carried out 4,367 confirmed executions in 1996, the report said.

In other words, about 17 people were sentenced to death each and every day of the year in China in 1996.

These were conservative figures, based only on public reports, and were the highest since 1983, a year widely known in Chinese legal circles for its abuses of the system, it said.

"This reflects the Chinese authorities' reliance on the most draconian tools of the state to deal with problems emerging through China's social and economic transformation," it said.

Chinese officials declined to comment on the report or to give the exact number of executions a state secret in China.

In 1994 and 1995, Amnesty recorded a total of 6,108 death sentences, making the figure for last year bigger than the sum of the previous two years, the report said.

One reason for the surge in executions last year, Amnesty said, was the launch in April 1996 of the "Strike Hard" campaign on crime in which tens of thousands of people were arrested.

"The 'Strike Hard' campaign was characterized by demonstrations of arbitrariness of punishment, speed of criminal procedure resulting from disregard for due process and evidence of the ultimate penalty falling disproportionately on people with low social status," the Amnesty report said.

The report questioned China's assertion that the death penalty was used sparingly and that judicial practice was governed by principles of "few and prudent killings" and "killing the few, never killing those where there is a choice."

The number of capital crimes in China has more than tripled since the criminal law was promulgated in 1980, many of the additions being non-violent or economic crimes such as value added tax and insurance fraud, Amnesty said.

Executions, carried out in China by firing squad and by lethal injection since this year, followed judicial processes similar to those employed in 1983 when summary trials contributed to an estimated 10,000 to 20,000 executions.

"Both local and intermediate courts, often influenced by public anger in the locality, or pressure to be seen to be tough on crime, have passed death sentences for non-capital crimes," Amnesty report said.

It questioned China's argument that capital punishment served as a deterrent, citing the roadside executions of highway robbers in central Jiangxi province where identical crimes were being perpetrated within two months.

People were executed for hooliganism, including one man convicted of harassing women cyclists. Some were executed for stealing pigs or cattle, others for stealing VAT receipts, electric cables, or heads of Buddhist statues, it said.

In Tibet, where pro-independence sentiment runs high, some were shot for counter-revolution or subversion.

Summary trials were reported in 1996, with one case involving the alleged murder of a policeman in northeastern Jilin province taking just six days from the crime to execution of the accused, Amnesty said.