(from The Daily Telegraph - June 27, 1992)

By Graham Hutchings in Peking

Drug traffickers have been executed and huge piles of narcotics burned at rallies in China over the past few days in a government crackdown on a growing drug threat. Public 'sentencing rallies', in which the accused are escorted into a stadium by armed police, sentenced and then led away to be shot, were held in several south-western cities, according to press reports. Heroin, opium and marijuana were burned in large cauldrons. The activities were timed to coincide with yesterday's international anti-drug abuse day. Wang Fang, head of China's Narcotics Control Commission, said: 'The Chinese people, who suffered from the scourge of opium brought by the British imperialists in the last century, will not allow history to repeat itself. 'The raging flames (from the cauldrons) indicate the firm determination of the Communist Party and the government to arouse the fighting will of the masses, and deal a heavy blow to drug dealers both at home and abroad.' Yu Lei, secretary-general of the commission, said that of

18,479 drug offenders detained last year, 866 had been sentenced to death or given suspended death sentences. Foreigners accounted for 829 of those arrested. They included three Britons, who are serving sentences of between four and 15 years. Last year, police confiscated nearly two tons each of heroin and opium, and almost half a ton of marijuana. These amounts testify to a sharp increase in both drug trafficking and abuse in China. Officially, there are about 150,000 registered drug abusers in the country, but confidential papers circulating in the commission put the real number at about double that figure. Yu Lei said that 41,000 registered abusers lived in special rehabilitation institutes. Those he described as 'hardened addicts' would be sent to new reform-through-labour camps. In a separate development, an official newspaper in the south-western province of Sichuan said 16 people had been executed for compromising military research. The executions were necessary to ensure the 'smooth implementation o

f national defence research' and to protect 'important state telecommunication lines', the paper said.