Southern Weekly also reported that a former senior judge of the Supreme People’s Court (SPC) stated at a seminar in July 2014 that the number of executions had reached one-tenth of the highest number recorded since 1979. In 1983—the first year of the Strike Hard campaign during which the power to approve capital punishment was given to provincial high courts—24,000 people were sentenced to death, according to The Communist Party of China: Forty Years in Power (Zhongguo gongchandang zhizheng sishi nian). The book called the first year of the Strike Hard campaign the largest centralized attack since the campaign to suppress counterrevolutionaries in 1950.

 

The Dui Hua Foundation claimed that between July 2, 2013, and September 30, 2014, the SPC published 152 death penalty review decisions online. The 152 decisions involved 129 murder cases and 17 drug cases. Provinces with the most review decisions were Yunnan (14), Xinjiang (13), Zhejiang (11), Guangdong (8), and Henan (8). The average time for reviewing a death penalty verdict was six months, with two years as the longest period.