GOU GIAN HOU places the stained scrap of paper on the scarred wooden school desk of an orphanage in Central China and flattens it out with shaking wrinkled hands.
In broad, vertical, Chinese script it says “Hsiao Mieh?” or “Disposed of” He is showing me the death notice of a condemned man.
There are two ways The Government executes men and women here in mainland China, he says: “They are either taken to a killing ground, a remote open grave, where a guard points a rifle at the back of their head and asks the prisoner to open their mouth so the bullet can pass out through his mouth. Or they are dragged into an ambulance and “finished” with a cocktail of three drugs: Sodium Thiopental to make the condemned unconscious; Pancuronium Bromide to stop the breathing and lethal Potassium chloride to stop the heart. Lethal injection is becoming more and more common, thats how they kill them now.”
As he speaks through my translator Hou reaches out and strokes the thick black hair of six year old Zhaing Sai. Behind him the sound of childrens laughter floats towards us as four other orphans swing happily on a rusting climbing frame.
“The certificate belongs to this boy. The name on the paper is his mother. It is all he has left of her and he can’t read. Here in the orphanage there are forty others like him, young girls, adolescent boys, all orphans of execution with parents either dead or on death row. Across China there are tens of thousands more, most or fending for themselves. They are the ones who really suffer from execution.”