An epidemic of street robberies, many of them carried out by thieves on motorbikes or in cars snatching women’s handbags, has infuriated the inhabitants of Guangzhou, a thriving metropolis that hosts thousands of foreign business visitors every year.

Its rise to prosperity has been scarred by crime, and detectives blame the rise in street violence on a booming drug industry. While the suppliers stay in the background, their desperate customers are often responsible for the bag snatchings, said police and court officials.

“Such things were unknown in Chairman Mao’s time when I was a boy, but the authorities don’t want to admit they are losing control,” said a local businessman. “Frankly, most Chinese people would be happy to see these thieves executed.”

Several residents complained that life in the city’s newly built middle-class apartment districts had become hazardous because of crime.

Keen to show that the authorities take such complaints seriously, Chen Huajie, vice-president of the provincial high people’s court, announced on February 28 that it would henceforth impose a minimum sentence of three years’ imprisonment and a maximum penalty of execution for bag snatching.

Before Chen’s announcement, the maximum penalty was three years in prison.

The decision attracted immediate condemnation from Amnesty International, which campaigns to abolish the death penalty. “We recognise the duty of governments to combat crime, but this is a knee-jerk response,” said Mark Allison, a spokesman.

“Can we really give a death sentence to a purse thief?” asked a Chinese legal expert, Professor Dong Likun of Shenzhen University, in an interview with the South China Morning Post.

Even though there is no reliable measure of public opinion in China, the state’s actions show that it wants to quell a rising sense of insecurity among middle-class Chinese.

The police have just announced that 24,000 officers have been deployed at kindergartens and schools across the country to combat a rise in robberies and assaults against children.

Secrecy alternates with lurid publicity in the government’s anti-crime strategy as the courts have a duty under the communist system to use sentences to exemplary effect. Last October the executioners came for Wang Binyu, a migrant worker sentenced to die after a case that had generated nationwide comment and sympathy.

Wang had murdered four people after trying to extract unpaid wages from an unscrupulous employer. It was a familiar tale of exploitation and despair that inspired a lively debate on the internet between supporters and opponents of the death penalty.

But after Wang was shot in government-approved fashion his name vanished from Chinese internet sites, online discussions were shut down by censors and all references to the case were purged.

Nonetheless, the government has permitted the beginnings of a debate about capital punishment. China executes more people than any other country, with research suggesting that about 10,000 people die at the hands of the state every year.

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