She Xianglin is lucky. He could have been executed for the murder of his wife. But a judge sentenced Mr She to 15 years’ jail instead of adding his name to the thousands put to death each year. Then his wife turned up, alive and farming pigs.

Mr She became a cause célèbre and the miscarriage of justice became a factor in a decision that will require the Supreme Court, from January, to review every death sentence passed in China.

He prefers not to dwell on the 11 years of his life that he lost in China’s prison system. He told The Times: “I’ve heard about the change in the death penalty and I am pleased. It’s a good thing.” But he is reluctant to discuss his feelings, focusing instead on his search for a job in the central city of Yichang.

No one knows how many people are executed in China each year. That number is a state secret. However, Amnesty International estimates that at least 1,770 people were executed last year and 3,900 were sentenced to death — more than in the whole of the rest of the world put together. Chinese legal experts say that the actual number may be far higher.

The decision to restore to the Supreme Court the right to review all death sentences was motivated not only by a series of reports in the increasingly courageous Chinese media of miscarriages of justice. Debate about the widespread and arbitrary use of the death penalty has also raged in recent years.

China holds that the death penalty should be used sparingly. However, the number of capital crimes has more than tripled since China promulgated its criminal law in 1980, many of the additions being non-violent or economic crimes such as VAT and insurance fraud. Today nearly 70 crimes qualify as capital offences.

One reason was a call by China’s leaders for “Strike Hard” campaigns to curb crime that began to rise with the introduction of economic reforms in the 1980s. By 1983 the Supreme Court could no longer cope with the workload and began to delegate the death penalty to lower courts.

People have been executed for hooliganism. Some have been executed for stealing pigs or cattle; others for stealing VAT receipts, and yet more for corruption. Summary trials are not unusual.

Officials have described the change as the most important reform of capital punishment in China in two decades and have said the number of executions could fall by as much as one third. Xiao Yang, president of China’s highest court, said: “In cases where the judge has legal leeway to decide whether to order death, he should always choose not to do so.”

But it is far from clear how the new system will work. After all, Chairman Mao issued almost the same pronouncement in the 1950s and there was no reduction in executions.

He Weifang, a law professor and director of the Centre for Judicial Studies at Peking University, said: “This is a good thing but it should have happened years ago.”

Mr She was fortunate. The judge had doubts about his case. By rights he faced the death penalty for the murder of his wife, a charge brought after police found an unidentifiable woman’s body in a pond some weeks after Mr She’s wife disappeared. Mr She said: “The past is past. I have just one thing to say: the truth lies in people’s hearts.”

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