USEFUL IN CHINA?
China uses the death penalty as a regular punishment. Unlike studies showing the United States rarely uses the death penalty, China uses it regularly because they believe "It's a necessary as a deterrent" (1), (2). China overuses the death penalty, but even more concerning than that, China lets more prominent people have more legal leniency then lower class citizens (2).
"China creates a contradiction in its criminal justice system when it grants legal mercy for corrupt government officials but not for those convicted of other serious crimes" (2). Serious debate has been brought up because of this topic. Along with how many people get executed per year.
China has executed at least 1000 people to 2000 people per year since 2005 (2). China executed about 1.5% of its population in 2012, compared to the U.S. at .000014% (2), (3). The difference of those numbers are substantial. For a fact, China has more people than America but the percentages are still drastic.
"Capital punishment in the People's Republic of China is usually administered to offenders of serious and violent crimes, such as aggravated murder, but China retains in law a number of nonviolent capital offenses such as drug trafficking" (4). This means if you do anything to slightly break the law, they can give you the death penalty for it. They punish people like this to make sure they get the point across, don't break the law (2).
1-
http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/documents/CostsRptFinal.pdf
2-
http://callisto10.ggimg.com/imgsrv/FastPDF/UBER1/RangeFetch=contentSet=UBER1=prefix=PI-0JZN-2014-JUN00-IDSI-=startPage=373=suffix==npages=32.pdf
3-
http://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/robert-schlesinger/2011/12/30/us-population-2012-nearly-313-million-people
4-
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_China