Public Executions Instead of Public Accountability
By Brad Hirschfield July 11, 2007

Zheng Xiaoyu is dead, are we happy now? The Chinese government certainly hopes so. After all he was served up as their public guilt offering to a world filled with unsafe Chinese products ranging from poisonous toothpaste to children’s toys dipped in lead paint. Who is Zheng Xiaoyu, you ask. He was the head of China’s State Food and Drug Administration, and he was executed yesterday for taking bribes in order to license hundreds of medications that had not been properly tested (though God alone knows what “properly tested” even means in China).

All of which leaves me wondering, are they nuts?! First, the fact that the Chinese executed someone is, for them at least, no big deal. The Chinese carry out more court ordered executions than the rest of the world combined. Second, they have not announced a single concrete step that would make their products safer, or introduced any plan to work more transparently with any other governments, like our own, that is interested in helping them to do so. Instead, they made speeches about the complexities of being a developing nation with an underdeveloped product safety infrastructure about which little can be done. That, coupled with killing a former government official was apparently designed to appease us.

Of course, we should not be surprised by their response, or by their calculation that it would work. After all, we are the country in which destroying people in public rather than addressing their problems in private has become the stock and trade of our culture. We are the country in which making the obligatory trip to rehab is the expected response to any misdeed, for everything from problems with alcoholism to racist speech, whether or not it actually helps or grows out of the offender’s commitment to making a real change in their lives. We simply want to see people sacrifice a bit of their dignity and time in order to maintain the status quo. In light of our own seemingly endless appetite for sacrificial lamb, is it any wonder that they Chinese served up one of their own?