Sentence in bribery case seen as move by China to show emphasis on product safety
BEIJING — China executed its former top food and drug regulator Tuesday for taking bribes to approve untested medicine as Beijing scrambled to show that it is serious about improving the safety of Chinese products.
The Beijing No. 1 Intermediate People’s Court carried out the death sentence against Zheng Xiaoyu, 62, the former head of the State Food and Drug Administration, soon after the country’s Supreme Court rejected his final appeal.
Zheng, who had appealed his May 29 sentence on the grounds that it was too severe and that he had confessed to the bribery charges against him, became the first ministerial-level official put to death since 2000 and only the fourth since China opened it doors to the outside world nearly 30 years ago.
The official Xinhua news agency announced the execution but did not say how Zheng was killed. In most cases, court police execute prisoners by shooting them in the back of the head, though recently the police have used lethal injections.
China carries out more court-ordered executions than the rest of the world combined, according to human rights groups. Even by local standards the sentence against Zheng was unusually harsh and its execution uncommonly swift.
China’s Supreme Court recently has made a public effort to show it carefully reviews all death sentences and that it has restricted the power of local courts to impose that penalty.
But Zheng’s case appears to have served a political purpose, allowing senior leaders to show that they have begun to confront the country’s poor product-safety record. Shoddy or dangerous goods have damaged its reputation abroad, especially in the U.S., which has had recent pet food and toothpaste scares.
Zheng became China’s top drug regulator in 1994, when he was named the head of the State Pharmaceutical Administration. In 2003, the agency became the State Food and Drug Administration.
