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Law, Jurisdiction and Capital Punishment in the June 1989 Crackdown

Free China Movement
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An FCM Legal Opinion on the law governing the 1989 criminal proceedings in Beijing, Shanghai and Chengdu, on military–civilian jurisdiction, and on the review and approval of death sentences.

PART I — Introduction and Questions Presented

1. Introduction

In June and July 1989, courts in three cities imposed death sentences on defendants convicted of offences arising out of the protests and the military crackdown that ended them. In Beijing, eight defendants were sentenced to death at first instance on 17 June 1989, and seven were executed. In Shanghai, three men were sentenced to death on 15 June 1989 and executed on 21 June. In Chengdu, two men were sentenced to death on 1 July 1989 and were subsequently executed. These proceedings were conducted at extraordinary speed, under a legal framework assembled between 1979 and 1983 that concentrated capital jurisdiction in the intermediate people’s courts and — exceptionally, for defined categories of crime — delegated the power to approve death sentences away from the Supreme People’s Court (SPC) to provincial-level high people’s courts and to the Military Court of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA).

This opinion examines that framework. It asks what law governed these proceedings when they were held; which organs held investigative authority, trial jurisdiction, appellate jurisdiction and the power of death-sentence approval; and what can, and cannot, responsibly be said about how those powers were exercised in the individual cases. It is a legal and evidentiary study, not a narrative of the crackdown. Where the record establishes a fact, the opinion says so. Where the record contains only a government assertion, a contemporary press report, or an unresolved allegation, the opinion says that instead — because in capital cases decided in days, the difference between what a government announced and what a court record proves is not a technicality. It is the substance.

2. Questions Presented

  1. What substantive and procedural law governed the Beijing, Shanghai and Chengdu criminal proceedings of June–July 1989?
  2. How were investigative authority, first-instance trial jurisdiction, appellate jurisdiction and death-sentence approval allocated among civilian courts, military organs and the SPC under that law?
  3. Did the military–civilian rules of 1982 and 1987 confer trial jurisdiction on military courts over civilian defendants?
  4. Under the delegation framework in force in 1989, which organ held the power to approve the death sentences in these cases — and can that question be answered for any individual defendant on the surviving record?

3. Three separations

The analysis depends on three distinctions that public discussion of these cases routinely collapses, and which this opinion maintains throughout.

First, investigation is not trial, and neither is approval. The power to investigate a case, the power to try it, the power to hear an appeal and the power to approve a death sentence were held under different instruments and, frequently, by different organs. A rule allocating investigative competence between military and local security organs says nothing, by itself, about which court may try a civilian or which court may approve his execution.

Second, the legality of the crackdown is not the legality of the trials. Whether the martial-law decision of May 1989 had a lawful institutional basis, and whether particular uses of military force complied with the law then in force, are separate questions from whether the criminal proceedings that followed the crackdown complied with the criminal law and procedure then in force. This opinion addresses the proceedings. It draws no conclusion about any individual use of force.

Third, an assertion is not a finding. Much of what is “known” about these cases derives from announcements by the authorities who conducted them, relayed by official media, summarised by a United Nations special rapporteur, or compiled years later by non-governmental organisations. Each layer is evidence of a different thing. This opinion keeps the layers separate and grades them: authenticated official primary sources; strong contemporaneous or official bibliographic corroboration; secondary transcriptions; and unverified or conflicting reproductions.

4. What this opinion cannot decide — PENDING VERIFICATION

PENDING VERIFICATION. No authenticated judgment, appeal decision, death-sentence approval instrument or execution record has been located for any defendant in the Beijing, Shanghai or Chengdu proceedings — no document bearing a case number, a bench, a signature or seal, or a full reasoned text. Every case-specific statement in this opinion therefore rests on government assertions transmitted through official media and through replies to United Nations and International Labour Organization enquiries, on contemporary journalism reporting those announcements, and on non-governmental compilations of the same material. Where this opinion states that a court “sentenced”, “rejected” or “approved”, it records what the surviving sources report, at the grade those sources carry. It does not certify the underlying judicial acts, and it does not infer any individual defendant’s death-approval authority from a general legal provision.

That disclosure is not a formality. It defines the limits of every conclusion that follows.

PART II — The Legal Framework in Force in June 1989

1. The codes of 1979

The proceedings of June 1989 were governed, in substance and in procedure, by the two codes adopted by the National People’s Congress (NPC) on 1 July 1979 and effective from 1 January 1980: the Criminal Law and the Criminal Procedure Law (CPL). Later revisions — above all the comprehensive CPL revision adopted in 1996 and effective 1 January 1997, which renumbered the death-review provisions — did not exist in 1989 and cannot supply the law for these cases. Every citation in this opinion is therefore to the law as it stood in June 1989, in the numbering of the time. The surviving texts of the 1979 codes are known through reproductions of NPC lineage and contemporaneous scholarly analysis; they are graded B+ in the source record of this opinion — strong and consistent, though the opinion’s file does not hold gazette facsimiles of the original promulgation.

2. Substantive capital law: approval as the default rule

The 1979 Criminal Law stated the organising principle of capital punishment at Article 43(2): a death sentence, other than one imposed by the SPC itself, was to be reported to the SPC for approval. The principal exception contemplated at the substantive level concerned the death sentence with a two-year suspension of execution, which a high people’s court could decide or approve. The default rule, in other words, was centralised: the nation’s highest court held the power of final approval over immediate executions, and any departure from that rule required a specific legal basis. The history of capital jurisdiction in the decade before 1989 is the history of such departures — granted, time-limited, withdrawn and redefined — and Part III examines the departure that was in force in June 1989.

3. Procedure: trial level, appeal, and death review

The 1979 CPL distributed the procedural powers as follows.

First-instance jurisdiction. Ordinary criminal cases punishable by life imprisonment or death belonged, under the Code’s jurisdiction provisions (Article 15 and following), to the intermediate people’s courts. It was therefore the intermediate courts of Beijing, Shanghai and Chengdu that tried the 1989 cases at first instance — a point of court level, established by the Code itself, which must not be confused with the separate questions of military jurisdiction and death approval addressed in Part III.

Appeal. The Code fixed the period for appeal and protest by reference to receipt of the written judgment: under Article 131, the period ran from the day after the judgment was received. The ordinary period could be shortened only under the specific, conditional decision of September 1983 discussed below — never by assumption, announcement, or the fact that a verdict was broadcast.

Death review. The Code’s death-review chapter (Part 3, Chapter 4, Articles 144–147) then governed what happened to a capital judgment. Article 144 restated the approval rule: death sentences were approved by the SPC. Article 145 regulated the submission path where an intermediate court had imposed death at first instance and the defendant did not appeal — review by the high people’s court, then submission to the SPC — and the corresponding path for high-court first-instance and second-instance capital judgments. Article 146 assigned review of suspended death sentences to the high people’s courts. Article 147 required that death review, at either level, be conducted by a collegial panel of three judges. This chapter — Articles 144 to 147, verified against the 1979 text — is the procedural core against which any 1989 approval practice must be measured.

4. The constitutional setting

These codes operated within the institutional frame of the 1982 Constitution, under which the people’s courts exercised judicial power and the people’s procuratorates exercised legal supervision, and under which military courts existed as specialised courts within the judicial system. The detailed allocation of competence in 1989, however, was statutory: it is found in the 1979 codes and in the Organic Law of the People’s Courts, not in any emergency instrument issued in 1989 itself. The opinion’s authenticated record is accordingly built at the statutory level; readers should treat any account of these proceedings that begins from a 1989 decree, rather than from the codes and the 1983 legislation, as starting in the wrong place.

5. The 1981 delegation — and its expiry

The first departure from centralised approval came from the NPC Standing Committee (NPCSC) on 10 June 1981, which authorised a delegation of death-approval power for a defined period. Two features of that decision matter for 1989. First, it was expressly time-limited: its window ran from 1981 to 1983. Second, within that window, specified categories of case remained reserved for SPC approval. When the window closed, the 1981 decision did not continue by inertia. A later NPCSC legal-cleanup decision of 27 December 2025 lists the 1981 decision as no longer applicable, while preserving the validity of decisions made during its effective period — confirmation, if any were needed, that the instrument lived and died within its stated dates. No part of the law governing the June 1989 proceedings can therefore be traced to 1981. The operative delegation was the one constructed in September 1983.

6. September 1983: the two decisions that framed 1989

On 2 September 1983, at the height of the “strike hard” anti-crime campaign, the NPCSC made two decisions that together framed the capital procedure applied for the rest of the decade.

The first amended Article 13 of the Organic Law of the People’s Courts. As amended, Article 13 maintained the rule that death sentences were reported to the SPC for approval, but authorised the SPC, where necessary, to delegate approval of defined categories of capital case — murder, rape, robbery, explosion and other crimes seriously endangering public security and social order — to the provincial-level high people’s courts. This amendment, not any court notice, is the statutory foundation of the delegation examined in Part III. It named the provincial high people’s courts as the recipients of delegated approval. What it did not do, in terms, was address the PLA Military Court — a gap whose consequences are taken up in Part III.

The second decision of 2 September 1983 concerned the speed of trial. For legally qualifying grave public-safety capital cases, it shortened the service deadlines associated with Article 110 of the CPL and cut the appeal and protest period under Article 131 to three days, counted, as the Code provides, from the day after receipt of the judgment. Three limits must be stated plainly, because they are habitually lost. The three-day period applied only to the categories the decision specified; it was not a universal rule for capital cases. It shortened the time to appeal; it did not abolish the appeal, the requirement of service, the defence, or death review. And whether it applied to any individual 1989 defendant depends on that defendant’s charge, category and procedural record — matters which, for the reasons given in Part I, the surviving file frequently does not establish.

By June 1989, then, the framework was this: substantive and procedural codes of 1979; first-instance capital jurisdiction in the intermediate people’s courts; a death-review chapter built around SPC approval; a live statutory power in the SPC to delegate approval for listed public-order crimes; and a conditional expedited procedure for qualifying cases. Part III turns to how the delegation was exercised, and to the separate body of military–civilian rules with which it is so often confused.

PART III — Jurisdiction and Death-Approval Architecture

1. Two bodies of rules, two different subjects

Accounts of the 1989 proceedings often move from military–civilian rules to conclusions about military courts trying civilians, or from a general delegation of approval power to conclusions about who approved a named defendant’s execution. Both moves are errors. The rules governing military–local cooperation in investigating cases, and the rules governing which court tries a case and which approves a death sentence, are distinct bodies of law. This Part takes them in turn.

2. The 1982 military–civilian rules: investigation and coordination

In 1982, the political-legal and military authorities jointly issued rules on cases involving both military and local parties (〔1982〕政联字8号). Their existence and identifiers are corroborated by a Supreme People’s Procuratorate (SPP) reply of 19 June 1993, citing the 1982 rules (its Article 3) alongside the 1987 supplement below. The signed text has not been authenticated: Grade B for existence and identity, Grade C for text. On every verifiable pattern in this family, their subject was investigative competence, referral and coordination in mixed cases — not trial jurisdiction, and nothing in the record supports reading them as authority for a military court to try a civilian defendant in 1989. A distinct “intersection provisions” text dated 25 November 1982 also circulates; whether it is the same instrument or a conflation is unresolved, and this opinion does not merge the dates.

3. The 1987 supplement: who investigates is not who tries

On 21 December 1987, the SPP, the Ministry of Public Security and the PLA General Political Department issued a supplement to the 1982 rules (〔1987〕政联字第14号). As reflected in the 1993 SPP reply’s use of its Article 1, it regulated investigative cooperation and referral: a suspect known to be a local civilian belonged to the local organs; civilian identity discovered after opening required transfer; and military organs were not to impose coercive measures on local persons in the setting addressed. These are rules about investigation and hand-over — not adjudication, not death-sentence approval. Known through secondary transcriptions (Grade B/C; original unauthenticated), it was repealed, with the 1982 rules, by the provisions of 2009. It formed part of the 1989 background — but allocates investigation only.

4. Court level in ordinary cases: the 1983 notices

Trial jurisdiction in the ordinary courts was adjusted twice in 1983. On 16 August 1983, a joint SPC/SPP/Ministry of Public Security notice (〔83〕法研字第15号) temporarily permitted certain serious ordinary cases — those punishable by life imprisonment or death — to be transferred from intermediate to basic-level courts. On 2 December 1983, a further joint notice (〔83〕法研字第23号) ended the experiment: such first-instance cases were again to be heard by the intermediate people’s courts, per Article 15 of the CPL. The official 2013 repeal schedule confirms the December notice’s title, date and number verbatim, recording that it ceased to apply because social circumstances had changed; the official 2010 catalogue confirms the August notice’s true date (16 August — not 6 or 15 August). Both are Grade A as to identity and metadata; their full texts are unauthenticated. Their combined effect for 1989: the intermediate-court level of the Beijing, Shanghai and Chengdu trials was the ordinary, Code-based position — not an emergency departure, and not a military one.

5. The delegation of death approval: the notice of 7 September 1983

Five days after the NPCSC amended Article 13, the SPC exercised the new power. Its notice of 7 September 1983, “Notice on Authorizing Higher People’s Courts to Approve Certain Death-Penalty Cases”, divided capital cases into two tracks. On the first, approval remained centralised: for counterrevolutionary cases and specified serious economic crimes, the high people’s courts were to review and express agreement, but the sentence still went to the SPC for approval. On the second, approval was delegated: for homicide, rape, robbery, explosion and other specified crimes involving serious harm to public security or social order, the power of approval passed to the provincial-level high people’s courts and to the PLA Military Court, each within the cases before it.

The notice’s identity, date and later history are established at the highest grade available in this record: the SPC’s official 2006 decision on the unified exercise of death-approval power lists it in its annex and records its repeal from 1 January 2007, when approval of all death sentences returned to the SPC under the NPCSC’s Organic Law amendment of 31 October 2006 — proving, from the official record itself, that the delegation was in force throughout, including June 1989. Its full text, by contrast, survives as a secondary-hosted transcription, graded B: the two-track structure is corroborated by the official record and by a 2004 retrospective on the SPC’s own court network, but no signed original or gazette facsimile has been authenticated.

6. An unresolved conflict at the foundation

One defect in the foundation must be recorded rather than smoothed over. Article 13, as amended, speaks of delegation to the provincial-level high people’s courts. The transcription of the SPC’s notice names, in addition, the PLA Military Court. A subordinate notice cannot extend a statutory authorisation beyond the statute creating it; but whether the transcription is exact, whether another basis supported the military limb, and how the discrepancy was understood at the time cannot be answered from the materials authenticated for this opinion. The conflict is preserved as unresolved. It does not invalidate the delegation as applied by the provincial high courts, whose authority rests directly on Article 13 — but any assertion about the PLA Military Court’s approval power in a specific 1989 case would require the authentic notice text and the case record, neither of which is in the file.

7. The anti-parading notice of 1 June 1988

One further instrument deserves record, for its bearing on the public manner in which some 1989 sentences were announced. On 1 June 1988, the SPC, SPP and Ministry of Public Security issued an urgent telegram notice (高法明电〔1988〕46号) resolutely prohibiting the public street display (游街示众) of convicted and unconvicted persons alike. The official 2013 repeal schedule confirms its title, date and number verbatim, and records that its subject was later taken up in a detention-administration notice of 14 November 1992 (Grade A for identity and metadata; text Grade B). Two cautions follow. The notice regulated treatment and display, not jurisdiction or approval. And the existence of a prohibition does not, without case-specific evidence, prove a violation of it: whether any 1989 proceeding involved a prohibited display is a factual question for the case record, in the same PENDING VERIFICATION posture as the rest of the file.

8. Why the architecture does not decide any individual case

The architecture in this Part establishes the possible routes a 1989 capital case could lawfully take — not which route any case actually took. Three illustrations, developed fully in Part IV, make the point concrete.

For Beijing, no source examined states which organ approved the seven death sentences carried out. The government reply transmitted to the United Nations records that seven of the eight appealed and that the Beijing High People’s Court rejected the appeals and confirmed the original judgment — an appellate disposition, not the same act as death-sentence approval. To name an approving organ for Beijing from the general delegation alone would be precisely the inference this opinion prohibits.

For Shanghai, the record gives a date — 20 June 1989 — when the Shanghai High People’s Court rejected the three appeals: an appeal-rejection date only — not approval, and not the execution date (21 June).

For Chengdu alone, the record contains a case-specific approval assertion: the government reply of 14 September 1989 states that the two defendants were executed after examination and approval by the Sichuan High People’s Court, invoking the 1983 empowerment. That statement is evidence of what the government asserted, in a reply, about Chengdu — and it is not transferable to Beijing or Shanghai.

Jurisdiction and approval were genuinely distributed under the law of 1989, so the approving organ in any case is a question of category and of record, not of assumption. Recovering what happened requires the case documents; they have not been found. Part IV examines the proceedings as the surviving evidence allows: city by city, layer by layer, name by name.

PART IV — The Proceedings as the Record Supports Them

What follows is confined to what the surviving record can actually carry. That record has three layers, which must not be collapsed into one another. The first is government assertion: statements transmitted to the UN and the ILO, and official-media announcements monitored abroad. The second is contemporary journalism, which corroborates that sentences and executions were announced and carried out, and when — but does not verify the truth of any conviction. The third layer would be authenticated judicial documents — judgments, appeal rulings, death-approval instruments, execution records. That layer is empty: no such document, bearing a case number, a bench, a signature or a seal, was located for any defendant in any city examined. The grades attached to each statement are part of the findings, not decoration.

The Beijing eight

On 17 June 1989, the Beijing Intermediate People’s Court sentenced eight defendants to death at first instance, with lifetime deprivation of political rights. The sentencing is known from the official press — the People’s Daily of 18 June, page 1, carrying a Xinhua dispatch dated 17 June — and from the government’s reply of 3 July 1989 to the UN Special Rapporteur, summarised in his report. Both are government-layer sources; no judgment has been seen.

The eight, in the Chinese characters given by the People’s Daily transcription, were 林昭荣、陈坚、祖建军、王连禧、王汉武、张文奎、罗红军、班会杰. The romanisations are not stable, and this paper does not stabilise them. 林昭荣 appears as Lin Zhaorong in the People’s Daily, the Los Angeles Times, the ILO material and HRIC, but as Lin Shaorong in Amnesty’s reports. 祖建军 is Zu Jianjun, probably, in Amnesty and HRIC, but Zhu Jianjun in the ILO list — whose own republisher, HRW, notes that Zu is probably correct. 王连禧 in the People’s Daily is 王莲喜 in information later obtained by Dui Hua through government inquiries. Without an identity-grade primary record, none can be declared correct, and silently adopting one spelling is an editorial decision no account can defend.

The charges, as the government presented them, must also be read at two levels. Collectively, the official summary described wounding soldiers, stealing weapons, and burning buses and military vehicles. Individually, the reported charges differed materially, and the collective formula cannot be pasted onto each defendant. Five of the eight — Lin, Zhang Wenkui, Zu (or Zhu) Jianjun, Chen Jian and Wang Hanwu — were reported sentenced for arson. Luo Hongjun’s reported charge was serious looting. Wang’s was setting fire to the seats of a Beijing trolley bus on the night of 3 June. Ban Huijie’s charge is in outright conflict: the information China supplied to the ILO, as reproduced by HRW, gives a “very serious assault on women”, while initial reports and HRIC describe beating soldiers and burning a military vehicle. This paper records the conflict and resolves none of it: what a court found, as opposed to what officials announced, is not in the record.

On appeals, the record contains a government assertion and nothing more. The government’s 3 July 1989 reply, summarised at paragraphs 100 and 109 of the Special Rapporteur’s report, states that seven of the eight appealed, that the Beijing Higher People’s Court rejected those appeals and confirmed the original judgment — evidence of what the government told the United Nations, not an appeal ruling: no text, date of decision or reasoning has been produced. Nor does it say anything about a death-approval step for Beijing. The only case-specific approval statement anywhere in the UN record concerns Chengdu, dealt with below, in its own place. It may not be moved.

Seven of the eight were executed. The date is disputed, but it is not an even dispute. The best-supported date is 22 June 1989: Amnesty’s contemporaneous report gives it, AP’s wire of 22 June reported seven more executed “today” and a running total of 27 put to death in two days, and HRIC’s entries and the US State Department compilation agree. The arithmetic independently corroborates the split — three in Shanghai on 21 June, seventeen in Jinan on 21 June, seven in Beijing on 22 June make AP’s 27 across two days. The competing date, 21 June, rests mainly on a single annotation in the 1991 HRW/Asia Watch report, which conflicts with the dates of the reports it cites. June 22 is therefore stated here as probable-to-strong — and still as disputed and unauthenticated, because no execution record exists against which to settle it.

The eighth defendant, Wang Lianxi, was not executed. That much is settled, and almost nothing about the reason is. Wang was reported released from a Beijing prison in August 2007, after eight sentence reductions, on information Dui Hua obtained through Chinese-government inquiries. Of the mechanism by which the death sentence became a served term, the sources give at least three incompatible accounts: that the sentence was later revised or commuted to life imprisonment (Amnesty, 1991 and 1999); that it was a death sentence suspended for two years on grounds of “mental imbalance” (HRIC); and that Wang was “originally sentenced to life” (the Dui Hua summary, which erases the death sentence altogether). Amnesty’s earliest account is itself hedged — Wang was “apparently” not executed because a defence lawyer had argued mental capacity. The sources do not even agree on Wang’s gender. And the government’s own UN account, in which only the other seven appealed, contradicts later versions in which Wang was commuted on appeal. A responsible account can say Wang was sentenced on 17 June, was not executed, served a long sentence and was released in 2007. It cannot say by what legal route.

One further anomaly is recorded because suppressing it would be its own kind of error. HRIC’s list contains a ninth name, Wang Mingshu, shown as executed on 22 June and cross-referenced to Ban Huijie. The name appears in no other source checked — not Amnesty, not the UN reports, not the HRW/ILO material. It is flagged as an unresolved anomaly, probably a conflation in the HRIC list. It does not change the count of eight sentenced and seven executed, and it is not silently deleted, because a future primary record may yet explain it.

The Shanghai three

The Shanghai proceedings were separate — different court, different charges, different dates — and are chronically confused with Beijing’s in secondary accounts, not least because two names are near-homophones of Beijing defendants. On 15 June 1989, the Shanghai Intermediate People’s Court sentenced three men to death for setting fire to a train at Guangxing Road on 6 June, after that train had killed at least six demonstrators. The charge rested on Article 110 of the 1979 Criminal Law, sabotaging means of transport or equipment. The three were Xu Guoming — or Xu Guomin, Amnesty’s form; the variant is unresolved and no Chinese characters were retrieved — Bian Hanwu and Yan Xuerong. Bian Hanwu is not Ban Huijie, and neither is Wang Hanwu of Beijing: three different people.

According to the government’s reply transmitted in the UN report, the three appealed, and on 20 June the Shanghai Higher People’s Court rejected their appeals and confirmed the original judgment. Precision matters here, because 20 June is the date most often mis-stated in the literature. It is an appeal-rejection date. The UN record says nothing about a separate death-approval step for Shanghai, and nothing in it converts 20 June into an approval or execution date. The three were executed on 21 June — Amnesty gives that date, and AP’s 22 June report places the Beijing executions “a day after three men were executed in Shanghai”. The June 22 date appearing for Shanghai in the US State Department’s country report is a later-compilation error, apparently a report date mistaken for the event; and a circulating chronology heading, “20 June: Shanghai executes 3”, confuses the appeal date with the execution. Both errors should be retired wherever they appear.

The Chengdu two

Chengdu’s case is later and smaller, and must be kept in its own place. On 1 July 1989, Wang Guiyuan and Zhou Xiangcheng were sentenced to death by the Chengdu Intermediate People’s Court, at a public rally, for setting fire to vehicles during the rioting in Chengdu on 5 June. The government justified the sentences under Article 106 of the 1979 Criminal Law, arson. The Rapporteur’s cable of 13 July recorded that the cases had been reviewed by the Sichuan Higher People’s Court.

The government’s reply of 14 September 1989, summarised at paragraphs 110 to 113 of the same report, then states that the two were executed “after examination and approval by the Higher People’s Court of Sichuan Province”, invoking the Supreme People’s Court’s 1983 empowerment of provincial higher courts in serious public-security cases. This is the only case-specific death-approval statement in the entire UN record for any of the three cities. Two limits attach to it, both absolute. First, it is a government assertion transmitted to a rapporteur — grade A as a UN document, but an assertion as to the underlying fact; no approval instrument has been produced. Second, it is Chengdu-specific: it cannot be cited to show who approved the Beijing or Shanghai sentences, and the general 1983 delegation it invokes cannot fill that gap, because a general provision is not a case record. Finally, no execution date for the two is established: neither Amnesty nor the UN report gives one, and the State Department’s “two in Chengdu in July” is a compilation, not a date. Nor may these judicial executions be conflated with the killings alleged on Chengdu’s streets on 5 June — reported by Amnesty at at least 300, alleged to the Rapporteur at some 350, denied by the government — a separate matter, outside the judicial record entirely.

A note on Jinan

Seventeen people were executed in Jinan on 21 June 1989, among forty-five tried as criminals who had seriously jeopardised public security; the authorities described them as ordinary offenders, and how far their charges were protest-related is unclear. They are mentioned for one reason only: their number completes the arithmetic of AP’s 27 in two days, corroborating the Beijing–Shanghai date split. They were not part of the Beijing, Shanghai or Chengdu proceedings, and nothing here merges them into those cases.

PART V — Temporal Law and the Instruments That Cannot Decide These Cases

Much of the confusion in writing about the June 1989 cases comes not from missing facts but from misplaced law: instruments that are real, correctly cited, and irrelevant to June 1989 because they did not yet exist, had expired, or govern something else. This Part takes the principal offenders in turn. The rule throughout is the one this paper has applied from the start: a later instrument is never applied to June 1989 without an independently established legal basis, and investigation authority, coercive measures, first-instance jurisdiction, appellate jurisdiction and death-sentence approval are five different questions, not one.

The most consequential of the misplaced instruments is the joint Opinion of the Supreme People’s Court and the Supreme People’s Procuratorate on the specific application of law to criminal cases committed during the counterrevolutionary riot and political turmoil, dated 1 August 1989, 法（研）发〔1989〕19号. The instrument exists: its title, date and number are confirmed in the official 2013 SPC/SPP repeal schedule, item 31, read directly on the Supreme People’s Court’s own website — grade A for that metadata. Two cautions follow. Its issuers were two organs only, the Court and the Procuratorate; versions that add the Ministry of Public Security as a third issuer are wrong. And its full text survives only in a semi-internal compilation and in web reproductions of uneven quality — one English copy renders Criminal Law Article 108 as “08”, a transcription defect, not a different article. Above all, it is dated 1 August 1989. The Beijing trials were over by 17 June and the Beijing and Shanghai executions by 22 June. The Opinion can explain how the courts were directed to handle the prosecutions that followed through the autumn of 1989; it cannot be the legal basis, the classification standard or the sentencing authority for proceedings completed six weeks before it was issued. Any account that cites it for the June cases has committed retroactive application, whether or not it notices.

The 1993 Procuratorate reply, 高检发研字〔1993〕3号, dated 19 June 1993, fails for the same reason and is useful for a different one. It is a research-office reply to a specific inquiry — on its face, about whether military security and procuratorial organs could impose coercive measures on local civilians in a military-enterprise setting — and it answers by reference to the military–civilian rules of 1982 (〔1982〕政联字8号, Article 3) and their 1987 supplement (〔1987〕政联字第14号, Article 1), directing civilian-suspect cases to local organs. As law for 1989 it is worthless: it postdates the cases by four years, and a reply to one inquiry is not a general judicial interpretation in any event. As evidence, however, it does one real service — it cross-corroborates the document numbers and the existence of the 1982 and 1987 instruments, whose signed originals remain unauthenticated. That corroboration is graded B/C, drawn from cross-consistent secondary transcriptions, and corroboration of an identifier is all it is. It does not authenticate the earlier texts, and it does not establish jurisdiction, detention, trial or approval in any 1989 case.

Article 225 of the 1996 Criminal Procedure Law is the most mis-citable provision in this entire family. The 1996 revision — adopted 17 March 1996, effective 1 January 1997 — renumbered death review to Articles 199 to 202 and execution to Articles 210 to 212, and none of that numbering may be used for a 1989 case, which was governed by the 1979 Code. Its supplementary Article 225 provides that army security departments exercise investigation power over crimes inside the army. Investigation is the operative word. Article 225 confers no trial jurisdiction on any military court, says nothing about trying civilians, and, being of 1996, does not govern 1989 in any event. Drafts that cite it — or its predecessors in the 1982 and 1987 政联字 instruments, which likewise allocate investigation, emergency measures and hand-over — to place a civilian defendant before a military court have inflated an investigative rule into a jurisdictional one. The verified direction of the law, in every period for which a text can be checked, is separation: military and civilian defendants are dealt with by their own organs, not merged.

The 1997 re-delegation notice of 26 September 1997 and the reforms of 2006–2007 cut, if anything, the other way. By the 1997 notice the Supreme People’s Court re-delegated death-approval for most categories to the high courts and the PLA Military Court, retaining state-security, market-order and embezzlement and bribery cases — a distinct instrument from the 1983 notice, with which it must not be confused, and one that postdates 1989 entirely. The delegation regime then ended: the NPC Standing Committee’s amendment of the Courts Organic Law, adopted 31 October 2006 and effective 1 January 2007, restored the flat rule that death sentences are approved by the Supreme People’s Court, and the Court’s implementing decision, 法释〔2006〕12号, abolished the authorising notices from the same date. Two consequences follow. The reform confirms that the 1983 delegation was live law in June 1989 — it had to be abolished because it was in force. And it has no retroactive reach: it does not invalidate a 1989 high-court approval, if one occurred, and is no evidence about whether one occurred in any given case. The legislative amendment, not merely the Court’s decision, is the correct citation for the change.

The 2009 joint provisions on military–civilian criminal cases, 《办理军队和地方互涉刑事案件规定》, state the modern peacetime rule plainly: courts-martial cannot try civilians; military organs that take emergency measures against a civilian on a military site must hand the person over within twenty-four hours of ascertaining civilian status; and their Article 22 repealed the 1982 and 1987 rules from 1 August 2009. They are the right citation for the law of 2009 onwards and for nothing earlier. Even their number needs care: 政保〔2009〕1号 is the only corroborated form, while a 〔2009〕11号 form circulates uncorroborated in reproductions — an unverified transcription error until a title page is produced, never to be printed as an interchangeable alternative.

Two shorter warnings complete the Part. The 2010 capital-evidence and illegal-evidence reforms are a legitimate modern lens through which to evaluate a 1989 trial, and nothing more: used as the legal test for what a 1989 court was required to do, they are retroactive application wearing the dress of evaluation. And the UN document E/CN.4/1990/52, sometimes cited as though it were a second UN corroboration of the case record, is a note by the Secretary-General transmitting China’s reply of 1 December 1989 rejecting the underlying resolution, cross-referring to the Special Rapporteur’s report, and annexing Amnesty International’s own submission. It contains no independent fact-finding and no names or dates in its own voice. To cite it alongside the Rapporteur’s report or Amnesty as additional confirmation is to count the same evidence twice.

PART VI — Conclusions and the Limits of This Record

This paper set out to answer three questions: what law governed capital proceedings in June 1989, what the record supports about the three cities’ proceedings, and where the record ends. Its conclusions are numbered, each carrying its evidence grade.

  1. The governing law in June 1989 was the 1979 Criminal Law and the 1979 Criminal Procedure Law, in force since 1 January 1980. Article 43(2) of the Criminal Law required death sentences, other than the Supreme People’s Court’s own, to be reported to the Supreme People’s Court for approval, and Articles 144 to 147 of the Procedure Law — all four in the death-review chapter, Article 147 being the three-judge collegial-panel rule — supplied the review procedure. Citations to the 1996 Code’s renumbered provisions, the August 1989 Opinion, the 1993 reply or the 2009 provisions as the law of June 1989 are anachronistic. [Grade: B+; gazette originals outstanding]

  2. Death-approval in 1989 operated under a live, category-based delegation. Its statutory basis was Article 13 of the Courts Organic Law as amended on 2 September 1983; the Supreme People’s Court’s notice of 7 September 1983 divided cases into two tracks — counterrevolutionary and specified serious economic crimes reviewed by the high court but still approved by the Supreme People’s Court, and homicide, rape, robbery, explosion and other listed crimes seriously endangering public security and social order delegated for approval to the provincial-level high courts and the PLA Military Court. Its abolition from 1 January 2007 confirms it was in force in 1989. A discrepancy is preserved, not resolved: amended Article 13 names the provincial high courts; the notice’s transcription also names the PLA Military Court. [Grade: A for identity, date and repeal via the 2006 decision; B for the text]

  3. The forum, in every case the record describes, was an ordinary people’s court — intermediate courts at first instance, high courts on appeal. Nothing checked places a civilian defendant in these cases before a military court, and no instrument of the period, correctly read, confers military trial jurisdiction over civilians: the military–civilian instruments allocate investigation, emergency measures and hand-over; the 1983 notices fix ordinary court level only. [Grade: B+]

  4. On appeals, the record supports an assertion, not a ruling. The government told the United Nations that seven of the eight Beijing defendants appealed, were rejected and the judgment confirmed, and that the Shanghai three were rejected on 20 June 1989. No appeal decision, for any defendant in any city, has been produced. Shanghai’s 20 June is an appeal date only; any account printing it as an approval or execution date is in error. [Grade: A as a UN document; B+ as fact]

  5. For Beijing and Shanghai the executions can be dated to the preponderance standard only. Seven in Beijing on 22 June 1989, best-supported but disputed; three in Shanghai on 21 June, preponderant. For Chengdu, no execution date is established. [Grade: B+; NOT authenticated for any city]

  6. On individual death approval, the record answers for one city only, and only by assertion. The government’s reply attributes the Chengdu approvals to the Sichuan Higher People’s Court, invoking the 1983 empowerment. For Beijing and Shanghai, no source checked states who approved the sentences. The 1983 delegation narrows the possibilities by category; it is never used here to identify the approving authority in a named case. [Grade: Chengdu — A as a UN document, assertion as fact; Beijing and Shanghai — BLOCKED]

  7. Wang Lianxi’s case is a standing warning against compilation drift. Sentenced on 17 June 1989, not executed, released in August 2007 after eight reductions — yet the mechanism (revised to life; suspended death; “originally life”), the stated reason, and even the recorded gender all conflict across reputable compilations. HRIC’s additional ninth name, Wang Mingshu, is uncorroborated. None of this can be tidied away without a primary record. [Grade: not-executed and release B+; the rest C]

  8. This opinion reaches no holding on the legality of any individual conviction, sentence or execution. That is the only conclusion the grades permit: the law can be stated, the proceedings can be recorded at the level of their evidence, and the approval and execution record that a holding would require does not, at present, exist.

The archival agenda that follows is specific. First, the UN Secretariat files in Geneva: paragraph 16 of the Rapporteur’s report records that the full texts of his cables and of the government’s replies were held there — summaries of documents that exist. Second, the original correspondence in the ILO’s Case 1500 file — the government communications of 11 October 1990, 20 May and 18 October 1991 and 29 January 1992 are dated and retrievable as a sequence; China’s information to the ILO is known only as reproduced by others. Third, the gazette and compilation originals: the signed 1983 delegation notice or a facsimile, the 1982 and 1987 military–civilian instruments, and the 1 August 1989 Opinion in its Judicial Handbook locus — any one would raise a B-grade transcription to an authenticated text. Fourth — and it would change everything above — a single case file: one judgment, one appeal ruling, one approval instrument or one execution return, for one named defendant, in any of the three cities. Until that fourth item exists, the honest form is the one adopted here: the law as precisely as the sources allow, the proceedings at the grade of their evidence, the central documentary silence stated, not filled.

Sources

  • UN Special Rapporteur (Wako), Report on summary or arbitrary executions, E/CN.4/1990/22, 23 January 1990 — https://documents.un.org/doc/undoc/gen/g90/101/26/pdf/g9010126.pdf (case material at ¶¶83–113; government replies of 3 July and 14 September 1989 at ¶¶100–113).
  • UN Secretary-General, Note under Sub-Commission resolution 1989/5, E/CN.4/1990/52, 30 January 1990 (UN ODS G9010303) — transmits China’s reply of 1 December 1989 and Amnesty International’s submission; no independent findings.
  • Supreme People’s Court / Supreme People’s Procuratorate, Decision on repealing judicial interpretations issued 1980-01-01–1997-06-30, issued 4 January 2013, effective 18 January 2013 (44-item schedule; items 12, 14, 28, 31) — https://www.court.gov.cn/fabu/xiangqing/5029.html — cite by full title, not by bare document number.
  • Supreme People’s Court official catalogue (2010 repeal list, item 26, confirming the 16 August 1983 notice, 〔83〕法研字第15号) — https://www.court.gov.cn/zixun/xiangqing/1950.html
  • Supreme People’s Court, Decision on unified exercise of death-approval power, 法释〔2006〕12号, effective 1 January 2007, with annex (1983-09-07 and 1997-09-26 notices) — https://www.court.gov.cn/zixun/xiangqing/1077.html; NPCSC Courts Organic Law amendment of 31 October 2006, official English text — english.court.gov.cn.
  • Amnesty International, Preliminary Findings on Killings of Unarmed Civilians, Arbitrary Arrests and Summary Executions Since 3 June 1989, AI Index ASA 17/60/89, 14 August 1989, §7 (Beijing eight; Chengdu two); and ASA 17/09/90 (Shanghai three).
  • HRW / Asia Watch, Chinese Workers Receive Harsh Sentences, 13 March 1991, Appendix I (China’s information to the ILO, reproduced) — used for the ILO material, with its annotations treated as B-grade and its June 21 Beijing date, “Beijing Supreme People’s Court” and “June 10, 1990” errors expressly not followed.
  • HRIC, in-custody / executed lists, 2004 — individual entries used with the conflicts and the Wang Mingshu anomaly recorded in Part IV.
  • Dui Hua Foundation, Dialogue, Issue 33 — Wang Lianxi’s August 2007 release, on information obtained through Chinese-government inquiries.
  • 1979 Criminal Law and 1979 Criminal Procedure Law — official-lineage reproductions, Institute of Law, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CSSN), http://iolaw.cssn.cn/ywb/ywflfg/201512/t20151218_4637802.shtml; 1996 Criminal Procedure Law — npc.gov.cn and english.court.gov.cn.
  • People’s Daily, 18 June 1989, p.1 (Xinhua dispatch of 17 June 1989) — digitised transcription; the eight Beijing defendants’ names in Chinese characters.

Other Language Editions

This paper is also available in Simplified Chinese （简体中文）, Traditional Chinese （繁體中文）, French, German and Spanish.

FCM Legal Opinion — Law, Jurisdiction and Capital Punishment in the June 1989 Crackdown · v1.0 · 2026-10-18