Hao Hao ReportThe best China news and blog posts

This businessman was given a lethal injection in a van and had his ashes delivered to his wife ....

The country that executed more than four times as many convicts as the rest of the world combined last year is slowly phasing out public executions by firing squad in favor of lethal injections. Unlike the United States and Singapore, the only two other countries where death is administered by injection, China metes out capital punishment from specially equipped "death vans" that shuttle from town to town.

via The Peking Duck: "This is, quite simply, the scariest article yet about the poisonous products being exported from China to your supermarket shelves. It's about the willful efforts of Chinese companies to block the FDA's frantic attempts to trace the source of the poison and cut it off. You have to read it to believe it. No wonder it's featured as the No. 1 leading story in today's Sunday Times. It's a story of dogged detective work, cover-ups, corruption and death.

A fantastic article about Hu Jie, a Chinese documentary filmmaker, and his quest to bring to light the story of Lin Zhao - a defiant woman who was arrested and eventually executed during Mao's Anti-Rightest Campaign of the late 50s, and who used her own blood to continue writing her critical analysis of the times from prison. In Hu's own words - the story shows how far China has come.

“He was already dead by the time that I arrived,” a Chinese friend explained to me. “I rode my bicycle as fast as I could to the countryside to see the execution but in the end, I only heard the gun shot.” My friend was recounting to me the story from her hometown of a young man who had been caught stealing 400 RMB from a wealthy lady . He had been quickly handed over to the police and sentenced to death.

One hundred years ago Friday, a crime was committed behind the imposing oxblood-red walls of Beijing's Forbidden City. It was the ultimate crime: the murder of an emperor. But it remained a rumor or had been covered up. Until now. He was just 38 years old at the time of his death. He had been the victim of a palace coup following political differences with his aunt, the Empress Dowager Cixi.

A police officer with the Dalian Railroad Department fired five shots to kill a family of three who had showed up to demand compensation. The local government and publicity department censored all news. All information on websites were deleted and the media were not allowed to cover the story. The world still do not know what will happen to police officer Su Kai who fired the shots as well as the results of the police investigation.

On Tuesday evening, Liu Xiaoyuan, who has acted as a lawyer for family of Yang Jia, announced on his blog that Yang will be executed within a week. Yang Jia’s mother told him that around 7pm, she was visited two officials from the Shanghai Higher People’s Court who notified her that the Supreme People’s Court had approved the death sentence for her son.

Disgraced Vice-Admiral Wang Shouye, who was sentenced to death on corruption charges last April has had his sentence commuted to life imprisonment for spilling the beans on a number of his co-corrupters - including former Party chief Jiang Zemin.

Having accepted about 160 million yuan in bribes, the biggest upset in Wang's confessions has given current Party chief, Hu Jintao, some welcomed ammo against his predecessor.