China executes one or two foreigners every year -- nearly all for drug offences, according to John Kamm, director of the US-based Dui Hua Foundation rights group. Amnesty said "thousands of executions [are] believed to have been carried out" in the country last year.

Shrugging off international criticism, China has stood firm on the death sentence of the Canadian Robert Lloyd Schellenberg, after a highly politicalized abrupt retrial, while Chinese authorities detained two other Canadian citizens -- a former diplomat and a business consultant -- on suspicion of espionage, sparking a row with both Ottawa and the US.

The other two Canadians, Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor, currently held in undisclosed locations are not yet charged but deprived of sleep and interrogated daily for more than a month now, according to Canadian diplomats.

Diplomatic Row over Huawei Arrest

The punishment was handed down amid a clash between Ottawa and Beijing over Canada's arrest of a top executive from telecom giant Huawei last month on a US extradition request related to Iran sanctions violations.

There has been outrage in China as well, in both English- and Chinese-language statements protesting against the "white supremacy" of the west.

"Death-threat diplomacy" is what Donald Clarke, a professor of law at George Washington University Law School and an expert on the Chinese legal system, called it on his blog. 

Clarke said Beijing's actions against the three Canadians, underlined by Schellenberg's sentence, reinforce the message that "China views the holding of human hostages as an acceptable way to conduct diplomacy."

The detention of the Canadians has served a purpose, even though Beijing knows full well that Canadian authorities cannot be strong armed into intervening in an independent judiciary to free Meng Wanzhou, the Chief Financial Officer of tech giant Huawei and daughter of its founder Ren Zhengfei.

Analysts say that the arrest of Ms. Meng was to announce Washington's intent to arrest China's hi-tech Made-in-China 2025 programme, while Mr.Schellenberg's sentencing appears to be feeding into the high-intensity "trade war" between Beijing and Washington, masking the broader US goal of undermining China's rise in recent years.

In a move observers see as retaliation over the Huawei case, William Nee, a researcher on China at Amnesty International, told AFP that "Most likely, China wants to send a tough message to Canada."

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Monday expressed "extreme concern". Trudeau said, "it is of extreme concern to us as a government, as it should be to all our international friends and allies, that China has chosen to begin to arbitrarily apply the death penalty".

China's foreign ministry has vehemently denied that the case was politicized and responded by saying Canada should respect China's sovereignty and was "strongly dissatisfied" with Mr. Trudeau's remarks.

His spokesperson said Trudeau was "making himself a laughing stock with specious statements."

"It's a clear demonstration of what I call the New China," said former Canadian ambassador Guy Saint-Jacques, who spent four years in Beijing. He said this is a China that is "a lot more assertive and aggressive that acts in many ways as a bully."

Observers say that the 36 year old Canadian have become a bargaining chip in a diplomatic stand-off between China and the United States.

Death Penalty in China

Due to tightly controlled media in Communist China and inaccessibility to official number of executions that occur within the death penalty system, researchers mostly rely on data compiled by NGOs such as Amnesty International, which is the most cited source of reports regarding rates of execution statistics while the official death sentences reported are only a fraction of the actual figures.

The exact numbers of people executed is classified as a state secret; at times death penalty cases are made public by the judiciary, especially in certain high-profile cases. Other media outlets such as Internet message boards have become sources for confirming death penalty cases usually after a sentence has been carried out.

Moreover, it is difficult to estimate the number of people under sentence of death because not many prisoners linger on death row; they are either executed immediately or given a suspended two-year sentence after which they are either executed or have their sentence commuted.

Lethal injection and shooting are the only methods authorized by China's Criminal Procedure Law of 1996, though shooting executions were discontinued in 2010 per a People's Supreme Court ruling of February 2009 which had held lethal injections as a more humane form of execution while shooting at the back of the head causes significant disfigurement.

At least one source reports that persons convicted of economic or political crimes are more likely to be executed by lethal injection than persons convicted of general crimes, who may be more likely to be shot; however, that same source also indicates that lethal injection in a prison facility is a less expensive form of execution and was initially implemented in areas having high crime-rate where it would be more likely that offenders were being executed for general crimes.

A survey conducted in 2008 by the Max Planck Institute showed that 60 percent of survey respondents in Beijing, Hubei, and Guangdong supported the death penalty giving us a grim reminder that capital punishment in China is an age old practice and it certainly contributes to the legitimacy of the Communist Party, as the regime is, therefore, satisfying public sentiment and indignation when corrupt officials are executed.

In the past, the public heard few dissenting opinions towards the death penalty; however, reducing or abolishing the use of the death penalty has become a topic of open discussion over the recent years.

The current trend shows that the Chinese government is seeking to reduce its use of capital punishment. According to deathpenaltyworldwide.org, the number of annual executions in China fell from around 6,500 in 2007 to roughly 1,000 in 2017 as reforms are made to increase transparency and fairness of the appealing system.

Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch both annually publish reports calling for the abolishment of the death penalty globally as voices against the death penalty are heard increasingly louder in China as well.

Amnesty opposes the death penalty in all cases without exception regardless of the nature or circumstances of the crime; guilt, innocence or other characteristics of the individual; or the method used by the state to carry out the execution.

The national mentality of China has been shaped over thousands of years and won't radically change in the blink of an eye. Let's give China time to understand that the value of human life is higher than the interests of the state.