"Whether a country chooses to keep the death penalty should be decided with reference to its own national circumstances," said Prof. Liu.

Nonetheless, China has made great changes concerning capital punishment in recent years.

In June, the Supreme People's Court of China issued regulations banning the use of evidences obtained through torture and threats in criminal courts.

In January 2007, the supreme court took back the power of reviewing all death penalty decisions made by lower courts after province-level higher courts drew fire amid reports on miscarriage of justice.

In the meantime, lethal injections were also replacing the traditional method of execution by gunshot, which had been the only lawful execution method until 1996, when the amended Criminal Procedural Law added lethal injection as an alternative.

In another step forward, the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress, or the country's top legislature, gathered last week in Beijing, deliberating proposals to drop death penalties for 13 non-violent economic crimes.

There will be several readings before the proposals become amendments to the Criminal Law. If consensus is reached, 19 percent of the current 68 offences punishable by death penalty would be scrapped.

"This is a landmark on our way to restricting capital punishment sentences until abolishing them for good," said associate professor Yuan of the Beijing Normal University.

While acknowledging the eighth amendments to the Criminal Law as major efforts in bringing down the number of executions in China, some experts believe that a fair justice in criminal procedures is as important as cutting down death numbers.

Prof. Jerome Cohen, of the New York University School of Law, said in a telephone interview with Xinhua, "In every country, most people like capital punishment unless it happens to them."

He said it's important "to improve the procedures for trying and convicting these people, so that you have a fairer and more accurate process, and that is expected to reduce the number of people executed."

"You have to improve the law, and then you have to really improve the implementation," said Cohen, a long-time researcher on China laws.