Thousands of spectators filled a stadium in China to watch 10 suspects be sentenced to death for crimes ranging from drug-dealing to homicide before they were taken away to be executed at the weekend.

An online video of the rare public trial, held in southern Guangdong province on Saturday, showed the handcuffed suspects paraded around a track by uniformed police officers as onlookers watched from the sidelines.

The convicts also stood on a podium as their sentences were read over loudspeakers, while officials sat on a stage flanked by military guards.

Rights groups say China executes more people than any other country, but Beijing does not give figures on the death penalty, regarding the statistics as state secrets.

A public announcement last week from Lufeng City People's Court had invited citizens to sit in on the "open-air stadium trial", as it was dubbed by the state-run Global Times.

Beijing News, which circulated the trial video along with several other Chinese media outlets, criticised the court for making a spectacle of the sentences.

Ten of 12 suspects were handed the death penalty and taken away for immediate execution while curious locals, including many young people in school uniform, looked on.

"Places may hold public trials in order to intimidate criminals and raise society's sense of security, but they should not violate the basic humanity of the law," a Beijing News commentary said Monday.

The column noted that "from a legal standpoint, the death penalty should not be enacted immediately after the final ruling... the local court deliberately put together this scene for dramatic effect."

According to Global Times, an open-air trial for drug trafficking was also held in Lufeng in 2015, with 10,000 people in the audience.

The city is one of the country's largest producers of methamphetamine.

China police detain artist who documented migrant evictions
Beijing (AFP) Dec 18, 2017 - Beijing-based artist Hua Yong has been released on bail after being detained for his work documenting the mass eviction of migrant workers from the Chinese capital, his friends said on Twitter Monday.

The artist had been "criminally detained on suspicion of 'gathering a crowd to disrupt traffic'", according to a tweet from his friend Li Huaping that included a photo of the artist with his three-year-old daughter and friends.

Hua arrived in the southwestern city of Chengdu from Beijing Monday evening, it said, adding that he had been released on bail and was heading to celebrate his daughter's birthday.

Tweets earlier in the day expressed concern at the artist's disappearance over the weekend.

In the weeks before his detention, Hua had uploaded dozens of videos on YouTube and Chinese social media platform WeChat documenting the destruction of migrant neighbourhoods on the outskirts of Beijing.

He set up the YouTube account only two weeks ago, but his videos have been viewed tens of thousands of times since then and some have been translated by others into English.

Hua was taken from a friend's home in the northern city of Tianjin in the early hours of Saturday after fleeing Beijing to evade police, friends told AFP earlier.

"Police grabbed him. Didn't you know? Nobody is able to contact him," one of them said Monday morning on condition of anonymity.

The Tianjin public security bureau could not be reached for comment.

- 'Ruined in an instant' -

Hua's videos, usually shot with a selfie stick, brought viewers into recently demolished migrant neighbourhoods and recorded his conversations with displaced low-income workers.

In one he walks between heaps of rubble, gesturing around him and saying, "The sky is very blue today. But look at what's behind me, all ruined in an instant."

On Friday night Hua posted several videos on his Twitter account entitled, "They're here". In the videos he said police were at the door and he would soon have to leave with them.

"Daddy is using these last minutes to sing you a song, 'Happy birthday to you' ... Daddy wants our country to be better; It should be just, fair, free and democratic with free speech," Hua said, addressing his daughter.

Hundreds of millions of migrants who moved from the countryside to the cities fuelled China's dramatic economic boom of recent decades.

But some are no longer welcome in overcrowded Beijing, which seeks to cap its population at 23 million by 2020 and demolish 40 million square metres of illegal structures -- mostly shops and homes for migrants -- by the end of the year.

Authorities argue that they need to clear dangerous buildings after a fire killed 19 people last month. A blaze in another migrant area killed five people last week.

Fire safety is a major problem in the city's cheap migrant housing, which often has jerry-rigged electrical wiring and an absence of emergency exits.

But the brutal efficiency of the demolitions and mass evictions has provoked an unusual public outcry that has put officials on edge.

Amnesty International China researcher Patrick Poon said authorities are "very concerned" that discussions about the topic will harm China's image.

President Xi Jinping has led a sweeping crackdown on civil society since taking power in 2012, targeting everyone from human rights lawyers to celebrity gossip bloggers.

In recent years activists have been jailed on charges such as "picking quarrels and provoking trouble", "subversion of state power" and defamation for spreading "false rumours" online.

"Ironically, by targeting Hua Yong, it further hurts China's image when even documenting what happened could be justified as a crime," Poon told AFP.

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Bustling Beijing migrant area turns into ghost town
Beijing (AFP) Dec 15, 2017
The narrow alleyways of the Beijing migrant neighbourhood were once crammed with men cooking on outdoor stoves, women hanging clothes to dry and young children playing games. Now dead leaves litter the pavement as a bitterly cold wind blows through empty lanes after authorities swept through the area in a controversial city-wide eviction campaign. It is one of the myriad migrant neighbou ... read more

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