Li Yunlong does not have the air of someone carrying out an impossible mission, yet this 51-year-old lawyer is committed to an objective that many here consider utopian.

In a country that executes more people that the rest of the world put together and where many executions are carried out in public, Li campaigns against the arbitrary and extensive use of death penalty.

''When I first spoke against it in the 1980s, people thought I was mad,'' confesses Li, a defence lawyer and professor at the Legal Institute of the Academy of Social Sciences in central Jiangxi province. ''Twenty years later, opinion has shifted and now even Chinese media write about me.''

What makes Li even more exceptional is his success in launching appeals against death sentences, and winning rare reprieves in many of the cases. The lawyer says that out of 16 clients on death row he has taken on, 12 won reprieves even though all of them were guilty of murder.

''Many suspect I have used money or gifts to save the lives of convicted criminals but I did it only by relying on the law,'' Li says in an interview during a visit to Beijing.

Country bumpkin

In the case of Xia Liangui, a peasant boy from Mugao village in Jiangxi province, Li succeeded in proving that the boy was underage and thus could not be executed. Xia, whom the lawyer fondly calls '' the country bumpkin'', had been condemned to death for raping and strangling his girlfriend.

''His father traveled all night to come and see me,'' recalls the lawyer of the case which took place in 1998. ''All he could offer was a basket of fresh eggs and I accepted that as payment.''

At the appeal, Li argued that the boy had been convicted wrongly as the court had taken his age from Xia's student card. ''I presented his residence card which showed that at the time of the crime Xia was under 18 years old. The residence card is the only legal document which counts.''

As a result, Xia won a reprieve and was sent to a prison for minors. After two years, his sentence was reduced from life imprisonment to 18 years.

Although China has never made public any figures on executions it carries out, China watchers believe Li's last-minute successful appeals are exceptions in a grim overall picture of thousands of cases where the death penalty is actually implemented.

Successful appeals

''It is extremely rare to get information about successful appeals. I've almost never heard of any appeals succeeding,'' says Arlette Laduguie, a senior researcher on China at Amnesty International's London headquarters.

According to Amnesty, which compiles annual lists of reports of death sentences, China carried out 4,000 executions in 2001, amid reports of 2,500 death penalty sentences.

''We believe the real figures are higher,'' says Laduguie. '' There is speculation they are as high as 50,000 a year but though it varies from year to year, it is probably around 10,000.''

Human rights activists charge that the toll rises when authorities launch their Yan Da or 'Strike Hard' campaigns, initiated by President Jiang Zemin in the mid-1990s to combat both rising crime and growing corruption.

Although a Communist Party member for 30 years, Li dares to disagree in public with the use of the death penalty as a chief instrument in the 'Strike Hard' campaigns.

''From a legal point of view, Yan Da is unacceptable,'' he says. '' The purpose of the legal system is not to mete out harsh sentences, it is to make punishments timely, and without delays.''

To meet quotas

During these anti-crime crackdowns, the country's legal institutions are required to speed up normal legal procedures in order to meet quotas for the number of solved crimes. Death sentences are carried out swiftly by a bullet to the back of the head and many times in front of huge audiences in public places like stadiums.

''The death penalty is not a panacea for crimes,'' says Li. who has been campaigning against its arbitrary use for 18 years and has written four books on the subject. ''Many people were executed during these 'Strike Hard' campaigns, but China's crime and corruption are growing.''

Li Yunlong is credited with making an impact on the revised criminal code in 1997, which narrowed the scope of economic crimes in China punishable by death. According to the criminal code of 1979, there were 430 crimes altogether, of which 73 can be punished by death.

Of these, 28 were for economic crimes and in the 1980s, some Chinese were executed for the theft of goods worth 30,000 yuan (US$3,614).

''Prisoners asked me: how can I be killed just for 30,000 yuan?'' the defence lawyer recalls, as in the case of a boy who had stolen sticks of China's famous Red Pagoda cigarettes from a shop. ''Even the shopkeeper came to plead for the boy's life, but in the end I could do nothing,'' Li says.

Made an impact

Through his books and articles however, Li believes that he has somehow made an impact on the use of capital punishment in China.

For economic crimes, the state has now raised the threshold for the application of the death penalty to 500,000 yuan (US$60,000) and it is now rarely applied to cases that do not involve three or four million yuan (US$361,000 to US$481,000).

Are conditions ripe for abolition of death penalty in China? Even campaigners like Professor Li think China has a long way to go before the authorities and the public cease to see the death penalty as a deterrent for crimes.

''When people say 'what does it matter if a few die, there are over a billion of us', I say 'what about India, they only execute five or six people a year and there are nearly one billion of them','' Li argues. — IPS