热点新闻事件：
* 12月30日上午10点左右，英国毒贩阿克毛在中国被依法执行死刑。
确凿犯罪事实：
* 阿克毛2007年由新疆乌鲁木齐机场入境时，被发现携带价值25万英镑，4030克巨量的海洛因。
国内外的反应：
* 中国政府官方的态度：中国外交部发言人姜瑜 ---- 英国公民阿克毛在中国贩毒被判处死刑是一起独立的刑事案件，中国的司法机关一直是严格按照中国的法律和法律程序独立加以处理的。中国的司法独立性不容外来干预，任何人都无权对中国的司法主权说三道四。打击毒品犯罪是全世界人民的共同心声，我们对英方无端地指责表示强烈的不满和坚决的反对，我们敦促英方纠正错误，避免给双边关系造成损害。
* 英国首相和媒体的表态：首相布朗 ---- 我对处决阿克毛一事表示最强烈的谴责，并且对我们屡次请求宽大处理却未被采纳感到震惊和失望。英国媒体 ---- 以“英国废除死刑”为由无端指责中国政府的作为。
* 算有点良知的英国人表态：George Walden 2009年12月30在泰晤士报(TIMES)发表的文章：大标题 ---- Before preaching, remember the opium wars;小标题 ---- Britain is in a poor position to condemn the execution of Akmal Shaikh unless it accepts its history of drug dealing to China。(文末有该篇文章的全文)
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雅思备考话题准备：
* 死刑：capital punishment
* 训练机经：Can capital punishment ever be justified?
* 观点把握：首先，也是前提条件，死刑与否要做到有法可依，取决于一个国家实行死刑的司法制度与否，任何人都没有权利干涉一国的司法独立。其次，实行死刑的理由有(胡伟支持的观点)：死刑判罚是对受害者及其家属的最大安慰，如果死刑犯没有得到罪有应得的最严厉惩罚，这是对受害者及其家属的最大伤害;死刑判罚对社会上其它犯罪有震慑作用，如果取消死刑的话，那么许多潜在的罪犯就有可能肆无忌惮地做出许多危害民众利益与人身安全、国家利益与安全、社会安定团结等的犯罪行为。再次，反对实行死刑的理由有(西方人的观点)：死刑只是对罪犯的一种惩罚，并不能将犯罪行为中受害者的生命或损失或伤害挽回;无论一个人犯多大的错误，任何人都无权剥夺其生存的权利。
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泰晤士报文章阅读： (From the Times December 30, 2009)
* Before preaching, remember the opium wars
Britain is in a poor position to condemn the execution of Akmal Shaikh unless it accepts its history of drug dealing to China
* Collecting calligraphy in China during the Cultural Revolution, I found some by Commissioner Lin Zexu, governor of Canton in the early 19th century when Britain and others were booting the country about.
A cultivated man with a bold and vigorous script, he remains a hero to the Chinese to this day, one of the few incorruptible civil servants in a period when his country was in a state of political dissolution and moral meltdown, not least through the soaring consumption of opium.
After tipping our opium stocks in Canton into the Pearl River (that we pushed drugs in China partly to pay for imports of their tea gives this a nice Bostonian touch) the commissioner went straight to the source of the problem.
A letter he sent to Queen Victoria read: “It is said that the smoking of opium is forbidden in your country, the proof that you are clearly aware of its harm. Since you do not permit opium to harm your own country you should not allow it to be passed on to other countries, certainly not to the Central States [China].
“Of all the products that the Central States exports ... there is not a single item that is not beneficial to the people ... Has any article from the Central States done any harm to foreign countries?”
Certainly not the tea, silk and porcelain that Her Majesty consumed in some quantities. Such a pity our moralising Queen does not appear to have seen the letter.
It wasn’t just the lower classes that Lin was worried about: opium helped to stupefy the minds and to dissipate the energies of an already decadent elite, weakening China further in the face of the foreign challenge. So the merciless treatment of Akmal Shaikh, the British citizen executed yesterday for smuggling 4kg of heroin, is rather more than another instance of China’s lack of delicate feeling towards criminals, home- grown or foreign.
Few in China have forgotten the past. A statement issued by the Chinese Embassy yesterday said that the “strong resentment” felt by the Chinese public against drug traffickers was the product of “the bitter memory of history”. Paranoid as it seems, many a Chinese official still believes that, after ransacking the country in the imperialist age, the West today will stoop to anything to impede it from finally taking its rightful place as a — or, as they hope, the — global power.
Nonetheless, my hunch is that Shaikh might have been reprieved if we had kept the pressure intense but out of sight. Democracies don’t work that way, however, so China found itself on the spot over a subject where historical memories could hardly be more poisoned, or more vivid.
What should we do now? For the people who seriously suggested that we station a nuclear submarine off Hong Kong to keep British the colony that we acquired through the Opium Wars, there’s no problem. When it comes to post-imperialist posturing our latter-day Palmerstons have a thing about China and the Chinese, just as the Victorians did:
John Chinaman a rogue is born The laws of truth he holds in scorn About as great a brute as can Encumber the Earth is John Chinaman.
So wrote Punch at about the time we were foisting drugs on the Chinese brutes, and sending gunboats if they resisted.
What we should do is make our disgust known vigorously, bilaterally and in international forums, while keeping our part in China’s history in mind, on the assumption that we want to understand a power that already touches all our lives, and will affect them more. We should also keep a keen eye on China’s overall direction — of which the fate of a heroin mule is not necessarily a symbol.
“Of course we want to build socialist democracy,” the regime’s spiritual guru, Deng Xiaoping, said during the Tiananmen uprising. “But we can’t possibly do it in a hurry, and still less do we want that Western-style stuff.”
Since then, human rights in China have improved vastly from a low base. In recent years the gruesome toll of executions has diminished: each sentence must be confirmed by the Supreme Court and lethal injections are replacing firing squads (a sign of sensitivity to international opinion, believe it or not).
Although it is hard to verify the truth, the execution of what sounds like a mentally distressed person is another reminder that China can be a harsh society, in the throes of evolution. But “nothing can be done in a hurry”, and an economic hurricane has slowed reform. A subterranean struggle is permanently under way about the perils of liberalisation, which expose the young to “that Western-style stuff” — pornography, drugs and Aids.
The struggle seems to have sharpened, so we get the vicious 11-year sentence passed on Liu Xiaobo, a particularly impressive dissident, last week and the execution of Shaikh. Some will say that this signals a general onslaught on human rights, but I doubt it.
You cannot give the leeway that the Chinese have to the free exchange of goods and services without a freer exchange of ideas and information. Unless the Chinese want to close their doors and their markets, they are stuck with it. Witness the number of visitors to China, the huge growth of Chinese tourism abroad, and that there are now more internet users in China than anywhere else. Of course there is censorship, and an element of “two steps forward and one step back”, but this does not preclude more steps forward.
The issue for us is not so much if a British citizen deserves to be executed for his part in heroin smuggling: sovereign states have that right, and China is not alone in claiming it. It is that if we wish to influence China on capital punishment, the treatment of mentally unstable people or anything else, a little historical humility may be in order.
Not that modern generations should flagellate themselves for the misdemeanours of their forebears every time a post-colonial country behaves brutally, but while we fulminate against China, we could spare a little moral opprobrium for the people who ruin young Chinese lives by running drugs.
Commissioner Lin’s magnificent admonition received no reply from the British. At the time we could afford to ignore China’s complaints. The Chinese have now given their reply to us. As well as condemning the execution, we should think about why they did it, and how we can best persuade them from doing it again.
（编辑：Lily）
