The middle-aged man with the bookish face looked more like an academic than a killer. It was hard to believe that this soft spoken, bespectacled teacher had been sentenced to death for murder.
I met Wang Ting in Tianjin Municipal Prison, two hours north of Beijing, last Wednesday morning. He was reluctant to go into the details of his crime, apart from saying he killed a man.
Wang is not your normal death row prisoner, however. He, and the other prisoners in Tianjin who have been sentenced to death have been offered a reprieve from the firing squad. The deal is if they remain on good behaviour for a period of two years, they can apply to the courts to have their sentence reduced to a life prison term.
Wang, a college graduate, teaches other inmates in the prison school for two hours every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Married with one child he is allowed a half-hour visit from his family every month.
In time, if the prison authorities feel he is genuinely reforming, his family will be able to come on special occasions to stay in a special unit reserved for overnight visits.
In a prison cell nearby, Liu Feng is also working on avoiding the execution yard. He was given the death sentence for murdering his wife. He looks a lot tougher than Wang.
The prison director, Chen Ruijun, refuses to say how many prisoners in total are being held in this modern jail which opened in 1999. That is a "secret", he says.
However, he does confirm that 14 per cent of inmates here have been sentenced to death for various serious crimes. This is one of 10 jails in Tianjin, a city with a population of 10 million, and is held up as a reforming prison and a model for others in China.
The question of how many Chinese criminals are executed in China every year is another big "secret". The authorities have never divulged the true figure. But from time to time, in an effort to send a strong warning to the public, it releases details of executions through official media.
The State news agency, Xinhua, published some startling statistics over the weekend. It revealed that last Friday, a total of 28 people were executed across China as part of a "strike hard" campaign aimed at curbing rising violent and organised crime.
China's crime rate reached a peak last year, with police investigations rising by 50 per cent. There was a seven-fold increase in gang-related crimes, many involving senior communist Party and government officials.
Friday's executions were spread all over the country. In Beijing 16 people were executed for crimes ranging from robbery, murder and rape.
Four men were put to death in Chengdu, the capital of the south-western province of Sichuan, for killing between seven and 10 people each in a spate of robberies along highways and from local shops.
In Luoyang city in the central province of Henan, another four were executed for murdering and robbing up to five people each, using sleeping pills.
Four more were put to death in Huizhou city in the southern Guangdong province for robbing and killing nine taxidrivers in the last year.
Earlier last week, according to Xinhua, another 28 people were executed in Guangdong for violent crimes and drug dealing after a public sentencing in a sports stadium attended by 30,000 people.
Under the "strike hard" campaign the death penalty is being meted out for crimes that may otherwise have resulted in long prison sentences rather than death.
China executes more people every year than the rest of the world combined. According to Amnesty International, 1,263 people were put to death in 1999. Between 1990 and 1999 there were 27,599 confirmed death sentences and 18,194 executions in China. But these figures are only the number of executions confirmed by the authorities. The true tally is thought to be much higher.
Significantly, the death penalty is the one issue on which the US does not criticise China on human rights grounds.
Executions in China are usually carried out with a single bullet to the back of the head. All major cities have execution grounds.
Death by injection is being experimented with in some provinces. In the majority of cases, executions are carried out immediately after the court hands down the sentence.
There are almost 70 crimes for which the death sentence can be given. People are executed for murder, kidnapping, tax dodging, copyright offences, antiques theft, and peddling drugs.
You can even be executed for publishing pornographic books. Last year four people were sentenced to death for faking tax receipts.
Back in Tianjin jail, Wang Ting and Liu Feng are determined they will avoid the executioners bullet. "I feel I am lucky to have been given a second chance," Wang says.
However, the widespread use of the death penalty excites little comment among most Chinese. In a country where the poor are sick of watching high-ranking officials line their pockets through corruption, executions for white-collar crime are popular.