The Bundesbank, Germany's central bank, indicated last weekend that it will limit its cooperation with China on the subject of currency counterfeiting because China is a country that "imposes the death penalty for money forgery." One day before that, German media reported that a Chinese person had been sentenced to death for producing counterfeit money, and the Bundesbank was supporting China in this regard.

China is not the only country with which the Bundesbank wants to seriously reconsider its cooperation. The Bundesbank also limited its cooperation with Vietnam and shelved an anti-counterfeiting venture with the Central Bank of Bangladesh for the same reason. The German central bank stated on Saturday that although "it believes that counterfeiting is a serious criminal offence, it considers the threat of imposing the death penalty to be excessive."

This is the latest example of the clash over the death sentence between developing and developed countries. Because of the existence of the death penalty for economic crimes, China's cooperation with developed countries in the fields of anti-corruption and extradition has been negatively affected.

The death sentence is also a controversial topic in China. The number of capital punishment cases has been dropping gradually and the number of crimes that are punishable by death has also decreased.  Voices calling for the abolition of the death penalty are on the rise.

Acts of intervention, such as the Bundesbank's, despite their lofty goal, may create disturbances in judicial fairness. For instance, China promised that Lai Changxing, the top criminal in the Xiamen Yuanhua smuggling case who fled to Canada for many years, would not receive the death penalty, in order to guarantee his extradition to China. However, 14 other criminals involved in this case have been sentenced to death. This creates double standards for judicial decisions.

According to the Criminal Law of the People's Republic of China, the death penalty is only to be applied to criminal elements who commit the most heinous crimes.  On the question of whether economic crimes are heinous crimes, countries have various interpretations of this due to differences in culture, religious concepts and degree of development. Due to the connection between economic crime and corruption, there is a high level of public support for punishing serious economic crimes with the death penalty in China.

China has made continuous efforts in adjusting the death penalty. The country removed 13 offences from the list of 68 crimes punishable by death in 2011, including tax fraud, the smuggling of cultural relics or precious metals, tomb robbing and stealing fossils.

The Bundesbank's decision came out of political concerns, but did not take local conditions into consideration.