BEIJING China has executed at least 1,781 people and sentenced to death another 2,690 in the last three months, in an intensified "strike hard" campaign against crime, human rights group Amnesty International said on Friday.

"More people were executed in China in the last three months than in the rest of the world for the last three years," the London-based group said in a press release.

Even these totals fall "far below" the actual number of death sentences and executions, since only a fraction of cases are publicly reported in China remain a state secret, Amnesty said.

The scale of nationwide mass rallies and sentencing this year is the largest for many years.

"The campaign is nothing short of an execution frenzy - a huge waste of human life," it said.

Since President Jiang Zemin launched the campaign in April, convicted criminals have been executed for crimes as diverse as bribery, pimping, embezzlement, tax fraud, drug offences and violent crimes, it said.

A spokeswoman for the Ministry of Public Security said the campaign would last two years and could be the biggest since 1949.

"There were big (anti-crime) campaigns in 1983 and 1996. This is also a big one," a second ministry official said.

Courts ordered the execution of hundreds of people convicted of drug-related crimes to coincide with an international anti-drugs day last month.

National television broadcast live a rally in Kunming, in the southwestern Province of Yunnan, where a local court announced death sentences for 20 convicted drug dealers, who were taken away and executed by firing squad after the rally.

Similar rallies in the northwestern Province of Shaanxi in April and may were reportedly attended by 1,800,000 spectators, Amnesty said.

Authorities in China's mainly Muslim western region of Xinjiang aim to use the campaign to combat separatism and illegal religious activities, it said.

Many Uighur political prisoners have been executed, accused of "separatism" and violent crimes, it said.

Police and prosecutors were urged to cut corners, and not to "get entangled in the detail", so as to achieve "quick approval, quick arrest, quick trial and quick results", Amnesty said.

"Curtailed procedures plus great pressure on police and judicial authorities mean that the potential for miscarriages of justice, arbitrary sentencing and the execution of innocent people is immense."

In the Central Province of Hunan, police boasted of "solving 3,000 cases" in two days in April, it said.

Amnesty urged the Chinese government to replace its "callous and counterproductive policy" with "more effective and humane criminal punishments, in line with global trends," DPA said.