I don't get why China doesn't embrace at least the bulk of it, it's pretty basic stuff.
China doesn't execute many people, instead many people are sentenced to death with 2 year buffer time, which automatically gets bumped to life sentence at the end of the two years if no major crimes are conducted in prison during the two years, which then automatically gets bumped to 20 years imprisonment in two years, again, providing no major violations.
So death sentence in China is really 24-year imprisonment.
Death sentence with immediate (read: one month) execution does get sentenced, but very rare. According to Chinese law, at least one, usually two, of the four extremes can qualify death sentence with immediate execution:
1. Crimes with extreme inhumane methods (say, torture to death)
2. Crimes with extreme negative social influence (say, a cop murders a civilian)
3. Crimes with extreme devastating damage (say, blowing up a plane)
4. Crimes with extreme evil motivation (say, raping a child)
According to several international human right organizations' data, every year China sentences ~5000 death sentences, among them ~1500 are actually executed.
Considering every year Chinese DEA busts a number of armed drug syndicates, and armed drug crimes are usually qualified as death penalty with immediate execution, it's not hard to think the majority of the executed are drug gang members.
That makes the executed death penalty condemned only less than a few hundreds, excluding armed gangs.
For a country with 1.4Bn population, only less than a few hundreds executed per year for assorted reasons seems to be a fairly low percentage.
Another reason that death penalty still exists is that Chinese people like it. The traditional ideology for thousands of years is simple - pay lives with lives, pay money with money.
Multiple questionnaires conducted both by authority and civilian organizations both reveal the absolute vast majority population in China encourages death penalty for those did the absolute unthinkable.
//Edit: there are also two crimes in China that automatically result into death penalty, execute immediately, regardless consequence. One being killing a hostage by the kidnapper, the other being hijacking aircraft with casualties (even if the deceased being a terrorist killed by the resist) or extreme property damage.