The parents of a Kiwi man facing the death penalty in China say the price of being duped should not be their son's life.

Peter Gardner was arrested in November, in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou, after Chinese customs staff allegedly found 30 kilograms of methamphetamine in a luggage scan.

Peter Gardner, being tried on drug smuggling charges, arrives at Guangzhou Intermediate Court.

His girlfriend, Kalynda Davis, was freed and allowed to return home to Australia, but Gardner could face the firing squad.

With a rough Australian street value of $18 million, the meth found in the 26-year-old's bags was the biggest single haul of the drug seized at the airport.

Gardner's parents, Russell Gardner and Sandy Cornelius, say in an interview with 3D that their son, born in Blenheim, should not pay with his life for being duped into being a drug mule.

'No-one really deserves to die like that,” says his father. 'No-one deserves to be executed.”

They said their son first got involved with a gang that asked him to smuggle the haul through contacts in body-building.

Gardner got deep into debt with the gang, believed to be linked to the Chinese organised crime group the Triads, and trouble followed.

Initially, he asked his parents for a $30,000 loan to pay off his debts, but this money was not enough, his father says.

Gardner confessed to his mother the gang had threatened to kill him.

The November trip that brought his arrest was not the first the crime group had told Gardner to make. He told the Chinese court he carried body-enhancing peptides into Australia in September.

The substance, legal with a prescription in New Zealand, was easily purchased in China.

After the successful handover to Sydney Airport baggage handlers, Gardner confessed his task to Cornelius and at her request, vowed he would never do it again.

He broke his promise to his mother.

This time, although he said he was told the cargo was peptides, the package handed to him by two Chinese men at his Hilton Hotel in Guangzhou was methamphetamine.

Barrister Craig Tuck of Tauranga, told 3D there was strong evidence gang members had Gardner 'under the hammer” and had pressured him into the drug run.

'If Pete was duped effectively and exploited in the way it seems to have occurred, is this something that we want our sons, our daughters, our cousins, our parents, then exposed to being killed for that?” says Craig.

'Is that something that a civil society wants?”