Adhering to the Values of an Intellectual

Narrated by JIANG PING & collated by FENG JIANHUA

Jiang Ping was born in Dalian, Liaoning Province in 1930. He received a law degree from the Moscow State University in 1956. Since 1982 he has held a variety of positions such as vice president of Beijing Institute of Political Science and Law (predecessor to CUPL), vice president and full president of China University of Political Science and Law (CUPL), a member of the Standing Committee of the Seventh National People's Congress, vice-chairman of the NPC Law Committee and vice-president of the China Law Society.

    I was among the first law students China given the opportunity to travel to the Soviet Union for an education. But upon returning to China, I found that I was unable to put what I had learned into practice. China's legal system was still barely in existence, or at least, in function prior to the opening-up and reform that started in 1978. After the chaos that decades of "class struggle" caused in China ended, together with a determined group of teachers, I began to develop a new set of goals for the education of law. These steps ranged from supplying personnel for the "proletarian dictatorship" to cultivating a new way of legal thinking, defining a sense of justice, fairness and conscience as well as the notion of democracy and freedom. Aside from teaching, I also participated in the drafting of a number of important laws. I witnessed firsthand the progress of China's legal system in the new era.

Jiang Ping (second right, front row) in Moscow.

    Nowhere to Use My Skills

    I was born in the coastal city of Dalian in 1930, and moved to Beijing with my family at the age of eight. I later attended Chongde High School (now Beijing No. 31 Middle School), a church school whose alumnus include the Nobel laureate Chen-Ning Franklin Yang. It had a wide reputation for its teaching excellence, particularly in its English courses. I still use the skills today as I am often asked to deliver speeches in English at major international events on legal matters.

    I entered Yenching University (now Peking University) in 1948 to study journalism, hoping to promote the rule of law in the nation with my pen. But the dream was soon shattered by the cruel realities of a corrupt government in old China. Like many other disenchanted youths of the time, my solution was to drop out of school, and join the revolution.

    The People's Republic was founded on October 1, 1949. In August 1951 I was selected by the state to study law in the Moscow State University. There were more than 300 students in my group, but only 12 of us were to major in law. Legal education in the Soviet Union had fortunately gone on uninterrupted by the war, with a legal system similar to that in the West. This made it an ideal place to study, and during my five years in Moscow I eagerly studied classic Latin and Roman law. After class I would work at the Chinese Students' Union, where I encountered people like Mikhail Gorbachev, who was also a young student leader at the time.

    In 1956 after completing my studies in Moscow, I returned home with a deep passion and ambition to serve my country using my newly acquired legal skills. I was assigned to a job at the Beijing Institute of Political Science and Law, the first law school in the People's Republic. The school leaders appreciated me, and therefore placed me in key positions. Both my life and career outlook was bright. Perhaps that was the calm before the storm. Soon a series of political movements took hold in the country, eviscerating the Chinese economy that had barely recuperated from decades of wars. In 1957 I was charged as a Rightist, beginning a long period of grappling with this label.

    This blow drove me mad. I set fire to all the books I had brought from abroad, seven cases of them, all bought with money I had so diligently saved. I never imagined that it could end up this way.

    I was removed from my post and sent to labor in the countryside where I remained until 1972, when I was finally allowed to return to Beijing. Assigned a teaching job at a middle school in the suburbs I found my suffering wouldn't end there.

    My wife at that time was a woman I met in Moscow, marrying her after our return to China. We had a happy life together until I was convicted as a Rightist. Some people coerced her to divorce me, and that was the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back.

    After going through all this tragedy and loss, I began to wander in and out of a state of consciousness at unexpected times. One of these periods of absent-mindedness hit me when I was crossing a railway with a heavy load on my shoulders, paying no heed to an oncoming train. I was hit and dragged dozens of meters, but I miraculously survived, minus one leg.

    Despite all that, given the circumstances of that era, my personal adversity is not worth mentioning. Prior to the reform and opening-up that took place in late 1978, there was no sound legal system in the new China. The words of leaders, instead of laws, ruled China.

    A Shift in Legal Education

    The year 1978 marked the end to "taking class struggle as the central task." Economic development instead was made the new centerpiece of governmental priorities. China has since gradually got on the right track. At the end of that year I returned to the Beijing Institute of Political Science and Law. The following year the Rightist stigma on me was expunged, allowing me to be reinstated to my post in civil law teaching and research.

    This was the biggest turning point in my life. For a long period in China, legal study was deemed equivalent to national security, therefore the teachers had to be politically impeccable. With my blemished political record, I obviously didn't fit into that category.

    After so many years of suppression and oppression, I was determined to put my whole heart into the job, and was soon promoted to head of the section, and then vice president of the school in 1983. After the school was renamed the China University of Political Science and Law in 1984, I was made vice president in charge of teaching affairs. In 1988 I was promoted to full president of the university.

    While holding various administrative posts, I came to realize that my faculty had not yet come out from under the shadows of previous political movements. Their conservative thinking and outdated learning made them incompetent for legal education in the new era. In fact this was a common situation among all the law schools in China. In response I decided to nurture a new crop of legal professionals. Using tests and professor recommendations, some undergraduates were selected for enrollment in postgraduate programs. Upon graduation many of them took on teaching jobs with the university. This youthful faculty has grown to become the backbone of China's burgeoning legal educational system.

    Meanwhile I also began introducing reforms to the curriculum. Previously civil law had never been given the same level of attention as criminal law had in China's law schools and courtrooms. For law students the three major courses were usually legal theories, history of law and criminal law. This explained why public rights were long given priority over private rights in Chinese society. I knew from bitter personal experience that advocacy and protection of private rights is equally significant for a nation's development. In some sense the rule of men is a practice whereby public rights trample on private rights. Though due attention should be given in our education system to the interpretation of legal articles and canvases of theories of law, we should be aware that law is empty without the goals of democracy, freedom and human rights.

    For a long period in China prior to 1978 the mission of law schools was to provide professionals for the proletarian dictatorship, and law was merely a tool of this dictatorship. I did my best to change this in my school.

    In 1979 I opened courses on Roman laws and civil and commercial laws of the West, the first of their kind in China. Gradually civil law had more of a presence and significance in the curriculum. Today Chinese people have an increased awareness of the law, with more and more students electing to go into the profession. As educators our goal is to foster in our students a sense of modern legal thinking, faith in fairness, justice, democracy and freedom as well as a conscience.