(p. A19) Jiang Ping, a legal scholar who helped lay the foundation for China’s civil code, and whose experiences with political persecution shaped his relentless advocacy for individual rights in the face of state power, died on Dec. 19 [2023] in Beijing.
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Often called “the conscience of China’s legal world,” Mr. Jiang established himself in the 1980s as a highly regarded teacher and a leading scholar, one of four professors who helped oversee the drafting of China’s first civil rights framework. His reputation was cemented during the 1989 pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square, when as university president he publicly supported the student protesters.
After the government quashed the protests and massacred the protesters, Mr. Jiang was removed from the university presidency. But he remained wildly popular on campus. Even after his removal, law students wore T-shirts printed with one of his best-known refrains: “Bow only to the truth.”
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His moral authority was augmented by his own story. In the 1950s, as a young teacher, he was denounced as anti-Communist after criticizing excessive top-down bureaucracy and ordered to be “reformed,” as the government called it, through labor. He was not allowed to teach law for two decades. And, while working, he was hit by a train, leaving him with a prosthetic leg.
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He lamented the lost decades, but he was never bitter. “Adversity gave me the ability to meditate and look back, and see things calmly,” he said at a celebration of his 70th birthday. “There was nothing to believe in blindly anymore.”
Mr. Jiang rose quickly after his political rehabilitation. He oversaw the drafting not only of civil and commercial laws, but also of China’s first administrative litigation law, which gave citizens a limited right to sue official agencies for misconduct.
In 1988, he was named president of the university. The next spring, protests broke out on Tiananmen Square. Mr. Jiang, fearing bloodshed, sat on the ground at the campus gate despite his bad leg and pleaded with students not to go.
When the students went, Mr. Jiang lent his support. Along with nine other university presidents, he signed an open letter urging the government to open a dialogue with the students.
After his ouster in 1990, Mr. Jiang stayed on as a professor.
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(Note: the online version of the obituary was updated Dec. 29, 2023, and has the title “Jiang Ping, the ‘Conscience of China’s Legal World,’ Dies at 92.”)