On June 7, 1901, Liang Qichao proposed in one of his drafted zhengzhi, “The Constitution, the vitality of a country.” Some scholars have thus argued that the constitutionalist, the vital energy of a country, is also the vital energy of a country. The jurists of the Republican period not only received Confucian education from their childhood, but also most of them had overseas study background and accepted Western constitutional ideas. Like other Chinese who accepted Western ideas, they wanted to emulate the West and promote the rule of law in China.
However, the Communist theft shattered their dreams, in other words, the jurisprudential energy accumulated in the Republic of China was destroyed after 1949. At that time, the jurists of the Republic of China either chose to stay on the mainland, or chose to go to Taiwan, or went to Europe and the United States, and especially the jurists who stayed on the mainland had the most miserable end, among which the representative figures were Yang Zhaolong, the prosecutor general of the Supreme Court of the Republic of China, and Yan Shutang, the great judge of the Republic of China.
The Republic of China Supreme Court Procurator General’s family was broken
Born in 1904 in Jintan County, Jiangsu Province, Yang Zhaolong was a very intelligent man since his childhood; he entered the philosophy department of Yanjing University in 1922, and then switched to Shanghai Soochow University to study law; he joined the Kuomintang in 1926; after graduating in 1927, he was employed as a professor at Shanghai University of Political Science and Law, and served as a judge at the Provisional Court of the Shanghai Public Concession and the Court of Appeal of the Concession. During his tenure at the court, he often confronted the jury and brought the guilty foreigners to justice. He was dismissed after two years because he often clashed with foreign jurors and consuls in Chinese and foreign litigation disputes. However, many of the judgments he wrote during his tenure were included in the then influential “Dongwu Law Quarterly” in China.
In 1931, Yang Zhaolong was admitted to the Ministry of Justice and Administration of the Nanjing Government, and soon became the head of the secretariat section. His doctoral dissertation entitled “A Study of the Current Situation and Problems of the Chinese Judicial System with Reference to the Systems of Major Foreign Countries” received unanimous praise from experts. After that, he went to Berlin University in Germany to study “civil law” with the famous Professor Kurochen.
After finishing his studies in Berlin, Yang Zhaolong returned to China and was appointed as a special member of the National Resources Committee. During the war against Japan, he was instructed to draft the National Law on General Mobilization and the Law on Military Expropriation. Thereafter, he served as the Dean of the School of Law and Business of Northwestern United University and was a professor at Central University, Fudan University and Chaoyang Law School.
After the end of the war, he completed the translation of the Chinese version of the United Nations Charter, and served as the Director of Criminal Affairs in the Ministry of Justice and Administration, and presided over the drafting of the Regulations on the Trial of War Criminals. At that time, there were 50 people in the world who received this award, two of them were Chinese, and the other one was Wang Zhaowei, who was then the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Nationalist Government.
Dissatisfied with the Kuomintang, at the end of 1948, Yang decided to leave the government and teach at a university or specialize in legal studies. While he was resigning from the Ministry of Justice and Administration, he suddenly received an appointment from Acting President Li Zongren, who appointed him as the Acting Procurator General of the Supreme Court of the National Government. He told his wife Sha Shu, who inadvertently disclosed this to his sister Sha Yi-ying.
Sha Yiyin, an underground member of the Chinese Communist Party, reported the news to the Chinese Communist Party. The CCP then sent someone to convince Yang Zhaolong to accept the appointment and use it to rescue the imprisoned CCP members. At first, Yang Zhaolong was reluctant, but he finally agreed because of his family ties.
After his appointment, Yang Zhaolong went to persuade Li Zongren several times on the grounds that “releasing political prisoners” would demonstrate the sincerity of the peace talks between the Communist Party and China. In the end, Li Zongren agreed to release about 10,000 political prisoners, many of whom were CCP members or pro-communists.
In 1949, on the eve of the Communist occupation of Nanking, Kuomintang dignitaries left for Taiwan. At this time, Chen Lifu’s wife also sent two tickets to Taiwan to Mr. and Mrs. Yang Zhaolong, and at the same time, Yang Zhaolong also received an invitation letter from Harvard. But under the persuasion of his wife and the Chinese Communist Party’s related people, he decided to stay in the mainland. This decision doomed him to a tragic life thereafter.
Yang Zhaolong, who stayed, kept all the archives of the Supreme Court Prosecutor’s Office of the Kuomintang and handed them over to the Nanjing Military Administration of the Chinese Communist Liberation Army.
In 1950, Yang Zhaolong, who was working at Nanjing University, was elected as a “special representative” of the Nanjing People’s Assembly and wrote a bill as a jurist suggesting that the People’s Government should draft the Land Reform Law as soon as possible to regulate the upcoming land reform work. However, Ke Qingshi, then secretary of the Nanjing Municipal Party Committee, criticized this proposal because, in his opinion, a person who had been a senior judicial official of the Kuomintang was not qualified to “talk extravagantly” about “legislation” to the Communist Party.
In 1952, Yang Zhaolong was assigned as a professor of Russian in the Department of Foreign Languages of Fudan University because his previous studies were all bourgeois law, which was “not conducive to training the successors of the proletariat”. Although he was unhappy, he complied with the arrangement.
During the “Anti-Rightist” campaign in 1957, Yang Zhaolong got into trouble for two articles he published on the working style of CCP members and the problems of democracy and the legal system. He was not only branded as a “rightist”, but was also arrested by the Public Security Bureau in September 1963 and sentenced to life imprisonment in June 1971 for “active counterrevolution”, and was only released in December 1975. During this period, his wife committed suicide and his three children were classified as “rightists”, and two of his sons were later imprisoned for “counter-revolutionary crimes”. His family was really ruined!
One day in 1979, Yang Zhaolong passed away quietly in a 4-square-meter hut in Haining County, Zhejiang Province. Before he died, he murmured a line from Qu Yuan’s “Li Sao”: “The goodness of my heart, though I die, I have no regrets”. What made him not repent even after nine deaths? Was it the fact that he did not regret his choice to be with the Chinese Communist Party? Or did he not regret his courageous actions and deeds? Probably the latter.
Yan Shutang, the great judge of the Republic of China, could not escape from one movement after another
Yan Shutang was a famous jurist in the Republic of China. Born in 1891, he graduated from Beiyang University in 1914, went to the United States in 1915 and studied at Columbia University, Harvard University and Yale University, and received his J.D. degree from Yale University in 1920. He also served as a member of the Association for the Implementation of Constitutionalism and as a member of the Supervisory Yuan.
It is said that he gave very good lectures. An article on his life in China, “Down and Out in the Chaotic World,” states that Yan Shutang was known for his seriousness and seriousness when he taught at Peking University. He never smiled in class, so much so that many students were a bit afraid of him. However, he taught well, with a loud voice, detailed explanations and no nonsense, and the teaching effect was very good. He often invites students to his home, eats together, and studies jurisprudence together.
Yan Shutang also uses his historical knowledge of Western jurisprudence to tell students about the development and evolution of Western jurisprudence schools; he also uses his profound writing skills and proficiency in foreign languages to translate some of the latest works of Western jurisprudence into China.
In addition to this, Yan Shutang was in charge of drafting the draft of the Relatives Part of the Civil Law of the Republic of China, and participated in revising and discussing the draft of the Constitution of the Republic of China.
After the victory of the war, the National Government invited Yan Shutang to be the Justice of the Judicial Yuan. “Mr. Yan had a very perfect and independent personality. Apart from teaching conscientiously, he seldom interacted with others, was not addicted to smoking and alcohol, and had almost no special hobbies. Now it seems that it is really appropriate for such a person to be a judge.” This is what Dai Kezhong, a professor at the Wuhan Institute of Chemical Engineering, who has long studied the history of WU, had to say.
In 1949, when the Kuomintang retreated to Taiwan, Hang Liwu, the then Minister of Education of the Kuomintang, sent Yan Shutang a ticket to Taiwan. Yan Shutang refused, saying, “I have been patriotic all my life, the Communists will not kill me, and I am not willing to hide on a foreign warship as a ‘White Russian’; there is always a need for people to change the dynasty.”
Unfortunately, Yan Shutang misjudged the Chinese Communist Party. After Wuhan was occupied by the CCP, the Central South Military Commission, which took over Wuhan University, immediately dismissed three prominent professors with ties to the Kuomintang government, 58-year-old Yan Shutang being one of them.
Since then, Yan Shutang has not missed any of the campaigns launched by Mao and the Chinese Communist Party, and at the age of 66, he was branded as a rightist and forced to leave the lectern. “From then on, he hardly talked to anyone and did not even dare to greet his former ‘old’ friends when he met them. to release the depression.” My son, Yan Jinhao, recalls. (See “Down and Out in the Chaotic World”)
In 1961, Yan Shutang suffered from hyperpsychosis. He stopped focusing on legal education and instead buried himself in ancient books such as the Kao-wei Guwen Guanzhi and the I Ching.
After the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution, Yan Shutang, who was already in his old age, was not forgotten; not only was his home raided, but the rebels also found a lot of “incriminating evidence” in the archives and hung a sign on him and paraded him around the campus. Afterwards, he was sent to labor camps. “Wearing deep eyes, wearing a gentle robe and coat, even the way he walked with a stretcher was so moderate, digging ditches, picking bricks and sleeping in a shed became his daily life.”
After returning home from labor reform, Yan Shutang moved twice, and the smaller he moved, the smaller his family was finally crammed into a room of only 17 square meters. In his eighties, he still insisted on working in the library of Wuhan University every day, mainly turning on water, sweeping toilets and mending broken books. For decades, he often chattered, “The people who are making me whole are my students, and they don’t know what I’m like! And how much benefit I got!”
In his later years, Yan Shutang developed symptoms of dementia, “He could sit for hours and stare, occasionally playing with his dentures in his mouth to make strange noises.” In February 1984, Yan Shutang died at the age of 93.
Conclusion
Undoubtedly, from what happened to Yang Zhaolong and Yan Shutang, the jurists of the Republic of China who remained on the mainland after 1949 did very little, as did others such as Mei Rutang, who was a judge of the Far Eastern Military Tribunal. It was through one campaign after another that the jurisprudential energy once preserved in them was stifled by the Chinese Communist Party. What is clear is that since the establishment of the Chinese Communist Party in 1949, the rule of law has remained a castle in the air, and the jurists of the Republic of China have naturally not escaped its clutches. Until the CCP is removed, the rule of law will always be a dream of the Chinese people.
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