By Jerome A. Cohen
The ongoing suppression of human rights lawyers and legal scholars in China makes me recall the huge attack that was dramatically launched against them in early June 1957 as Mao decided to end the dangerously developing “Hundred Flowers Bloom” Campaign by launching the Anti-Rightist Movement. One of the major targets was law professor YANG Zhaolong, Harvard Law SJD and protégé of former Dean Roscoe Pound, who played a prominent role in Republican China’s legal development and who decided to stay on to help build a post-Liberation legal system. He was often attacked in existing legal publications of the day, detained and punished as an “extreme rightist” and, after his release, again punished severely during the Cultural Revolution as a “counterrevolutionary”. In 1971, Yang was first sentenced to death but, because he was so well-known abroad, this was reduced to life imprisonment. His wife and son also suffered severely. After Mao’s death and Deng’s rise, Deng, who had presided over the horrendous Anti-Rightist Movement as the Party’s Secretary-General, began the process of rehabilitating (平反píngfǎn) many of those who had been most unfairly abused. Yang died in 1979 some time after his release and was posthumously rehabilitated in 1980. In 2017, Fudan University managed to get by the censors a massive volume of Yang’s collected writings, mostly but not entirely from the relatively freer pre-Liberation days, in tribute to him but also as an impressive, implicit signal of the continuing loss to China’s rule of law efforts.