Remembering Professor Jiang Ping

By Jerome A. Cohen

Like so many, I admired Professor Jiang Ping, and we seemed to have a special bond even though we seldom actually got together. It seemed to be based on our similar ages and our mutual concern for China’s legal profession. In many ways he was a courageous person as well as an influential developer of China’s civil law. 

I greatly respected his decision to return to China despite June 4th, which occurred while he was abroad, in Hawaii, I believe. He was always supportive of attempts to defend the PRC’s criminal defense lawyers, and I liked his ability to retain his sense of humor in difficult circumstances. He made a great impact on my class when I invited him down to lecture at NYU while he was visiting at Columbia. His career encapsulated the PRC’s legal progress and problems from the early 1950s.

Even in death the Party seeks to benefit from Professor Jiang Ping and keep him under control. As experience in China has shown, funerals can sometimes provide the single spark that lights a prairie fire. Both the Supreme Court and the Supreme Procuracy sent tributes. I didn’t see anything from China’s lawyers association but there may well have been, if only discreetly. I hope someone will analyze the symbolism and significance of this occasion. 

Developing a Hebrew Language Program at Peking University

By Jerome A. Cohen

I enjoyed this recent article on the teaching of Yiddish at Peking University. I am surprised, however, that it fails to mention the teaching of Hebrew at Peking University. A few years before China and Israel established diplomatic relations a law professor who was serving as a university vice president telephoned to ask my help in establishing the university’s first course in Hebrew. He not only wanted me to find an appropriate teacher who was not an Israeli citizen but also asked me to find the money to support this project for two years.

I came up with the funding through the good offices of Lawrence Tisch, who was eager to promote normalization of Sino-Israeli relations. I found an excellent teacher named Miriam R. L. Petruck among the recent PhD recipients in Hebraic studies at the University of California at Berkeley through the help of their mentor Professor Zev Brinner. There were eight students in her first class, and they were soon posted to Israel in a variety of occupations, such as a New China News Agency journalist, during the period before normalization was achieved.

Singapore NUS and cooperation with legal education in China

By Jerome A. Cohen

On hearing the news about the end of the Yale-NUS collaboration in 2025, I thought about my own efforts to develop a legal education program in China. About 20 years ago, colleagues at NYU Law School established an innovative five-year program of cooperation with the Law School of NUS. It was financed by the Singapore Government and brought many NYU law professors to Singapore, usually for the first time. I was trying to develop similar programs in China. Our China activities benefited from the stopovers some of my colleagues made en route to or from Singapore. Those visits, often their first to China, enhanced their interest in the PRC’s unique legal phenomena and in the many PRC students eager to study American law.

Almost a decade earlier, encouraged by my 1979-81 teaching of international business law to Beijing City officials, I tried but failed to unify our NYU law faculty in supporting a proposed program for establishing graduate law programs in both Beijing and Shanghai. Although many were eager to make a first visit to China, quite a few colleagues would not commit to a second stay, which made long-run planning difficult.

In 2004, after a stimulating stay in NY, a leading Shanghai Jiaotong University law professor urged me to set up some sort of cooperation with his law school. I told him that, although our new NYU US-Asia Law Institute could be relied on for support, I doubted whether he could obtain approval of Jiaoda’s participation because of USALI’s rule of law and human rights publications and programs. To demonstrate his school’s enthusiasm, he invited me to meet on campus with his university’s Party secretary and other leaders. At the meeting I reminded the Party secretary of my criticisms of the existing legal system. He responded that they had carefully checked my record and assured me there would be no obstacle. On that basis we went ahead and for a time I had a beautiful office in the law faculty’s handsome building on the new campus on the outskirts of Shanghai. Although we did manage to have a few programs, including a significant one at the Shanghai Stock Exchange and another that we convened on International Human Rights Day (the date’s significance did not dawn on our hosts til speeches began), our cooperation soon broke down because higher-ups within the Shanghai Party organization insisted that I withdraw from our joint efforts.

Subsequently the NYU Law School did establish a modest teaching program in Shanghai as part of the larger NYU-Shanghai project. It was one of several “Law Abroad” programs established by our law school. However, staffing it with regular NYU professors, and even enough students from NYU, soon proved a problem, and the effort gradually withered away. Our students preferred a semester in Paris and even Buenos Aires to one in Shanghai.

Johannes Chan: Hong Kong University's Chilling Message

By Jerome A. Cohen

Here is the recent news about Johannes Chan’s departure from Hong Kong University. He is a wonderful scholar and long-term, courageous critic of the PRC’s increasing repression in Hong Kong. Before, during, and after his distinguished service as the eminent Hong Kong University Law School’s dean, his published analyses have provided invaluable insights into Beijing’s manipulations of the Joint Declaration, the Basic Law and the former UK colony’s traditional legal system. At 62, he is at the top of his form. Yet the university’s political leaders have now diminished his status to, at best, that of a part-time adjunct lecturer. They previously rejected the formal recommendation that, after his deanship, he would become one of the university’s most prominent administrators. How far the discrimination against him will go is hard to say. Some time ago he was even denied entry into Macao on national security grounds.

Professor Chan would grace the faculty of any law school anywhere and will undoubtedly have opportunities to teach in many common law countries, as many prematurely “retired” HKU professors have done. I have no idea what his plans might be but hope that he will not leave  Hong Kong unless, like some other invaluable human rights advocates there, he believes his personal security is threatened by government prosecution. Hong Kong’s embattled barristers will surely welcome his newly-liberated participation in their efforts to slow the process of dictatorial controls.

Hong Kong University's Uncertain Path Forward

By Jerome A. Cohen

The appointment of Fu Hualing as Dean of the Faculty of Law of Hong Kong University is gratifying not only because of widespreadas acting dean respect and friendship for Dean Fu but also because of its possible positive significance for Hong Kong's continuing struggle. The dean of HKU's impressive law school has long been in a position to have an important public impact. This imposes a responsibility that Hualing is admirably equipped to fulfill, especially after two years as acting dean that have been a "trial" in more ways than one. 

On the same day as the above announcement, two scholars from mainland China were appointed as vice-presidents of HKU. It is ironic that the news of these two university-level appointments, both scholars formerly associated with the University of California at Berkeley, came out just as we learned of Dean Fu’s appointment. Interestingly, all three people involved are “mainlanders” well-known outside of the mainland.

HK has long drawn upon former Berkeley scholars for educational leadership. In the early ‘60s it invited the distinguished economist Professor Li Choh-ming, then chairman of Berkeley’s Center for Chinese Studies, to be the first head of the then new Chinese University of Hong Kong. (He would be deeply saddened to see the damage recently inflicted on the beautiful campus he fostered.)

I do not know the two new HKU vice-presidents, but I do know Law Dean Fu Hualing and echo the many voices that welcome his appointment as the best possible choice for an important institution. For two years, Professor Fu has been ably serving as acting dean as HKU floundered in its deliberations over the deanship.

How he will choose to exercise his new authority and prestige in the current HK crisis will be very much worth watching. He is well aware, of course, that one of his many distinguished predecessors in the post, another leading expert on justice and human rights in China, Professor Johannes Chan, was later denied a more senior university-wide position and then couldn’t even obtain a visa to enter Macao!

So often, wonderful scholars are selected to be law school deans in difficult circumstances that significantly diminish their possibilities for further scholarly attainment. Let's hope that Hualing can continue to follow Chairman Mao's admonition to "walk on two legs". Good luck, Hualing!!

Law, Justice, and Human Rights in China Seminar

By Jerome A. Cohen

On September 16, we held the first session of a New School-sponsored seminar “Law, Justice, and Human Rights in China,” co-taught with Teng Biao, a famous but exiled Chinese law professor, lawyer, law reformer and human rights activist, and moderated by Katherine Wilhelm, executive director of the U.S.-Asia Law Institute at NYU Law School. The seminar introduces the legal system of the PRC with a focus on constitutional law, legal institutions, criminal justice, and human rights. The first session covered pre-Communist legal history in China, and the recording can be heard here. The seminar will take place every Wednesday from 2pm-4pm EST through November 18, 2020. You can register here.

90th birthday of Prof. CHEN Guangzhong, "Godfather" of China's post-Cultural Revolution criminal procedure reforms

By Jerome A. Cohen

Professor Chen Guangzhong (陈光中), emeritus professor at the Chinese University of Politics and Law (CUPL), is the “grand old man” of China’s criminal justice legislation. He played a prominent role in the drafting of the 1979 Criminal Procedure Law (CPL), the first in the PRC’s history.

In the mid-1950s, under deStalinized Soviet influence, drafts had been formulated but, because of the 1957-58 Anti-Rightist Campaign, the Sino-Soviet split, the Cultural Revolution and other political factors, the draft legislation was not enacted. After Mao’s death the drafting process was renewed, still influenced largely but not nominally by Soviet law, and legal scholars like Prof. Chen, who had been sidelined for two decades, began to play an important role.

(Prof. CHEN Guangzhong (2000); photo source)

By the time of the major 1996 CPL revisions, Prof. Chen was the leading figure shaping the revisions in a quiet struggle with Party, police and other officials who opposed many Western-style due process reforms. Chen, who briefly served as the President of CUPL and was the Inaugural President of the China CPL Society, trained most of the PRC’s many experts on criminal justice who have valiantly served with distinction as well as frustration not only in academe but also in government, the judiciary and the legal profession. He edited an important book in the late ‘90s about the problems confronting PRC adherence to and compliance with the UN International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights(ICCPR), which the PRC signed over two decades ago but has still not ratified. Although retired, Prof. Chen retains considerable prestige in academic and legal circles that have fallen on hard times. He amply warrants our admiration and congratulations!

The graduating class in the first one-year training program in law that any foreigners have ever offered in the PRC

By Jerome A. Cohen

I’m now in the process of collecting old photos for the purpose of my memoirs as well as a Chinese-language festschrift that my colleagues have been working on for my 90th birthday on July 1!

Here is a photo of the graduating class in the first one-year training program in law that any foreigners have ever offered in the PRC. Steve Orlins, Owen Nee and I ran it — in the Chinese language — as guests of the Beijing Economic Development Corporation (BEDC, the alter ego of the Beijing Economic Commission) whose leader, the marvelous XIAO Yang (肖秧), later became Party Secretary of Chongqing and then Governor of Sichuan Province.

The 30 or so city business officials who took part had never studied law before, needed legal education in their daily work and were released from their law-related jobs fulltime in order to give their all to our course. A few went on to study law in the US at Harvard, Berkeley and other places and later worked in Chinese and American law firms. Xiao, who became my best PRC friend, later made me formal advisor to Sichuan for purposes of attracting foreign investment. 

China’s regular law schools were just reopening and did not yet welcome foreigners. We gave this nine hour per week course again for BEDC the following year, since our efforts were highly appreciated.

You will also see some unauthorized foreign auditors in the photo including my wife Joan and our three hirsute sons!

Chinese students adjusting to American campus

By Jerome A. Cohen

The New York Times had a good op-ed over last week, “Chinese, Studying in America, and Struggling.” This is such an important topic that raises so many issues that we all confront today as teachers and have earlier confronted as students, whether in China or elsewhere.

I was an early Fulbrighter to France in 1951-52, a time when many French university students were hostile to Americans (Yankee, Go Home was a popular slogan) and some French professors, not only “leftists”, were not welcoming (One day in Lyon I greeted my professor of French history on the street and he said: “Mr. Cohen, I will forgive you since you are a foreigner unfamiliar with French customs, but in France a student does not accost a professor on the street”. I especially liked his use of the word “accost”. I used to tell this story at our Harvard opening day welcome to foreign LLM students in order to alert them to our differing custom!)

Chinese law students are generally a bit more mature than undergrads but obviously also have adjustment difficulties, many of them similar to those of other foreign students not native speakers of the English language, especially those from elsewhere in East Asia, and the more time we as educators can spend with them outside of class the better.

But I may add to the depression of some of the graduate students from China, not only in my classes but also when talking at Yale, Harvard and other schools, by giving frank assessments of the legal situation in China. I really hope to inspire them but see their deflated faces as I leave the room, which saddens me. They don’t argue back, perhaps because of my age, the way some other foreign students and American scholars occasionally do and are probably understandably conflicted and uncertain.

In class their silence often presents a challenge for their American instructors, particularly in seminars dependent on student participation. When I co-teach I always admire the greater success my faculty colleague seems to have in gradually stimulating Chinese participation. I find that Chinese women students generally— not always—are more reluctant to speak up than men, even though they are at least just as capable.