By Jerome A. Cohen
I have enjoyed the media obituaries and listserv commentaries on Jiang Zemin but hope that there will eventually be appraisals of his contributions to PRC efforts to establish government under law in the post-Tiananmen era. Some very significant criminal justice reforms were adopted when the nation’s Criminal Procedure Law was revised in 1996, and many legislative and regulatory reforms relating to the economy took place in order to make the PRC a plausible candidate for the WTO. Prime Minister Zhu Rongji played a key role regarding the latter, of course, and did recognize the importance of the rule of law to foreign investors. Yet I don’t recall Jiang Zemin saying much of significance about law reform.
I do vaguely recall my disappointment at his reaction to a question about a human rights case that I managed to get someone to ask him at an appearance in Washington. I wanted to bring to his attention - and the public’s - the arbitrary detention of a dissident whose family I was advising. He simply dismissed the question by saying that, since the Public Security Bureau had taken the action, he was sure that the government had reasonable grounds for acting. I would have been wiser to try “the back door” by asking Wang Daohan, whom I knew fairly well and who was thought to be important in promoting Jiang’s rise, to put in a quiet word for my client.