June 17, 2024 for SCMP's Open Questions Series
He Weifang is a retired professor from Peking University Law School. Named one of Foreign Policy’s top 100 global thinkers in 2011, He has long advocated for judicial independence.
You retired last July, bidding farewell to your fruitful career as a legal scholar. How is life after retirement and do you still have some work to do?
It’s quite good. I still have three PhD students under my supervision who have not yet graduated.
I supervised a concentration in Western legal history, which is more historically oriented. Some of my students specialise in the different versions of the Magna Carta that evolved, some study the early development of the legal profession in England, and some study how the common law adapted to the 13 colonies as a “New World” environment prior to the founding of the United States.
I encourage students to do such studies because they help people understand how the rule of law works. They do not necessarily have to relate to the reality of China.
I am happy to say goodbye to the classroom at this moment, because university teachers now face more difficulties. My discipline is law and constitutionalism, and my comments on current affairs have often been at odds with the authorities.
You have been teaching at universities, including the China University of Political Science and Law and Peking University, for almost 40 years. Looking back, was there a moment you were especially proud of?
I am particularly convinced that what I study and teach is an extremely important discipline for the future of China.
More than 2,000 years of governance in ancient China has given us the impression that the Chinese legal system has a significant “genetic defect”.
So I think my life has been fulfilling because I have been able to think about China’s future based on historical comparisons between Chinese and Western legal systems, which is also meaningful for our mission to rebuild the Chinese civilisation.
At Peking University Law School, I was voted the best teacher many years in a row, as well as the best teacher in the entire university. These honours have also made me proud.
How has China’s legal system changed during your long career? What are your views on how China should promote the rule of law?
Legal practitioners of my generation are eyewitnesses to history and have seen this country go from having almost no laws to having many new kinds of laws.
Victor Hao Li, a Chinese-American scholar of Chinese law who served as president of the East-West Centre in Hawaii, wrote a book about the legal situation in China during the Cultural Revolution. He said that the state was “law without lawyers”, which describes the practice of “mass struggle”, probably similar to the “Fengqiao experience” that has now been revived. It was a state where there were no lawyers and the rule of law was not even a possibility.
When my generation was in college, in 1979, China enacted its criminal law and criminal procedure law. They were the first laws after the reform and opening up. Later, China introduced the administrative litigation law and the general rules of civil law. Laws are being drafted more frequently.
There was also a lot of legislation that did not follow the spirit of the rule of law. Nevertheless, China has established the direction of “law-based governance”, which was exciting for us.
For a long time, we legal scholars had a good relationship with the courts and procuratorates. When they made new rules, they would hold meetings to listen to our views.
I personally participated in the revision of the Organic Law of the People’s Courts, but it failed in the end. What a pity!
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