The Thornton Center Chinese Thinkers Series. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2012. xlix, 269 pp. US$34.95, cloth. ISBN 978-0-8157-3390-8.
In his words, Professor He Weifang, a prominent lecturer and researcher at Peking University, argues that there exists a certain division of labour among scholars. Some scholars would like to immerse themselves in academic research; others, like him, “believe that there is a need for people to disseminate the knowledge developed in the ivory tower among the public in a manner welcome and easily accessible to them” (66). As an admirable public scholar, Professor He Weifang has long been both a conscientious scholar and an indefatigably intrepid fighter who has been fighting for a China with judicial independence, the rule of law, freedom of speech, and a constitutional government. Mostly because of his outspokenness and boldness, Professor He was “banished” in 2009 to northwest China for two years (42), a region which used to be an exile venue for criminals who committed felonies in the Qing dynasty.
The book entitled In the Name of Justice: Striving for the Rule of Law in China is a collection of published articles and interviews conducted by Professor He Weifang from 2001 to 2011. Aside from a fascinating introduction authored by Li Chen, this book has been aptly classified into five parts, with each part specifically focusing on one topic that Professor He has advocated, such as Judicial Independence, Constitutionalism, Legal Education, Free Speech, and Human Rights. Throughout the book, we can find Professor He’s humour, insights, and a scholar’s conscience and concerns about China’s judicial and political problems.
As Li Chen correctly writes in the introduction, Professor He has “both idealism and pragmatism in his search for a constitutional China” (xlvii). Chapter 4, “Constitutionalism as a Global Trend and its Impact on China,” mirrors the idealism of Professor He, as he believes that there are four trends related to constitutional government in the contemporary world: 1) increasing justification for constitutionalism; 2) the end of the socialism-capitalism dichotomy and its impact; 3) supranational organizations’ restrictions of sovereignty; and 4) global expansion of judicial powers (101-118). All of them, he argues, will be “significant for China’s legislative and judicial development” (123).
In chapter 3, “China’s First Steps toward Constitutionalism,” a lecture he gave at the Southwest University of Political Science in 2003, Professor He becomes an outspoken and cogent critic of the judicial and political defects in China. Not only did he denounce the Chinese constitution as “empty lip service” (67) because such civil rights as the freedom of press, speech, protests and religious belief promised by the constitution did not exist in reality (67-9), but he also sharply chastised the National People’s Congress as useless and urged the Chinese Communist Party to register and publicize the usage of the national treasure (84-6). In addition, he lauded the tradition of constitutionalism in the West and attributed the tradition to the existence of natural law and Christianity (77-80).
Professor He’s scholarly conscience is best manifested in chapter 10, “Challenging the Death Penalty: Why We Should Abolish this Barbaric Punishment.” He states that there are a total of seven reasons that could justify the abolition of the death penalty in China: 1) the death penalty cannot bring about the “intended effect of curbing crime”; 2) the death penalty fails to “deter crimes but actually incites them”; 3) tortures are often used in decisions of death penalty; 4) the practice of open executions is “actually encouraging cruelty”; 5) the government is not justified in enforcing executions; 6) the death penalty “destroys a person’s dignity”; 7) economic crimes should not result in the death penalty because “man’s life is beyond price” (191-208). At the end of the chapter, Professor He concludes “the human world cannot go on without compassion and sympathy for one another” (215).
Like all books, however, this book contains some minor factual flaws and questionable claims. For example, chapter 1 claims that the “traditional legal and political systems” of China “had been in place for more than two thousand years” (16). As many studies in both China and the West have shown, China’s legal and political system have undergone significant changes through its long history, and the word “traditional” is a cliché and tends to be problematic in generalizing Chinese history. Likewise, Professor He’s assertion that China did not have judicial independence seems incompatible with the historical facts (21). In the Han, Tang and even the Ming dynasties, there were rulers who could respect the independence of the judiciary and some judicial officials could use their independence to reverse rulers’ decisions on punishment. Moreover, the view that sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England had “embraced the democratic system” (219) likely overlooks the class struggles as shown by historian E.P. Thompson in his book The Making of the English Working Class and the Charters movement that called for voting rights for the workers in the nineteenth century.
Those minor scribbles, however, do not lessen the significant value of this book. Professor He’s unique insights in Chinese judiciary and politics and especially his scholarly conscience and valour will make this book a useful source for university students and people in the West who are interested in modern Chinese law and politics.
Qiang Fang
University of Minnesota Duluth, Duluth, USA
pp. 319-321