Jiang Ping, 92, the ‘conscience of China’s legal world’

BEIJING — Jiang Ping, a legal scholar who helped lay the foundation for China’s civil code, and whose experiences with political persecution shaped his relentless advocacy for individual rights in the face of state power, died on Dec. 19 in Beijing. He was 92.

His death, in a hospital, was confirmed by the China University of Political Science and Law, where he had served as president and was a longtime professor.

Often called “the conscience of China’s legal world,” Mr. Jiang established himself in the 1980s as a highly regarded teacher and leading scholar, one of four professors who helped oversee the drafting of China’s first civil rights framework. His reputation was cemented during the 1989 pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square, when as university president he publicly supported the student protesters.

After the government quashed the protests and massacred the protesters, Mr. Jiang was removed from the university presidency. But he remained wildly popular on campus. Even after his removal, law students wore T-shirts printed with one of his best-known refrains: “Bow only to the truth.”

In the preface to his 2010 autobiography, Mr. Jiang outlined two qualities he said were important for Chinese intellectuals: “One is an independent spirit that does not succumb to any political pressure and dares to think independently. The other is a critical spirit,” he wrote. “My only wish is to earnestly inherit these two qualities,” he added.

His moral authority was augmented by his own story. In the 1950s, as a young teacher, he was denounced as anti-communist after criticizing excessive, top-down bureaucracy and ordered to be “reformed,” as the government called it, through labor. He was not allowed to teach law for two decades. And while working, he was hit by a train, leaving him with a prosthetic leg.

In the 1970s and ’80s, as China began to recover from the chaos of Mao Zedong’s rule, Mr. Jiang returned to his quest for reform, taking up teaching and administrative roles at the university and serving as a highranking member of China’s legislature and deputy director of its legal committee. In addition to the civil rights framework, he helped craft China’s property law, contract law and company law, as the country moved toward a market economy.

But it was in the decades after Tiananmen, when he no longer held official or administrative positions, that Mr. Jiang made the most sweeping calls for change. He argued that human rights and constitutional democracy were inseparable from the property and commercial rights he had helped introduce. He signed open letters criticizing censorship. When Beijing mounted a crackdown on hundreds of human rights lawyers in 2015, Jiang said that all of Chinese society should be concerned with protecting lawyers as watchdogs.

In recent years, as the rule of law has retreated even further under China’s current leader, Xi Jinping, Mr. Jiang continued lecturing widely.

“He was the legal mentor of our era, and the legal mentor of our people,” said He Weifang, a prominent Chinese legal scholar and former student and friend of Jiang’s.

Jiang Ping was born Jiang Weilian on Dec. 28, 1930, in Dalian, a city in northeastern China. His father, Jiang Huaicheng, worked in a bank, and his mother, Wang Guiying, was a homemaker.

His first marriage ended in divorce.

Mr. Jiang’s second wife, Cui Qi, died in July. He leaves a son, Jiang Bo, and a daughter, Jiang Fan, as well as an older sister, Jiang Weishan, and two grandchildren.