It all began in 1993. Xue Bo graduated from the China University of Political Science and Law. One day, while searching for information on international law, he and his classmates suddenly realized that there was no applicable English-Chinese Anglo-American Law Dictionary.
Anglo-American law most often refers to a region in the Americas where English is the primary language and British culture, and the British Empire has significantly impacted the development of the legal system. This includes the United States of America, most of Canada, and some Caribbean countries.
So he thought: “How do we compile such a dictionary?” No one had any experience of such a project; they would have to cross the river by feeling the stones.
Initially, in a dormitory at the China University of Political Science and Law, dozens of young law students worked hard on the project from 8.00 am to late at night for two years. Some preliminary results were finally worked out, but their amateur efforts would not pass the test when shown to the senior faculty staff with advanced Anglo-American legal education.
This was not a personal problem on their part, as it was impossible to reconnect with this legal culture overnight after decades of artificially severing the Anglo-American tradition of education.
China’s law elites were found once again
By chance and good fortune, Xue Bo learned that a group of long-forgotten academic elders from China’s Soochow University School of Law was still living in Shanghai. Thus, the most suitable dictionary reviewers were found.
Many years later, Xue Bo still vividly remembers the first time he visited these forgotten elders. Lu Jun sat trembling in a small room, leaning for support on a worn chair.
Xue Bo told him: “For whatever reason, the world has forgotten you. Is it still the same now?” Lu Jun’s hearing had been severely weakened, and Xue Bo could only half-kneel on the ground and whisper in his ear: “You have not only profound learning, you are also a symbol of the academic peak of the times; please be sure to participate in our work.” The frail Lu Jun listened quietly, tears flowing from his eyes, and said: “I promise you.”
In East China, Xue Bo found 14 elderly academics to participate in the editing process of the English-Chinese Anglo-American Law Dictionary. In addition, there were also Xu Zhisen, a supervisor of the Shanghai Lawyers Union in the 1930s, who had been working as a middle school teacher since 1949, and Jiang Yiping, a clerk at Xinhua Bookstore before 1979. He became the director of the Foreign Languages Department of the East China University of Science and Technology after the 1980s.
The average age of the elderly reviewers was around 84 years, and this project was the culmination of their significant contribution of wisdom for posterity. This is the largest legal dictionary ever written in China, with more than 4.6 million words, three times the size of a similar dictionary published in Japan.
A dictionary compiled by two generations of scholars with no jobs, power, or money
With no government support, financial support, flowers, or applause and not even a regular office, two generations of scholars quietly published their magnum opus in obscurity after nine years of painstaking work.
A director of the Ministry of Justice commented: “It is a strange thing that a dictionary with the authority of the state is compiled by a group of scholars and old people who have no job, no power, and no money, and they have done what our entire judicial administration and educational system wanted to accomplish but could not do.”
Behind the dictionary is an essential group of elder law sages who had been humiliated, tossed aside, and forgotten. They are some of the most famous names in legal science; some were already noted scholars and authors of jurisprudence publications before 1949.
Soochow University School of Law and the International Court of Justice
Soochow University School of Law, founded in Shanghai in 1915, was the only school in China that systematically taught Anglo-American law and Chinese law and was one of China’s most prestigious law schools before 1949.
From the 1930s to the 1990s, there were six Chinese judges at the International Court of Justice, starting with Gu Weijun and ending with Li Haopei (a judge of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia of the United Nations in 1997), all of whom were professors or graduates of Soochow University School of Law.
The most outstanding period in the school’s history was in 1946, when the Tokyo Trial was conducted via Anglo-American jurisprudence. Because they could not find a suitable candidate for quite a while, the then-national government became anxious about it, and finally, Chiang Kai-shek named professors from Soochow University. The result was that almost all the judges, prosecutors, and advisers from China who attended the Military Tribunal for the Far East came from this school.
Yet, the cream of Chinese jurisprudence for the first half of the 20th century, following the episode of 1949, almost all who remained in mainland China had to abandon jurisprudence altogether and do other things that had nothing to do with the law. Whether they became English teachers or prisoners in labor camps, that is, for teachers and students from 1957 to 1966, their relationship with Soochow Law School was deemed a sin.
How did these law luminaries and their families survive the chaos and the hardships of the Cultural Revolution? What were these learned and knowledgeable people like in the second half of their lives? How did they and their families survive that turbulent era?
Zhou Nan: A ‘living dictionary of Roman law’
Zhou Nan (1908-2004), an expert in Roman law, was celebrated in China as a “living dictionary of Roman law.” His book On Roman Law is considered authoritative in the field.
In 1929, he was recommended by Hu Shi to study in Belgium and became one of the five Chinese who received a doctorate from the University of Leuven in Belgium before 1949. The Commercial Press published a series of books titled A Hundred Years of Literature, all of which were written by famous scholars of the century on Chinese academic history, such as Wang Guowei, Hu Shi, and Chen Yinke. Zhou Nan is the only living author of the series.
Xue Bo never imagined that a towering law academic would live in such an environment: a dilapidated two-story building in Shanghai. The corridors are dark, the wooden floors are warped, creaking when you walk, and the corners are covered with cobwebs. Zhou Nan lives in a unit of about 10 square meters on the second floor. Zhou Nan’s valuable belongings are a black-and-white TV and a single-door refrigerator.
In the mid-1950s, Zhou Nan, who was working in the southwest branch of the Supreme Court, was suddenly sent to the library of Qinghai Normal University. Since then, Zhou Nan spent more than 20 years in a place thousands of miles from his hometown of Shanghai. It was not until 1980 that Zhou Nan entered Anhui University. After working there for 10 years until his retirement, he had to return to Shanghai because he had nowhere to stay.
Later, Zhou Nan moved back to his daughter’s house in Anhui because he did not see sunlight all year round in his Shanghai residence. By then, he was in a wheelchair due to his mobility difficulties. When he was in his daughter’s house, he would finally fulfill his wish to bask in the sun indoors.
Lu Jun: Dean of Central University’s Law School and Harvard Doctor of Juridical Science
In the house of Lu Jun (1909-2000) from Harvard University, the only electrical appliance was a palm-sized electric fan. Lu Jun, who was in his 90s, was blind in one eye, with glasses glued to one side with an old envelope. “When I was sick, I didn’t dare go to the hospital and couldn’t afford medicine.”
Who would have thought that this frail older man, who had been bedridden for a long time, was a university scholar to whom the Harvard Law Review sends sample journals with every issue? He was one of China’s few Harvard Doctors of Law and the former Central University Law School dean.
Cai Jin: Judge and Special Administrator
When facing another older man who received a bachelor’s degree in law from Soochow University in 1944, Xue Bo found that the five buttons on his shirt differed. He was Cai Jin, a judge of the Zhejiang District Court and the Shanghai Special Administrative District Court in the 1930s. He taught at Shanghai Xiangyang Middle School after 1957.
He lived with his youngest son and his family in a small room with a bedboard and a thin quilt behind a bamboo screen in his bedroom. His grandson and granddaughter-in-law lived in the inner chamber. A worn-out milk powder can contains Cai Jin’s valuable belongings.
After becoming seriously ill, Cai Jin lived in a community hospital on Nanjing West Road in Shanghai. But for the intervention of a kind person in charge of the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences who made the arrangement, it would have been difficult for Cai Jin to move in there. Even then, he could only be placed in an enclosed balcony.
When he was dying, Xue Bo went to the hospital to see him and witnessed an unforgettable scene: Cai Jin was lying alone in one corner of the balcony, and the other corner was the resting place of his long-time caregiver.
Cai Jin died suddenly when the English-Chinese Anglo-American Law Dictionary compilation was nearing completion. In addition to his 1933 Bachelor of Law Degree from Soochow University, accompanying him into another world was a 49-page dictionary manuscript, which he had personally reviewed and was gently placed in his coffin.
These souls had all been forgotten and frail from the chaos and turbulence of the Cultural Revolution and the aftermath. Their priceless body of knowledge and wisdom was rescued from extinction for posterity.
Translated by Chua BC
