“If I am to die, I will die on the path to my humanity”
At a dinner with friends late last year, he recited “We Are Wooden People,” a poem by a Beijing writer that he said distilled the spirit of the times. (A full translation of the poem is here). “We are wooden people, forbidden to speak, not allowed to laugh, not even permitted to move,” Mr. He read out. “If I am to die, I will die on the path to my humanity.”
BEIJING — These are
quiet but fretful days for He Weifang, who has spent two decades at the
forefront of struggles for the rule of law in China. He may be China’s best known law
professor; he is also,
in many ways, persona non grata in his country. Universities where students
once thronged to hear his lectures cannot invite him. Newspapers that regularly
published his columns and lionized him as a trailblazer cannot mention him.
Frustrated by censors, he has mostly given up trying to speak out on China’s internet,
where his dormant Weibo social media account still has nearly
1.9 million followers.
“It’s even become hard
to publish papers in academic journals,” Mr. He said with a half-bemused shake
of his head in a bookstore cafe near Peking University, where he has
taught for 23 years. “The past five years have been really, really stifling.” Mr.
He (pronounced “her”) is among the most prominent of the liberal Chinese
intellectuals who find themselves huddled down in a political gale. Under President Xi
Jinping, the unyielding
Communist Party leader, China has turned sharply
against the advocates of
political pluralism and legal limits on party power.
Instead, Mr. Xi has
reasserted the party’s sweeping supremacy. In March, the legislature removed a
two-term limit on
the presidency, paving the way to a generation of
unchallenged rule. Mr.
He said that even he was stunned by the boldness of the constitutional changes.
“I didn’t expect them to be so impatient and swift,” he said of the changes,
including the expansion of an anticorruption
agency that can
detain officials beyond the reach of courts and lawyers. “The authority of the
pre-existing national legal system has been greatly weakened.”
Some of Mr. He’s
friends and at least one
of his former students have
been imprisoned for their political and legal advocacy; other scholars have
retreated into silence or moved overseas. Some once like-minded academics now
praise Mr. Xi’s authoritarian ways. A global tide of authoritarian sentiment
has also emboldened Mr. He’s critics inside China. But Mr. He, 57, said life
had taught him to take a longer view of the country’s political evolution. His
career has followed the twisted path of Chinese liberal reformist hopes over
four decades, from the optimistic ferment of the 1980s to the reversals that
have accelerated into an avalanche under Mr. Xi. “Recent developments in China
have delivered a big wake-up call to Chinese liberals that nothing will come
easily,” he said.
Mr. He in 1982, when
he was finishing his law studies in the city of Chongqing. “It was an
optimistic era,” he said. “There was a feeling that Chinese society was slowly
thawing.” Even while banished from the Chinese news media, Mr. He commands a
warm following among students and lawyers. He is still allowed to teach foreign
legal history and comparative law at Peking University, which he said is more
tolerant of mavericks than many other Chinese campuses. While he was being
interviewed for this article, a student waited patiently to shake his hand.
During another interview, editors at a law publisher greeted him as an old
friend.
“He’s a public
intellectual and has a big following, but of course it’s suppressed now,” said
Eva Pils, a law scholar at King’s College London who studies Chinese human
rights lawyers and has known Mr. He for about 15 years. “But I think he sees
himself in a longer historical trajectory as one of those Chinese scholars who
spoke up whatever the consequences.” China’s tradition of liberal dissent burst
out of hiding in the late 1970s, when the nation was recovering from the
upheavals of Mao Zedong’s final years. For Mr. He, the scars from that time
were deeply felt.
He was born in
Shandong Province in eastern China, where his father, He Chuanyou, was a doctor
who had once worked in the military. But the father was engulfed in the mass
persecutions of the Cultural Revolution, and in 1970 he killed himself by
severing the arteries in his legs, Professor He said. These memories swelled 10
years ago, when Bo Xilai, an ambitious politician, began reviving Mao-era songs
and rhetoric in Chongqing, a city in southwest China. Mr. He issued an open letter in 2011 denouncing Mr. Bo’s red revivalism, and
he was jubilant when Mr. Bo fell in a
scandal the
following year. But dangerous nostalgia for Mao’s time persisted, Mr. He said. “When
I was young, a wall at the front of our home was covered with big-character
posters accusing my father of being an ideological reactionary,” he said in an
interview. “I realized that the Cultural Revolution was a tragedy that must
never be allowed to happen again.”
In 1978, Mr. He won a
coveted place in higher education, after Deng Xiaoping, the reformist party
leader, revived competitive entrance exams. He had aspired to study Chinese
literature and become a journalist or writer. Unexpectedly, he was sent to
study law in Chongqing. It was there, at 18, that he was thrown into the
ferment of ideas released by Deng’s liberalizations, when ideas of rule of law
and democratic accountability began to circulate. “It was an optimistic era,”
he said. “There was a feeling that Chinese society was slowly thawing.” Mr. He
became intrigued by how Western ideas like the rule of law had emerged in the
Middle Ages, and he went on to study legal history in Beijing. Back then, it
was easier to envision the Communist Party evolving into a more open form of
government. He joined the party in 1984, and remains a member.
Mr. He at the Chinese
University of Hong Kong in 2013. He is “a powerful speaker, humorous and very
popular,” a former student said. “At that time, it didn’t feel like you had to
make a choice between the party and democracy, because party leaders seemed to
be heading in the right direction,” he said. “There was no unbridgeable gulf
between the party and the intellectuals.” But in the late 1980s, as Deng and
other leaders recoiled from political relaxation, students and liberal
academics demanded faster change. Student protesters occupied Tiananmen Square
in Beijing in 1989, and Mr. He joined the hubbub.
On June 4 that year, a
friend banged on his dormitory door to say that soldiers had shot their way
into the city. Mr. He said he had seen five corpses in pools of blood on the
grounds of the college where he was staying. For many Chinese intellectuals,
the years that followed were a time for rethinking. Outright transformation of
China’s one-party system seemed out of reach. Mr. He and other law experts
began to discuss how to encourage progress within limits, especially through
measures to promote legal judicial independence and by spreading ideas of legal
rights.
“Our assumption was that we didn’t have to
touch other major parts of political reform,” he said. “We could make progress
here, because it wasn’t so ideological.” Mr. He emerged in the 1990s as one of
China’s most articulate proponents of this legal approach. In 2003, he backed a successful
campaign, whose leaders
included two former students, to ban the detention and expulsion of migrants
moving into Chinese cities who were accused of not having the right permits.
The case became a landmark in Chinese hopes of using the law to promote
political change. “Back then, no other law scholar played such an important
role in disseminating liberal ideas,” Teng Biao, a former student of Mr. He’s who led
that campaign, said by telephone from New Jersey, where he lives. “His most
important characteristic was his speeches everywhere across the country — he’s
a powerful speaker, humorous and very popular.”
But even before Mr.
Xi’s rise, Chinese leaders were worried by this surge of legal activism. In
2006, Mr. He gave a blunt speech to a closed door conference in Beijing, castigating
the Communist Party for sitting outside the law. His comments leaked onto the
internet, drawing denunciations and official pressure. Since Mr. Xi came to
power in 2012, the pressure on Mr. He and other wayward intellectuals has
deepened. But he said he was prepared to wait until he would be allowed to roam
the country again, giving talks. At a dinner with friends late last year, he
recited “We Are Wooden People,” a poem by a Beijing writer that he said
distilled the spirit of the times. (A full translation of the poem is here). “We are wooden people,
forbidden to speak, not allowed to laugh, not even permitted to move,” Mr. He
read out. “If I am to die, I will die on the path to my humanity.”
