Wang Zaoshi

Wang Zaoshi (, September 2, 1903 – August 5, 1971) was a Chinese lawyer and activist for human rights and constitutional government under both the Nationalist Government in Republican China and the People's Republic of China.

He was educated at Tsinghua University then went to the United States for a doctorate at University of Wisconsin, Madison and post-doctoral work at University of London.

Wang was a native of Anfu County, Jiangxi, born September 1903 to a family of lumber and bamboo merchants.

In 1919, as a middle-school student at Tsinghua College in Beijing he participated in the May Fourth Movement that attacked traditional Chinese civilization, and was twice arrested and jailed.

He was student council president.

During these years, Wang was active in the China Democratic League, many of whose members had been human rights advocates since the 1920s.

After graduation in August 1925 he went to the United States, where he obtained a PhD in political science at the University of Wisconsin in June 1929.

He then went as a research student to London School of Economics, where he worked with Harold Laski, the Fabian Socialist.

In 1930 Wang returned to China by way of the Soviet Union and was appointed Dean of Faculty of Arts at Shanghai's Guanghua University.

In the early 1930s, increasing repression by the Nationalist government led a group of both leftist and liberal intellectuals, including Song Qingling, Cai Yuanpei, and Lin Yutang, to form the China League for the Protection of Civil Rights (, Zongguo minquan baozhang tongmeng), which also urged resistance to Japanese expansionism.

Wang joined them, but seemed more interested in theoretical discussions than their campaigns to support political prisoners or civil rights.

The League dissolved when one of its leading organizers was assassinated outside League headquarters in Shanghai, but the debate continued.

After the Japanese attacked Manchuria in the 1931 Mukden Incident, he founded Zhuzhang yu piping 主张与批评 (Advocacy and criticism) semimonthly, later founded the "Freedom Forum 自由论坛 (Ziyou luntan) magazine. November 1933, he participated in the "Fujian Rebellion.

Near the end of 1935, Wang, Zou Taofen, Shen Junru and several others organized the Shanghai Cultural Salvation Council.

He was one of the so-called Seven Gentlemen Incident, liberal scholars and activists arrested in 1936 for advocating a United Front between the Nationalist Party and the Communist Party of China in order to fight Japanese expansionism.

He was active in the China Democratic League during and after the war.

In 1936 he became head of the Shanghai Federation of National Salvation as cultural propaganda officer.

He urged the Nationalist government to stop internal repression, to free political prisoners, and to put up resistance to the Japanese.

In June 1936, Wang, Shen, Zou, Zhang Naiqi, Li Gongpu, Sha Qianli, and Shi Liang were arrested in the famous Seven Gentlemen Incident.

While in jail, Wang revised the manuscript for his book An Analysis of the China Problem, whose publication government censors had prevented, and worked on Huangmiao ji (Absurd Notes).

In the years leading up to the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945) he was prominent in the National Salvation Association that agitated for resistance to Japan and criticized the Nationalist government for its weak policies.

At the trial in April 1937 Huang argued that indicting his group for the crime of criticizing the government assumed that to criticize the government was to weaken the nation.

This assumption, Wang told the court, ignored modern principles of political theory because the government derived its power from the people.

When the seven were released on bail in July, they proclaimed that "one is not wrong to for wanting to save the country."

In March 1938, Wang offered a politics class at Jiangxi School of Education as Professor and Director, responsible for the training of cadres in Jiangxi Province during the Anti-Japanese War.

In September, in Ji'an he founded Daily Front, and was elected to the National Political Assembly.

After the war he founded the Shanghai Free Press, also served as private legal counsel.

In December 1948, Chiang Kai-shek ordered the seizure of Chu Anping's liberal Shanghai magazine Guancha (Observer), and the arrest of the staff.

Wang Zaoshi organized pressure on the authorities and the prisoners were released in February of the following year.

In the mid-1950s, Wang, along with older, liberal colleagues such as Fei Xiaotong, Chu Anping, Chen Renbing, and Luo Longji, was cautious in his criticisms of the political situation, but in 1957 joined the 100 Flowers Movement, in which liberals, seemingly at Mao's invitation, became more forthright.

When the People's Liberation Army entered Shanghai, Wang was active in the "patriotic democracy movement" and in 1951, was made history professor at Fudan University and director of its Institute of World History.

After the foundation of the People's Republic of China, he continued to advocate constitutional government, democratic reforms, human rights and democracy, but was attacked after the 100 Flowers Movement of 1957 and in the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976).

Wang told the People's Political Consultative Conference of 1957 that the "rule of law has to be strengthened if we are to extend democracy."

In the following Anti-Rightist Movement, Mao Zedong declared them all rightists.

In September 1960 Wang was briefly rehabilitated, but in the Cultural Revolution Wang's daughter, Hairuo had schizophrenia.

His daughter Hairong refused to participate in criticism of her father, was labeled a "counter-revolutionary", and tortured to death.

His sons were hospitalized for schizophrenia and died in hospital.

In 1966 Wang was held in Shanghai First Detention Center, where he died in August 1971 due to hepatorenal syndrome, at the age of 70.

Wang's views on human rights (minquan) had been shaped by Harold Laski's Fabianism.

He argued "human rights" were different from the "natural rights" advocated by John Locke and rejected the idea that these rights proceeded from nature or that they were inherent; Wang insisted that human rights were indeed attached to man's moral nature, but that their central value was that meaningful existence would be impossible without them.