Wang Ch'ung-hui

Wang Ch'ung-hui

Wang Ch'ung-hui ( Chinese  王 寵 惠 , Pinyin Wáng Chǒnghuì , W.-G. Wang Ch'ung-hui , born  December 1, 1881 in Guangzhou , †  March 15, 1958 in Taipei ) was a Chinese lawyer , politician and diplomat . He served several times as Justice and Education Minister and in 1912 and from 1937 to 1941 as Foreign Minister of the Republic of China . He was also President of the Judiciary Yuan , the supervisory authority for the judiciary of the Republic of China, from 1928 to 1931 and 1948 to 1958 . From 1931 to 1936 he worked as a judge at the Permanent International Court of Justice , of which he had previously been an assistant judge from 1922 to 1930.

Life

Wang Ch'ung-hui was born in Guangzhou in the Chinese province of Guangdong in 1881 and graduated from Peiyang University in 1900 . He then studied in the United States at the University of California and Yale University , where he received his doctorate in comparative civil law in 1905 . From 1905 to 1907 he was in England , where he 1907 in London admitted to the lawyer received and in the same year an English translation of the German Civil Code published, which was in due course to the standard English translation of the German Civil Code. He then devoted himself to comparative law studies in Germany and France from 1907 to 1911 .

In 1912 he became the first foreign minister of the newly formed Republic of China . In the further course of his political career he was also Prime Minister from August to November 1922, from March to June 1912, from December 1921 to August 1922 and from January to September 1924 Minister of Justice, from August to September 1922 and from May to June 1926 Minister of Education as well as foreign minister again from March 1937 to April 1941 during the first half of the Second Sino-Japanese War . In 1920/1921 he served as the presiding judge at the country's Supreme Court, and from 1928 to 1931 he served as the first president of the Judicial Yuan. In these functions he contributed significantly to the codification of large parts of the civil and criminal law of the Chinese Republic. His achievements in this area included a divorce law , which combined modern legal standards with ancient Chinese customs.

After the founding of the League of Nations after the end of the First World War , Wang Ch'ung-hui became the chief delegate of his home country at the meetings of the League of Nations. From 1928 he was a member of the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague . After he was also a member of the newly created Permanent International Court of Justice (StIGH) as an assistant judge ( juge-suppléant ) from 1922 to 1930 and during this time was involved in several decisions and legal opinions, including the Wimbledon case in 1923, the first decision of the court , he was elected judge at the StIGH in September 1930 by the Assembly and the Council of the League of Nations . He took office in early 1931 and served on the court until his resignation in January 1936, before returning to China.

Wang Ch'ung-hui took part in the founding assembly of the United Nations in San Francisco in June 1945 as a delegate from his home country and was involved, among other things, in drafting the statute of the International Court of Justice , which was founded as the successor institution to the StIGH. With the defeat of the Kuomintang under the leadership of Chiang Kai-shek in the Chinese Civil War , he fled to Taiwan . From 1948 to 1958 he served again as President of the Justice Yuan of the Republic of China.

Wang Ch'ung-hui was married with one son. The American Society for International Law made him an honorary member in 1944. From 1948 he was also a member of the Academia Sinica . He died in Taipei in 1958 .

literature

• Biographical Notes concerning the Judges and Deputy-Judges. M. Wang, Judge. In: Seventh Annual Report of the Permanent Court of International Justice. AW Sijthoff's Publishing, Leiden 1931, pp. 36/37
• Ole Spiermann: Judge Wang Chung-hui at the Permanent Court of International Justice. In: Chinese Journal of International Law. 5 (1) / 2006. Oxford University Press, pp. 115-128, ISSN  1540-1650
• Raymond M. Lorantas: Wang Ch'ung-hui. In: Warren F. Kuehl (Ed.): Biographical Dictionary of Internationalists. Greenwood Press, Westport 1983, ISBN 0-31-322129-4 , pp. 754/755
• Wang Chung-hui, lawyer, 77, dies. In: The New York Times . Edition of March 16, 1958, p. 87

Web links

• Literature by and about Wang Ch'ung-hui in the catalog of the German National Library

Commons : Wang Chonghui  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Note: This article places the family name before the person's first name. This is the usual order in Chinese. Wang is the family name here, Ch'ung-hui is the first name.