Chapter 18 Mei Ru'ao: The Lonely Judge (1)

Mei Ruao (1904-1973), born in Nanchang, Jiangxi, is a famous jurist. From 1946 to 1948, he represented China in Tokyo as a judge of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, where he tried Japanese war criminals.After the founding of New China, he served as the legal adviser of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. One night, there was a power outage in Dingyin Hutong in Beijing.Mei Ruao sat on the creaking wicker chair at home.In the dark, he softly hummed the school song of Tsinghua School in its early years: "The West Mountain is green, and the East Sea is vast. Our school is solemn and stands in the center. Eastern and Western cultures are gathered together..."

This scene happened in the early 1960s.Today, when Mei Ru'ao's son Mei Xiao'ao recalled his father, he immediately thought of this scene.When he talked about his father's old age to reporters, he was a little bit embarrassed.He used such an adjective: "loneliness". Mei Xiaoao said that although his father was not yet in his sixtieth year in the early 1960s, he knew well that his era of "Eastern and Eastern cultures gathered under one roof" had passed away. New China completely copied the "big brother" Soviet Union in terms of discipline system. Only a few universities in the country retained their law departments, and the contents of their lectures were all socialist jurisprudence of the Soviet Union.This made Mei Ruao, who graduated from Tsinghua University, studied abroad at Stanford University in the United States, and received a doctorate in law from the University of Chicago, often feel at a loss.He worked hard to follow the party's requirements for the transformation of "old intellectuals", studied Russian religiously, and tried not to be left behind by the situation.

According to Mei Xiaoao, his family can still find the small book in which his father copied Russian words back then.In the Soviet law textbooks, there are also pencil annotations left by my father. As a doctor of law studying in the United States, the legal beliefs that Mei Ruao insisted on gradually lost their support——separation of powers; judicial independence... This is the theory laid down by Montesquieu, the founder of legal philosophy, and also by Jefferson and others. perfected in practice. Obviously, all this is out of date. During the "Cultural Revolution", Mei Ru'ao wrote in an "inspection": "I am actually just a dilapidated and outdated dictionary."

"Actually, his personal environment is pretty good, at least materially. If Ji Xianlin is used as a frame of reference, he didn't suffer too much." Mei Xiaoao said so when explaining his father's lonely state of mind in his later years, " But his discipline is gone, his academics are gone." At that time, the three characters "Mei Ruao" became an empty symbol.What fills it is not the person's innocent feelings and profound knowledge, but an abstract reference that rises and falls with the "situation".Some researchers once commented on this former foreign ministry adviser: "The frequency of Mei Ru'ao's name appearing and the degree of attention are basically a barometer of Sino-Japanese relations." Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, once When there are "problems" in Sino-Japanese relations, he will be invited to write articles; when Sino-Japanese relations are "good", his name is reluctant to be mentioned by people from all sides.

But Mei Ruao is destined to go down in history.This "lonely" judge in his later years has written a rich and colorful stroke in the history of modern China. On March 19, 1946, Dr. Mei Ruao, who was appointed as a judge of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, left Shanghai for Tokyo. On the same day, "Central Daily" and other China's most authoritative media also published a headline on a prominent page: "Clearing Blood Debt: Far East International Military Tribunal judge Mei Ru Wang Ao flies to Tokyo today".