Tong Zhiwei: Analysis of a “Chongqing-Style” Legal Scholar

• Author: China Law Digest compiled news

Tong Zhiwei is a 1978 graduate of Jingzhou Teacher’s Vocational School, has a Master’s in International Affairs from Fudan University, Class of ’85, and Doctorate of Law from Wuhan University Law School, Class of ‘94. He has taught on various occasions at the Wuhan University Law School, the Zhongnan University of Economics and Law, and the East China University of Political Science and Law. He is currently a professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, where he is the director of the Constitutional and Administrative Rule of Law Institute. He is also the Deputy Chairman of the Chinese Constitutional Law Association.

Tong Zhiwei’s fields of professional specialization are comparative constitutional law and jurisprudence. He is recognized within the legal community for his “originality and grandness in thought of constitutionalism and theoretical framework, and uniqueness in style” His major academic contributions include his advocacy for a theory of rights and power-centered theory, which focuses on the dual concepts of “rights” and “power” to analyze legal phenomena, using this rights- power methodology to undertake a content and conceptual restructuring of legal relationships. This perspective on legal issues puts him diametrically at odds with the prevailing approach to legal analysis, which “structures legal theory around the concepts of rights and duties.”

Tong Zhiwei was formerly the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Legal Studies at East China University of Political Science and Law. One of his surprising moves as editor of the Journal was to institute a set of rigorous standards for conducting academic legal work, on the basis of which he published a “declaration” in the fourth issue of 2009 Journal in which he announced that the journal would not be accepting articles from Professor Liu Songshan for a three year period, in order to punish Liu for what Tong termed “academic misconduct.” Later, because a university academic committee...