John C. H. Wu

John Ching Hsiung Wu, known in pinyin as Wu Jingxiong, was a Chinese jurist and writer, born on March 28, 1899, in Ningbo during the Qing dynasty, and died on February 6, 1986, in Taipei. He built a career as a law professor and judge in Shanghai through the 1920s and 1930s, working in both Chinese and English across jurisprudence, philosophy of law, Chinese literature and, after his 1937 conversion to Catholicism, Christian spirituality, later translating biblical texts into literary Chinese. His most significant legal role came in 1933, when he was appointed Vice President of the Commission for the Drafting of the Constitution of the Republic of China under Sun Fo, the son of Sun Yat-sen, placing him at the center of China's constitutional founding effort during the Nationalist government. He went on to serve as the Republic of China's ambassador to the Holy See from 1946 to 1949, and after the Nationalist government's retreat to Taiwan he taught at universities in Hawaii and New Jersey before becoming a prominent intellectual figure in Taiwan from 1968 onward. His writings, translated into some fifteen languages, made him one of the most internationally read Chinese legal scholars of the twentieth century.