Wu Ching-hsiung (28 March 1899-), known as John C. H. Wu, lawyer, juristic philosopher, educator, and prominent Catholic layman. He was president of the Special High Court at Shanghai, vice chairman of the Legislative Yuan's constitution drafting committee, founder of the T'ien Hsia Monthly, translator of the Psalms and the New Testament, and Chinese minister to the Holy See (1947-48).

Ningpo, Chekiang, 'was the birthplace of John C. H. Wu. His father, Wu Chia-ch'ang (1847-1909), born into a modest family and with little formal education, had become a prominent banker and philanthropist in Ningpo. He also served as the first chairman of the Ningpo Chamber of Commerce. The youngest of three children, John C. H. Wu began his Chinese education at the age of six. After studying under a tutor at home for two years, he entered a Western-style school in Ningpo. In April 1916, while attending a Western-style secondary school, he submitted to an arranged marriage. Both he and his bride, Li Yu-t'i, were 17 years old. Also in 1916 Wu went to Shanghai to enter the Shanghai Baptist College for scientific studies. A schoolmate, Hsu Chih-mo (q.v.), urged Wu to join him at the Peiyang University Law School in Tientsin. Wu agreed and studied at Peiyang during the spring term of 1917. That autumn he returned to Shanghai and registered at Soochow University's Comparative Law School of China, then headed by Dean Charles W. Rankin. Wu thus came into contact with Western missionaries and, under the influence of Dean Rankin, became a Methodist. He was graduated at the top of his class in 1920. In the autumn of 1920 Wu sailed for the United States to enroll as a candidate for the LL.M. degree at the University of Michigan Law School. Because of his exceptional academic record of 10 straight A's in Ann Arbor, he was awarded an advanced J. D. degree in June 1921. During that year he also published his first professional article in English, "Readings from Ancient Chinese Codes and Other Sources of Chinese Law and Legal Ideas," in the Michigan Law Review. The article discussed universal legal ideas in the context of comparative law, stated that the Chinese legal mind was well prepared to accept contemporary Western sociological jurisprudence, and argued that foreign powers should be prepared to give up extraterritorial rights in China. He sent a copy of the article with a note requesting critical comment to Oliver Wendell Holmes, an act that initiated an extended correspondence and warm friendship. Holmes was then already 80; Wu, barely 22. The two men met only briefly and at long intervals, but with each exchange of letters their mutual affection deepened. The letters Holmes sent to Wu over a period of 1 1 years were among the best letters written by Holmes. Throughout his later legal career in China, Wu was strongly influenced by Holmes's legal philosophy.

Wu was recommended by his professors at Michigan to Judge James Brown Scott of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, which awarded him a traveling fellowship to visit Europe for advanced work. At Paris in 1921 he composed a treatise entitled "Les transformations des conceptions fondamentales du droit des gens," an effort to provide international law with a broader juridical basis through philosophical, rather than merely factual, analysis. In Berlin he attended lectures by the prominent neo-Kantian philosopher of law Rudolf Stammler, whom he came to know and admire. As in his relations with Holmes, the young Wu retained notable independence of mind. He sought to strike a middle course between the perceptual, intuitive approach to law of Holmes and the logical, conceptual approach of Stammler.

In March 1923 Wu's study of "The Juristic Philosophy of Justice Holmes" appeared in the Michigan Law Review. That article discussed juristic philosophy, which Wu defined as "man thinking about generalities in connection with law," in relation to problems of epistemology and ethics. It then examined the manner in which Holmes had contributed to resolution of these problems. Judge Benjamin Cardozo, in 1923 lectures at the Yale Law School, took note of Wu's article and indicated that his own thinking was similar; the Cardozo lectures were published in 1924 as The Growth of the Law. In 1923-24 Wu returned to the United States to accept a research scholarship in jurisprudence at the Harvard Law School, then under the direction of Dean Roscoe Pound. An article by Wu on "The Juristic- Philosophy of Roscoe Pound" appeared in January 1924 in the Illinois Law Review. In December 1923 Wu visisted Washington, where he met Justice Holmes for the first time.

John C. H. Wu returned to China in the spring of 1924. That autumn he joined the faculty of his alma mater in Shanghai, the Comparative Law School of China, as professor of law. Three years later, on the resignation of Dean W. W. Blume, Wu was one of the most popular candidates for the deanship. For practical reasons, Wu, who was deemed by some people connected with Soochow University to be a brilliant but somewhat unpredictable person, instead was promoted to a new position, that of principal, while Robert W. H. Sheng became the new dean. Later in 1927, when the new National Government regained jurisdiction over Chinese nationals in the International Settlement of Shanghai and established its own courts there, Wu was named judge of the civil division of the Shanghai Provisional Court. In writing to Holmes of the appointment, Wu declared that he would do his best to "Holmesianize the law of China." As the first Chinese to dispense justice in an area still under foreign administration, Wu laid down the principle that "the law of nations is a part of the common law of China." In the spring of 1928 he was appointed to membership on the codification commission attached to the ministry of justice cxt Nanking. That summer he became presiding judge of the criminal division of the Court of Appeals. Judicial Essays and Studies, a collection of his papers on aspects of legal and judicial philosophy, was published by the Commercial Press in Shanghai in 1928.

The year 1929 brought Wu's promotion to the presidency of the Special High Court at Shanghai. Late in the year, however, he resigned his judgeship to accept offers from institutions in the United States. In January 1930 he delivered the Julius Rosenwald Foundation lectures at the Northwestern University Law School in Chicago, where he discussed China's traditional and modern legal systems. He then took up a research fellowship at the Harvard Law School during the spring term. During his stay in Cambridge in 1930, he went to call on Justice Holmes at Beverly, Massachusetts. This proved to be their final meeting. Wu returned to China that summer to collect Chinese materials for a new course on commercial law which he was to offer at Harvard; but the illness of his wife forced him to cancel the course and remain in Shanghai.

In the autumn of 1930 John C. H. Wu began the practice of law in Shanghai. He was immediately, almost notoriously, successful, receiving more in fees during his first month of practice than he had earned in all his previous years as professor and judge. His academic qualifications and professional prominence combined to make him one of the most sought-after Chinese lawyers of the day. Despite his success, Wu found only minimal intellectual challenge in broken contracts, torts, and disputes over legacies and became increasingly frustrated and depressed by his situation. Thus, when Sun Fo (q.v.) invited him to join the Legislative Yuan in 1933, Wu quickly accepted. Sun Fo, who had been named president of the Legislative Yuan in 1932, held that post until 1948. During most of this period Wu served successively as vice chairman of the constitution drafting committee, chairman of the general committee, and chairman of the foreign relations committee of the Legislative Yuan. As vice chairman of the constitution drafting committee, he was entrusted with responsibility for the first draft of a new national constitution scheduled for 1936. He singlehandedly prepared the draft in four weeks, and he then was authorized to publish it under his own name for public comment. The original draft went through manifold revisions before it was adopted by the National Government in 1946, but the section of the document in which Wu had most interest, the chapter on basic rights and duties of the citizen, was preserved almost intact when the constitution finally was promulgated.

While serving in the Legislative Yuan, Wu also took an active part in the affairs of the Sun Yat-sen Institute for the Advancement of Culture and Learning. In May 1935, under the institute's auspices, he founded the T'ien Hsia Monthly, an English-language magazine devoted to increasing East-West cultural communication. Wu invited Wen Yuan-ning, a British-trained scholar of English literature (later Chinese ambassador to Greece), to become chief editor and asked Lin Yü-t'ang (q.v.) and T. K. Ch'uan (Ch'uan Tseng-ku) to be coeditors. This journal published many contributions of lasting significance by both Chinese and Western writers before it suspended publication in 1941. Wu devoted much of his energies to literary and editorial matters and delved deeply into both Chinese and Western literature. Shortly after the Sino-Japanese war began in 1937, John C. H. Wu became a Roman Catholic. His conversion was sparked by a chance reading of the autobiography of St. Theresa of Lisieux, translated into Chinese by Ma Liang (q.v.). The Theresian message of God's love, together with unbounded faith in God's mercy, struck him with the force of a revelation. Wu had found the Methodist brand of Protestantism emotionally cold and had investigated Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism. The problem of sin deeply disturbed him, for, like Boswell in London, Wu in Shanghai had oscillated between bouts of dissipation and pangs of conscience. The door opened by the life of St. Theresa led to a passage of many turnings—mysticism and dogma, philosophy and asceticism—and Wu found himself intrigued by each new discovery. It was not the intellectualism of Catholicism that attracted Wu; rather it was the simplicity of the Catholic message, its admission of the inscrutable mystery of God's love, and its demand for child-like faith. Wu's submission to the Catholic Church was as dramatic as it was genuine. He was baptized in December 1937 and was confirmed two years later. Within a few months, his wife (baptized Mary Teresa) and their children had followed Wu into the Catholic Church.

In 1938 Wu moved to Hong Kong, where the T'ien Hsia Monthly was edited until its demise three years later. When Japanese troops invaded Hong Kong in December 1941, Wu was interned for several weeks but later released through the intercession of Sir Robert Kotewall. He escaped from Hong Kong in May 1942 and sailed up the East River to Kweilin. After several weeks of rest, he went to Chungking, where he was a guest of Fu Ping-ch'ang, then vice minister of foreign affairs. He was commissioned by Chiang Kai-shek to translate the Psalms into Chinese. Wu returned to Kweilin in late 1942 and spent two secluded but happy years preparing a metrical rendering of the Psalms which would have the flavor of classical Chinese poetry. In the autumn of 1944 a new Japanese offensive forced him to move to Kweiyang and then to Chungking. Wu's translation, in which Chiang Kai-shek and his wife, Soong Mei-ling (q.v.), took direct personal interest, was later published by the Commercial Press in 1946. The work was widely acclaimed for its elegance, and Wu himself rated it his happiest literary production in Chinese. In the spring of 1945 John C. H. Wu served as adviser to the Chinese delegation to the United Nations Conference on International Organization at San Francisco. He returned to Chungking to attend meetings of the Political Consultative Conference in early 1946. Later that year Chiang Kai-shek named Wu Chinese minister to the Holy See, and Wu presented his credentials to Pope Pius XII in February 1947. During his mission to the Vatican, Wu completed a Chinese translation of the New Testament, also rendered in the classical Chinese style (published in Hong Kong in 1949). But he found the rigors of diplomatic life in Rome hardly more congenial than law practice in Shanghai. After returning to China briefly in early 1949, he returned to Rome. Soon afterward, he resigned his diplomatic post. In 1949 Wu moved to Honolulu to become visiting professor of Chinese philosophy at the University of Hawaü, where he remained for two years. There he wrote the autobiographical volume Beyond East and West, published in 1951. Despite its undisguisedly ambitious title, the book drew wide attention for its summation of Wu's 30-year spiritual odyssey, his search for an immutable scale of values suitable for all men. A second book, The Interior Carmel, also written in English, was a study of the Christian path of perfection.

In 1951 Wu was invited to join the law faculty of Seton Hall University in South Orange, New Jersey. Legal philosophy had been an early intellectual love, and he returned to the subject as though discharging a debt of honor. As a youth he had been a tentative champion of the natural law; in maturity, he viewed it as the basis of all law. The author of natural law was God, who either promulgated it through an agent (e.g. Moses) or imprinted it in men's hearts. This concept is indeed orthodox Catholic teaching, of which Aquinas was the ablest expositor; but Wu articulated it with the authority of an academically trained jurist. Fountain of Justice (1955) and Cases and Materials on Jurisprudence (1958) presented Wu's mature thinking. In 1957 he received the honor of appointment as a member of the Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague. As a Catholic writer who lived his later years in the United States, Wu became better known in the English-speaking world than in China. His classical Chinese renderings of the Psalms and the New Testament could not achieve the general utility or popularity of versions written in modern vernacular Chinese. His poetical English verson of the Tao Te Ching of Lao-tzu, published in 1961, was praised as a graceful translation prepared by a man for whom the famous Taoist text "represents a living tradition, not a philological exercise." A collection of his essays, Chinese Humanism and Christian Spirituality, edited by Paul K. T. Sih, appeared in 1965. Wu was a panel member at the East-West Philosophers' conferences held in Hawaü in 1959 and 1964, and two of his papers prepared for those meetings, "Chinese Legal and Political Philosophy" and "The Status of the Individual in the Political and Legal Traditions of Old and New China," appeared in The Chinese Mind: Essentials of Chinese Philosophy and Culture, edited by Charles A. Moore and published in 1967. Wu held honorary degrees from a number of institutions, including Portland University (Oregon) , Boston College, and St. John's University (New York) ; and he was an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Academy of Living Catholic Authors.

After 1937 John C. H. Wu was generally regarded as one of China's chief lay exponents of Catholic ideas. Some observed that, as in the case of Hsu Kuang-ch'i (baptized Paul Hsu; 1562-1633; ECCP, I, 316-19), the Catholic Church had found a true intellectual convert in China. Others responded that Wu was the greater gain to the Church since he was far better equipped than the Ming dynasty scholar and official to appreciate and interpret the Catholic faith.

Wu's first wife died in the winter of 1959. During their more than 40 years of marriage, 13 children had been born to them. One son, Peter (b. 1934) became a priest of the Maryknoll Society. In June 1967 Wu visited Taiwan, where he married Chu Wen-ying (baptized Maria Agnes) from Hong Kong.