Jingshan Wang was born in 1948 in Beijing into a family with a long intellectual tradition. Her father graduated from the Law School of Peking University in the 1930s and received his Ph.D. in government from Cornell University in the United States in the 1940s. He taught in the Law School of Peking University upon his return to China in 1947 and later in Beijing College of Political Science and Law (now China University of Political Science and Law). Her mother was a high school teacher. Jingshan is the third of the family¡¯s four children.
Having grown up in Communist China, Jingshan once believed that the Communists had saved China and Chairman Mao was the sun of the universe¡ªwhile two thirds of the world population were suppressed and exploited by imperialists and capitalists. But ironically, her childhood and adolescence were shadowed by the fact that her grandfather was a landlord and his father was classified as a historical counterrevolutionary¡ªboth were the enemies of the people. The tragedies happened in her family further darkened her life: both her sister and her aunt died in 1966 for political reasons.
During the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), Jingshan was sent to the countryside and lived there as a peasant for seven and half years. After the Cultural Revolution, she worked from 1976 to 1979 in an oil field hospital as an unskilled worker.
Although under Mao¡¯s China her family background prevented her from going to college, Jingshan was able to attend the Graduate School in the Law Department of Peking University in 1979. Upon her graduation, she joined the faculty there in 1982 and taught Western Legal Theory. In 1983 she came to America to enter the Government Department at Cornell University and received her Ph.D. there in 1988. Later in the same year, she taught a seminar in Chinese Law at the University of Texas, where she met her future husband, a professor in the law school. Jingshan returned to China in the summer of 1988 and taught at Peking University for two years.
After Jingshan and her husband married in Beijing in 1989, she moved to America permanently the following year. The freedom she enjoyed in America gave her the chance, for the first time in her life, to study what she really liked. Jingshan changed her career to Molecular Biology and received a Master¡¯s degree in that subject from the University of Texas in 1995. Presently, she lives with her husband in Austin, Texas, doing research in molecular biology at the University of Texas.
