P. C. Chang and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Hans Ingvar Roth

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СКАЧАТЬ of foreign control in several key aspects, such as the extraterritorial laws that stipulated separate judicial codes for Chinese and foreign citizens. The customs system was also divided. Sun Yat-sen waged a propaganda campaign with three principal objectives for the new republic: (1) national independence; (2) constitutional democracy; and (3) economic freedom and self-sufficiency. The creation of national unity was, of course, a central objective. Sun Yat-sen’s principles were adopted by his successor Chiang Kai-shek in the late 1920s. For both Sun Yat-sen and Chiang Kai-shek, it was essential to remove foreign influence in China and to put a stop to the fragmentation that had defined the warlord period.

      The so-called warlord period refers specifically to the years 1916–1928, when warlords mobilized private armies in order to take control of different territorial areas. Some of these warlords were supported by foreign powers and engaged in a series of wars and minor conflicts with each other, many of which had their origins in ideological disagreements. Some warlords, such as Zhang Xun, were deeply conservative and wanted to restore the empire, whereas others, such as Yan Xishan, advocated what for its time was a highly progressive social policy in Shanxi Province. Opinions are divided as to how to understand this period. Although some commentators have characterized it as an early attempt at substantive modernization and the balancing of power, the majority of Chinese tend to view it as a period of confusion and internal struggle.⁵⁶

       Brief Return to China and the May Fourth Movement

      In 1916, at the age of twenty-four and after almost six years in the United States, Chang returned to China to teach in his brother’s Nankai School, where he also became vice principal and director of the school’s new theater group. The plays mentioned earlier were performed at the school after Chang’s return and served to establish him as the school’s artistic leading light. During his early years as a teacher and school administrator in China, Chang also evinced a deep interest in subjects far removed from theater and literature. For example, he became involved in the struggle to retain agricultural and forestry programs at Gingling University, Nanking. The following year, 1917, Chang stepped in as a temporary replacement for his brother Poling as school principal. He was to serve in that position for the two years that Poling studied at Teachers College, Columbia University, under the supervision of John Dewey. When the school was hit by major flooding in autumn 1917, Chang helped to save several pupils from the floodwaters and even managed to maintain the teaching schedule despite extensive damage to the school buildings. In summer 1918, the school moved back into its old premises.

      After the school had got under way properly, Chang put on a new play, Xin Cun Zheng (The New Village Head), in which he introduced modern, Western directorial methods. For Chang, this meant that everyone involved in a dramatic production should follow an agreed-upon script and that the director should play a central role in rehearsals. In so doing, he broke with the improvisation-based theatrical tradition in China, which was largely centered on so-called star performers. Chang instead advocated a system in which every actor had a principal part under the director’s strict guidance. Chang admired the theater traditions in the Western countries, which had their origin in ancient Greece, and he was eager to introduce these traditions to China. He thought that many people in the Western countries saw theater not mainly as “entertainment,” as in China, but as something unique and important on its own, so-called pure theater. In Chinese theater, there was a combination of speech, singing, dancing, and pantomime to different extents. Theater and theater actors also had a higher social status in Western countries than in China, according to Chang.

      The play The New Village Head would in time come to be seen as an early intellectual forerunner of the May Fourth Movement, which emerged in 1919 against the backdrop of Japan’s expanding geopolitical ambitions in China. What exactly did the May Fourth Movement stand for, and what was its origin? The movement was a protest against the fact that Japan’s demand to assume control of Shandong Province had been largely accepted by the delegates at the Versailles Peace Conference of 1919. In contrast to the new states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, China as a whole was not accorded any real independence. Most Chinese had hoped that China’s participation on the French and British side against Germany during the First World War—in the form of 200,000 relief workers at the front—would result in the return to China of German-occupied territories such as Shandong Province. Instead, these territories were placed under Japan’s control. In so doing, the Versailles Peace Treaty left deep wounds in China that were to form the basis for the May Fourth Movement. Allied with that movement were various modernization campaigns between 1915 and 1921 that emphasized the value of science, simplification of the language, greater democracy, and less hierarchical family norms. Their rallying cries were “Mr. Science” and “Mr. Democracy.”⁵⁷ Key figures in this New Culture Movement included Lu Xun, the author of “A Madman’s Diary” (a short story written in vernacular Chinese), and Chen Duxiu, a dean at Peking University and editor of the New Youth Magazine. Other well-known members were the linguist Qian Xuantong and the politician Li Dazhao. These persons were pivotal in creating the Communist Party (CCP) 1921 in Shanghai. As mentioned earlier, the philosopher Hu Shi, a key member of the May Fourth Movement, also worked intensely to replace Classical Chinese with Vernacular Chinese as the standard written language. This language reform was effected in the 1920s. The new literary style was based upon the syntax of the national dialect “kuo yu.” The classical style was, according to Chang, very condensed and abstract and full of literary allusions that concealed the meaning of the words for the layman.⁵⁸

      On 4 May 1919, three thousand students from a number of universities, including Peking University, began processing toward Tiananmen Square and the entrance to the Imperial Palace, where the foreign legations were situated. After being driven away from this area, the students instead marched toward the residence of the communications minister, Cao Rulin, which they set on fire. Cao Rulin’s house was singled out because Rulin had previously negotiated a very large loan from Japan, which protestors regarded as excessively compromising.⁵⁹ Cao Rulin (1877–1966), a politician friendly toward Japan, had also been a signatory to the infamous Twenty-One Demands of 1915, drafted during the brief regime of Yuan Shikai, which gave Japan greater influence over China. Rulin had also been a delegate to the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, at which German-occupied areas of China were ceded to Japan. Following clashes with police, thirty-two students were arrested and one died in the hospital. The demonstrations spread to other cities in China, including Shanghai. The overall purpose of the May Fourth Movement was to struggle for China’s national sovereignty and fight against the people who were regarded as traitors at home. Throughout June, popular involvement grew, with demonstrations attracting not only students but also businessmen and workers, and a boycott of Japanese goods was called for. It should be noted that, according to official histories, even Zhou Enlai was active in the May Fourth Movement.

      Chang paid close attention to the student activities within both the May Fourth Movement and more generally the New Culture Movement during his time as a graduate student in the US. He gave a lecture that dealt explicitly with the origin and main purpose of the May Fourth Movement at the Third World’s Christian Citizenship Conference in November 1919 in Pittsburgh. This lecture was later published as an article—“The Rising Consciousness of Civic Responsibility Among the Students of China.”⁶⁰

      In his article, Chang praised the students’ mobilization against the Shantung Settlement in Paris 1919. He regarded these students—from universities, colleges, and secondary schools in China—as an avant-garde group that inspired other groups in society, such as the merchants, the gentry, and trade guilds, to fight against the unjust settlement. Because learning had always been highly respected in China, the influence of students could be strongly felt in all spheres of society, according to Chang. Many of the present students had also acquired a new socially relevant education after the fall of the old empire. In other words, the students were vitally interested in the real problems of their environment, and they had cultivated a civic responsibility that took into account the concerns of several interest groups in society. They had also allied themselves with liberal movements the world over who endorsed freedom, justice, and peace. The students quickly organized СКАЧАТЬ