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

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СКАЧАТЬ 4 May to 12 June and managed to effect the resignation of the three “traitors” from the Peking government (Cao Rulin, Zhang Zongxiang, and Lu Zongyu).

      According to Chang, what was remarkable about the student mobilization was that the students rose to fight not for Shantung alone, and not only for China, but also for democracy and democratic principles in the world as a whole. Chang said:

      The far-sighted all over the world are aware of the fact that if a militaristic nation should be allowed ultimately to dominate China—the largest, yet undeveloped, field of natural resources and of manpower in the world—thee will develop the greatest military power that has existed on earth; and that the world will have a far more powerful and dangerous Prussia to face in the next world war. While fighting for an independent, democratic China, the students believed that even as a policy—not to mention the supreme justice of the case—the safest course for the world, and particularly for the security and development of democratic institutions, is a free, peaceful China.⁶¹

      Chang revealed in this article that he had a very clear idea about the dangers that the Japanese militarists presented for China and the rest of the world. The main danger consisted in using China as a tool for a war on democracy on a global scale. Unfortunately, he was right in his pessimistic prediction of a new world war and the destructive role Japan would play in that forthcoming war during the 1940s.

      In his article Chang expressed his beliefs in the national importance of the educational efforts that had taken place in China after the establishment of the republic in 1912. Chang was an advocate of a multifaceted education that had relevance for solving urgent problems in society. According to his friend the educator Tao Xingzhi (T’ao Hsing-chih), who also had studied at Columbia University, Chang was critical of “the book worm”—a person who emphasized book reading as the main path to real knowledge. Chang coined the term “scholar ghost” to designate this kind of personality.⁶² Chang stressed in a later article published in 1933—“Redirecting Educational Effort in China”—that:

      In the old days the wisdom of the race could be garnered from books and a faith in the written word was to that extent justifiable. This old regard for books and book knowledge as carried over by the “scholar-ideology” is making for sad results among the students in the modern schools. Although the subjects they study are nominally modern, the extent to which they trust the written word is sometimes piteous. Instead of memorizing classics, many students today are memorizing school texts—sometimes even texts in geometry and in chemistry. This form of mental exercise obviously does not fit one to face concrete problems. It is also often noted that students are apt to consider a thing accomplished as soon as it is written on paper and announced. “A ghost from the past” threatens calamity for the present and the future!⁶³

      Chang hoped that “the New Student … will not be bookish, as he will have contact with, and control of, the material changes in his environment. He will have moral self-reliance; he will not need to crowd ‘the gates of the powerful and the rich’ in order to eke out a livelihood. He will be able to increase the wealth of the community. And, not the least important, he will be in close sympathy and understanding with the toiling masses. That is the type of educated leadership that the China in transformation urgently calls for.”⁶⁴ Hence, for Chang it was important to emphasize practical skills among the students and also vocational training. According to him there was no innate obstacle to the development of technology in China. The Chinese mind has never been blighted by any thoroughgoing mysticism, and in the making of material things, the Chinese have not been deficient in skill and inventiveness.⁶⁵ One could guess that Chang had (in addition to the student mobilization in the May Fourth Movement) his own Nankai School in mind as a role model for ideal educational efforts as Nankai mixed activities in workshops with activities in the classrooms for the pupils.⁶⁶ The Confucian ideal of learning also stressed that one should strive for a comprehensive learning that included social understanding and moral education and, hence, not only book reading.⁶⁷

      In 1921, Chang also wrote a commentary on the student protests that had sought to prevent the ceding of Shandong Province to Japan. China, he claimed, had gained greater respect, not least in the eyes of the United States, by withholding its approval of the Japanese takeover. According to Chang, the lesson to be learned from the Shandong affair was that the eyes of the Chinese people had been opened. Although ancient Chinese cultural traditions had made many of its citizens into gentlemen, these traditions clearly had another aspect: they had failed to inculcate in its population an ability to counter the threat of war from without. During the most recent war, the Chinese people had been sleeping on a beautiful golden bed covered with fine promises of peace. The Shandong affair had thus been a wake-up call for greater knowledge and realism; it was, he wrote, the antidote to a debilitating dose of morphine.⁶⁸

      Nationalist sentiments found expression in further riots on 30 May 1925 in Shanghai, which resembled the demonstrations organized in 1919 by the May Fourth Movement. These protesting students and workers were to become known as the May Thirtieth Movement. Their protests had been sparked by the shooting of striking workers by police officers under foreign control. The political rhetoric of the May Thirtieth Movement subsequently became highly influential within the domestic debate in China. For the May Thirtieth Movement, the frog became a symbol for everything that a good Chinese ought to avoid, namely dutifully adapting him- or herself to be an American, a Japanese, and a consumer of foreign products, as the context dictated. The movement’s activities also strengthened the position of Sun Yat-sen’s Nationalist Party.⁶⁹

      While Chang was not directly involved in either the May Fourth Movement or the May Thirtieth Movement, he was nonetheless active in other organizational contexts.⁷⁰ In the 1920s, he had contacts with the Crescent Moon Society (Xinyue), a Chinese cultural organization created in 1923 by the poet Xu Zhimo (1897–1931). The society, which lasted until 1931, published a culture magazine that commented on the cultural and political situation in China. The magazine took its name from a poem by the Indian Nobel Prize–winner Rabindranath Tagore. Zhimo was a pioneering advocate of modern Chinese poetry and had himself been strongly inspired by the English poets John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley. He had also studied at the same universities as Chang—Clark and Columbia. The famous Chinese intellectual Hu Shi was also a member of the society, which later became part of the larger New Culture Movement.⁷¹

       Second Period of Study in the United States—Doctoral Studies and Marriage

      Chang’s stay in China became rather brief as he decided to continue his graduate studies in New York. In 1919, Chang returned to the United States to complete his doctoral studies at Columbia, during which period he gave lectures as a way to support himself financially. In 1920, he and several other educationalists also made a study trip to several American universities, including Vassar College, which had invited him to give an address. Titled “The Problems of the Pacific,” his lecture had an obvious political content. When Chang visited Vassar, he was received by a female Chinese student named Ts’a Sieu-Tsu (Sieu-Tsu Ts’a). Since Chang was from northern China and Ts’a from the south, they did not understand each other’s mother tongue; Chang spoke Mandarin and she spoke Cantonese and “Shanghai” Chinese. As a result, they had to speak English with each other. During his visit to Vassar, Chang and Ts’a fell in love; they were married on 24 May 1921 at Union Theological Seminary in New York. Stanley said the following about his parents’ ways of communicating with each other: “My mother spoke ‘Shanghai’ Chinese or Wu which was used in ‘the half—way south’ or Shanghai region. My mother and father spoke English to each other until they returned to China and then my mother learned Mandarin. I myself can partially understand ‘Shanghai’ Chinese from hearing her speaking to her friend Mrs Chiang (who was from the same region and who lived in New York at the same time as my family).”

      Ts’a was born in Soochow (now Suzhou) in January 1898, the third of nine children (six girls and three boys). Her father, Shi-Zhi, encouraged her in her studies, in which she showed СКАЧАТЬ