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

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      Raising a Family, Theatrical Activities, University and Diplomatic Careers

      For Chang, much of the 1920s and 1930s were taken up with raising a family, pursuing a career, and continued involvement in the dramatic arts. He began traveling between the United States and China with greater frequency. In addition to becoming a professor at the newly founded Nankai University at the end of the 1920s, he was a guest professor at various universities around the world and was also intensely active in matters of educational policy. In the mid-1930s, he also became increasingly involved in foreign policy issues, due in part to the serious conflicts that erupted between China and Japan. Because Nankai University wielded considerable political influence in China and was strongly engaged with issues at a national level, Chang and his brother Poling found themselves drawn into these political conflicts. Thanks to his successful campaigns in Europe and the United States to argue China’s case with regard to Japan, Chang had by the early 1940s qualified himself for diplomatic postings in Turkey and Chile.

       Raising a Family, Return to China and Tsinghua University

      In June 1922, Chang and his wife had their first child, Ming-Ming. On the invitation of the Chinese Education Advancement Organization, Chang made a trip home to China that summer. He had been studying the educational systems of an array of countries, including Britain, France, Germany, Russia, and Denmark. His journey home from New York to Tianjin (Tientsin) took him through Europe and the Indian Ocean, via the Suez Canal, and lasted several months. Chang’s wife Ts’a was seasick for much of the journey, leaving her unable to look after her newborn daughter. When they arrived in China, one of her sisters remarked, “This child is not well.” During the long journey, Ming-Ming had contracted meningitis, which damaged the left half of her brain. The consequent disability left her with considerable learning difficulties that resulted in her being unable to look after herself or be fully independent for the rest of her life. She finished school to the sixth grade, showing an ability for elementary mathematics, and she learned English from watching television. According to Stanley, she was well aware of her limitations, including in logical thought, but despite these challenges showed great patience.

      It has already been mentioned that P. C. Chang tried in a number of ways to shake off the influence of his elder brother Poling and to find sources of income other than the Nankai School. In September 1923, Chang accordingly began working as vice-dean at the Tsinghua School, an institution that was supported by the US Boxer Rebellion Indemnity Fund. Before Chang’s engagement in Tsinghua, his mother, Yang Shi, passed away in January. During his short engagement at this school, he reorganized it into a college and reformed its curriculum with more liberal education. One of his aims in doing so was to enable students from Tsinghua School to move directly after graduation to a graduate college in the United States. The older teachers at the school opposed this idea, however, and Chang encountered major difficulties in realizing the project. During his years at Tsinghua, Chang also kept a diary (Richeng cao’an) in which he made notes on school “politics” and his own desire after studying in the United States to reconnect with the classical Chinese tradition. Indeed, he explic itly stated in his diary that his understanding of classical Chinese philosophy was greatly inferior to that of his colleagues. One of them whom Chang admired in this respect was the literary scholar and educator Wu Mi, who had also studied in the US almost at the same time as Chang.¹ During the end of his graduate studies there, Chang had also showed a keener interest in Chinese philosophy; for example, he gave a lecture titled “The Teachings of Confucius” at the Albany Institute and Historical and Art Society in 1921.²

      In November 1923, another daughter was born: Hsin-Yueh (Ruth), whose name means “new moon.” Ruth was to follow in her mother’s footsteps and become a chemist. She studied chemistry at Vassar College, her mother’s alma mater, before taking a doctoral degree in the same subject at the University of Wisconsin. At around the time of Ruth’s birth, Chang had become active in the Crescent Moon Society, a literary group whose number included Hu Shi and which shared the same name as Chang’s second daughter. As was mentioned earlier, the name Crescent Moon Society came from a poem by Tagore. Xu Zhimo, the founder of the society, helped Chang in 1929 to buy poems and scripts for the library at Nankai University. Xu Zhimo and Huiyn Lin (1904–1955) served as guides and translators for Tagore when he visited Tsinghua and Beijing in 1925 upon Chang’s invitation. In his lectures in China, Tagore warned against importing materialistic values from the West into Chinese society.³ Huyin Lin would later become a famous architect and poet in China. After a brief love affair with Xu Zhimo, she married Sicheng Liang (1901–1972), who would also become a famous architect in China. Sicheng Liang was the son of Qichao Liang (1873–1929), whom Chang also invited to Tsinghua.⁴ Sicheng Liang was a famous journalist and reformist who was involved in the Hundred Days Reform, a modernization reform from 1898. He was the mentor of Xu Zhimo. Later on, Huiyin Lin and her husband helped Chang with stage design in 1934 when Chang staged the play The New Village Head, with the famous actor Cao Yu.

      It is a remarkable fact that Chang was so well connected with some of the most distinguished people in the cultural life of China during the 1920s. All these people also knew each other in different ways. These kinds of networks would later be a constant presence in Chang’s life in addition to the networks that Chang developed through his Nankai connections and the Boxer Indemnity Scholarship Fund. In other words, it is fascinating to see how Chang’s life interleaved with those of numerous other Chinese intellectuals, particularly during his years as a student in the United States and through the Boxer Indemnity Scholarship Program. The network that he acquired during his student years in America were to prove decisive in a number of ways, including for his activities in the worlds of literature and the arts and in politics and diplomacy.

      Because of the resistance to his changes that Chang encountered from some teachers and administrators at Tsinghua College, he resigned from the college in 1926 and returned to the Nankai School where he was made principal. He also began teaching at Nankai University and served as a professor of philosophy from 1926 to 1937. He remained passionately interested in theater and continued to stage plays by various foreign dramatists. Perhaps the Western dramatist whom Chang most admired was the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen. Chang was strongly inspired by Ibsen, not least because of his plays’ sociopolitical themes and his dramatic technique. Chang subsequently sought to write plays of his own in the same vein. In 1927 he staged An Enemy of the People and the following year he directed the Nankai School’s new drama group in A Doll’s House as part of the school’s anniversary celebrations. Ibsen’s play An Enemy of the People gave voice to a special form of individualism, according to Chang, and it later transpired that the title of the play had prompted the city’s military authorities to seek to prevent it being performed. After the second act, Chang received a phone call from the authorities in which he was instructed to bring the play to a halt. The following spring in 1928, Chang nonetheless staged the play again; this time it bore the title The Stubborn СКАЧАТЬ