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

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СКАЧАТЬ visited the institute was when his brother Poling came to New York in 1946. Toward the end of the 1920s, however, Chang seems to have had more contact with the institute, which served as a meeting place for Chinese students at Columbia University and scholars, as well as for Americans with an interest in China.

       Chicago, Honolulu, and Nankai

      In 1931, after touring with Mei Lanfang in the United States, Chang was invited to take up a guest professorship at the University of Chicago, and during the year he taught philosophy and art history both there and at the Chicago Art Institute. That same year, he also taught at Columbia University, touring Europe in the summer and spending the autumn at the University of Chicago. During his tenure as a guest professor in Chicago, Chang’s two sons and his daughter Ming-Ming stayed behind on the Nankai campus in China, as they had while he toured with Mei Lanfang.

      In the early 1930s, Chang was also active on the American lecture circuit, speaking about China and topical problems in cities such as St Louis and New York. In a talk given to a women’s society in Scarsdale, New York, in autumn 1931, he warned about a scenario in which China would be forced to go down a military path in response to Japan’s aggressive colonial policy in Manchuria. Chang argued that ever since the founding of the republic, China had sought to follow the path of modernization by learning all it could from modern science and technology. While China was not yet a modern society, noted Chang, its enormous efforts to attain this goal should not be underestimated. He also argued that China was a more modern society than Japan in one vital respect: it had long abandoned the notions that the emperor was divine and that the army and navy should be under feudal control. “China may be slow in her adjustments,” said Chang, “but at least she long ago discarded these absurd beliefs that properly belong in the museum.”²⁴

      In late 1931, Peng Chun Chang was offered a tenured professor position at the University of Chicago. He declined, however, because of the grave political situation in China, which had worsened after dramatic events near the city of Mukden. On 18 September 1931, a bomb had exploded near the city on a railway line controlled by Japan. Japan accused Chinese groups of responsibility for the attack, which it took as a pretext for invading Manchuria. After the invasion, Japan created a new tributary, Manchukuo in Manchuria, and installed the last Qing emperor, Puyi, on the throne even as it retained actual control itself. Manchukuo remained in existence from 1932 to 1945. The only state to acknowledge Japan’s tributary (apart from Japan itself) was El Salvador.²⁵ Chang said that the Japanese invasion caused a wildfire that spread to other parts of the world. After Manchuria followed Abyssinia, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Memel, Albania, and Poland.

      Japan had been a signatory to the Nine-Power Treaty of 1922. This treaty was intended to guarantee China’s territorial integrity, which had now been violated by Japan. Unlike other colonial powers such as France and Britain, who were more interested in trade and control of the ports—as well as certain major cities, such as Shanghai—Japan had clear geopolitical interests and wanted to have complete control over large swaths of China, including Manchuria.

      In its summary of a speech that Chang gave in Chicago to the Convention of the League of Women Voters, the Milwaukee Journal described Chang’s understanding of the situation in China.²⁶ According to Chang, the grave situation in Manchuria—or in the three northeastern provinces—was the fault of the Japanese military, a military that was responsible to none but the emperor. Chang urged the League of Nations to do something to rectify the critical situation. He argued that although Japan was invoking its right to the southern Manchurian railway because it fought with Russia over it, the Japanese were bandits in this instance in exactly the same way as the Russians had been before them.

      The Kellogg-Briand Pact (after the secretary of state Frank Kellogg and the French foreign secretary Aristide Briand) had also stressed that aggressive war and the conquest of territory was no longer acceptable as a national policy for a country. It emphasized instead the peaceful settlements of conflicts and disputes. The multilateral pact had been signed by Japan and many other countries in August 1928 in Paris and was an attempt to eliminate war. Hence, several countries, including the US, did not recognize the Japanese conquest in 1931. The Lytton Report of 1932 recommended that the League of Nations seek to compel Japan to return Manchuria to China. Japan refused, however, and the following year it quit the League of Nations.²⁷

      The Chinese republic was deeply engaged with the League of Nations during this period. China was anxious to sign several of the league’s conventions and also sought to use the organization for various political purposes, above all, counteracting Japan’s colonial policy. And yet, as the Lytton Report well illustrated, the League of Nations showed itself to be incapable of bringing to an end the conflicts between China and Japan.²⁸

      In early 1932, Chang returned to China with some members of his family. They traveled by ship from Vancouver since at that time it was not possible to make the journey from Los Angeles. They reached Tientsin only after nearly two months of grueling traveling; the train connection from Shanghai had been interrupted once the city became a war zone. The Japanese presence meant that there was widespread fear in northern China of new attacks. Chang therefore advised his brother Poling to send out feelers to investigate the possibility of building a new Nankai School in the city of Chungking in Szechwan Province, in western China.

      The domestic political situation and the state of war with Japan nonetheless did not deter Chang from his usual professional activities. In summer 1933, he represented China at the International Conference of Pacific Nations in Banff, Canada. During the next few years, far from easing up on travel, he embarked on even longer journeys, including to Hawaii (a research and teaching visit) and Russia (a tour with Mei Lanfang).²⁹

      In 1933 and 1934, Chang was a guest professor at the University of Hawaii, where he taught Chinese art, philosophy, and literature. This was the first American university to offer regular courses in Chinese philosophy. Chang also took part in teaching at the Summer School of Pacific and Oriental Affairs in Honolulu. The purpose of this school was to study the cultures of countries bordering the Pacific Ocean. During his time in Hawaii, Chang also wrote a textbook on Chinese history, China: Whence and Whither?, which he later expanded into a history book, China at the Crossroads, intended for a wider audience.³⁰ Chang’s wife and two sons eventually joined him in Hawaii.

      The Chinese author and philosopher Hu Shi, who had been on the same boat to the United States as Chang and the other scholarship students, met up with him again while Chang was in Hawaii. In October 1933, he wrote to his girlfriend, Clifford Williams, about his meeting with Chang: “P. C. Chang is now teaching at the University of Hawaii, his wife and children have not yet joined him there. His family life has not been quite happy, it seems that he feels more at home in foreign academic centres than in China…. P. C. gave me a copy of H. G. Wells’s The Shape of Things to Come, which fits in the picture of the gloomy world as I see it from the ship.”³¹ The contents of Hu Shi’s letter accord well with Stanley Chang’s reflections upon his father’s many trips and even his radical changes in occupation. The latter—his involvement in very different activities—can also be accounted for by Peng Chung Chang’s being driven by impatience and curiosity, something mentioned earlier by his son Stanley. Once his father had immersed himself in an activity and excelled at it, it was time for the next challenge. Nonetheless, he remained faithful to some of these activities as far as possible. He strove to sustain his deep interest in theater and opera for much of the 1930s despite intensifying his foreign policy activities, as he did for his wide involvement in teaching and research. Stanley recalled:

      Like all brilliant people, my father was a profoundly multifaceted person with several different areas of expertise. My guess is that he travelled so much because he wanted to get away from my uncle Poling. Because of their sixteen-year age difference, the brothers’ relationship was more like that of a parent and child. Uncle Poling physically beat my father in order to make him study. It always seemed to me as though my father was looking СКАЧАТЬ