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

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СКАЧАТЬ in Chungking on the Nankai campus, I once got into a quarrel with one of my uncle’s grandchildren. It was just an ordinary quarrel between two children (I was eleven years old). My father’s reaction surprised me. He immediately went to uncle Poling and apologized. What was there to apologize for?!

      That Chang was highly valued as a lecturer was doubtless also a contributing factor to his journeying from one university to another. His tenure as a guest professor at the University of Hawaii in 1933 and 1934 was warmly appreciated, and students were clearly deeply affected by his lectures.³² Additionally, as was his habit, Chang gave several public lectures while at Hawaii. Reviewing one such lecture, Norman C. Schenck had the following to say about Chang’s performance: “There is something magnetic about this great man from China. He is tall and powerful. His appearance instils confidence. His speech and gestures are charming. He seems to be entirely at home with the English language … a voice with beautiful intonation, one that by turns can sound like a powerful organ and a gentle flute.”³³ In another article published in the newspaper KA Leo o Hawaii, the writer expresses the following impressions of Chang: “Dr Peng-Chun Chang, noted Chinese educator who was visiting professor here last year, was honoured last Friday at a tea party in the Honolulu Academy of Arts by the Oriental Institute. He stopped for one day in Honolulu on his way from China to England where he is to lecture at leading colleges. Dr Chang is remembered here for his brilliant lectures on Chinese art, philosophy and history which he delivered at the University last year. His feminine admirers still speak about his “gentle and graceful hands and just perfect diction.”³⁴

      That Chang felt at home and ease in different university towns is revealed in a poem (“New Year in Princeton”) that he wrote after visiting Princeton when he was a graduate student in the US. Chang wrote:

      Princeton, all beauty and repose!

      Why hurry? What’s the care?

      Ah Monster City that sucks human blood and brain!

      Here is life self-knowing, leisure inviolate.

      The Tower—the Gothic Tower—

      In sunlight, in moonlight,

      And in dark and cloudy night

      Watch it at a distance, it draws you near …

      Its firm upward lines dart with this mystic power.

      You aspire higher and higher at hither your wavering steps …

      And when close by, your hope penetrates heaven!³⁵

      For Chang, 1935 was another year defined by theater and opera. He accompanied Mei Lanfang on a tour of the Soviet Union, as was mentioned before, and found time to stage Molière’s L’Avare (The Miser) in China, giving the play a topical spin by making its focus the widespread corruption in Chinese society. One purpose of the play was to collect money for needy children.³⁶

       Research and Lectures in England

      In 1936, Chang was given an opportunity to go to Cambridge University on a one-year visiting professorship. During his time in England, he finished writing his book China at the Crossroads.³⁷

      While Chang’s doctoral dissertation had introduced Western educational concepts to a Chinese context, this book aimed to do the opposite: to introduce China to Western readers in order to give them as accurate a picture as possible of the country’s history and social development. In this book, Chang examined in detail how China had historically been regarded by the West. He also highlighted all of the ways in which China had contributed materially to the West, such as the manufacture of paper, porcelain, the compass, gunpowder, and the sedan chair. Silk had existed in China several thousand years before Christ. Printing was also invented in China, five hundred years before it came to Europe. Chang emphasized the intellectual inspiration given by China to Europe and its political consequences, such as the struggle against feudalism and absolute monarchy. These latter notions of “political cultural exchange” were to recur in Chang’s reflections on the history of human rights and how Western philosophers during the Enlightenment had drawn inspiration from Chinese traditions.

      The West’s negative perception of China, which had deepened during the nineteenth century, ultimately derived from the fact that China during that century had fallen behind in the fields of scientific discovery and industrial innovation. The Chinese army’s inability to hold its own against Western armies, Chang argued, served to further confirm the impression that China was an underdeveloped country. Nor was it a coincidence that these negative assessments became more entrenched in tandem with Europe’s creeping expansion eastward.

      In his book, Chang sought to situate these negative conceptions of China within a corrective historical framework by highlighting the ways in which the situation had been radically different prior to the nineteenth century. In this period, China and Chinese traditions were the object of widespread admiration in Europe and the West, with Chinese culture making an especially powerful impression.³⁸ During its three- to four-thousand-year history, Chang contended, China had developed a humanistically oriented philosophy that emphasized the importance of prosperity for every member of society. It had been commonly understood in China that emperors and political leaders were authorized to rule only if they treated their peoples well. This notion accorded closely to the social ideals espoused by the classical Chinese philosopher Mencius (Meng Tse) (372–289 BC).³⁹ (Similar ideas would later be included in the preamble of the UN Declaration: “Whereas it is essential, if man is not to be compelled to have recourse as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression, that human rights should be protected by the rule of law.”) According to Chang, it was also striking that China had never been a military feudal state for over two thousand years.⁴⁰ However, Japan had the experience of being this for a long time.

      Chang was eager to analyze the historical relationship between China and Japan in order to understand the actual conflicts between the two countries. Chang laid out the historical circumstances in the following way in the article “Civilization and Social Philosophies,” which he published for the American journal Progressive Education in 1938:

      Japan, a smaller country with a centralized control, also had the readiness to learn foreign things quicker (than China). Japan’s modernization has proved quicker. China’s larger, more loosely knit organization, and also China’s stupid attitude of having itself achieved a valuable civilization made the process of modernization slower. You have heard that the cultural relation between China and Japan is often said to be about the same cultural relationship as between Greece and Rome. You have heard that, but I don’t think you can say it is true. For one thing, Rome took over things from Greece, and then after that, creativeness in Greece died. Another thing: Rome overran Greece. In this respect, Japan learned from China, and the Chinese culture continued and Japan continued to learn from China—from roughly speaking, around the fifth or sixth centuries—and then new movements reached Japan from China even down to the eighteenth century. You should trace it in art, philosophy, court matters, and in literature. Furthermore, Japan never overran China. So it is not at all the same type of relationship; it is rather a matter of relative speed in modernization. That is one reason for the conflict today—it is the speed of modernization. Another reason is the nineteenth century attitude toward expansion in that area. Gradually all the people who have interests in the Pacific are giving up that attitude, and I hope gradually, even suddenly, our neighbour will give up the idea that China cannot modernize herself.⁴¹

      In a speech at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum in Exeter in 1936, Chang noted that there was a general impression abroad that Chinese civilization and culture were not merely ancient but also static and backward. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, СКАЧАТЬ