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

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СКАЧАТЬ for example, regarded the Chinese social and political organizations as humanistic in comparison with its European counterparts, which had been founded on religious thought. Chinese culture was not in fact spiritual, despite there being a common misapprehension that Eastern culture was spiritual and Western materialistic. That view, Chang argued, was wrong. It was indisputable that the Chinese had been more worldly than Westerners because religion in China had never grown into a significant force. Right up to the nineteenth century, China had continued to provide the world with material things. Tea, ceramics, paper, printing, and gunpowder—all originated in China. The country, it was true, still lagged behind as regards the production of railways, motorcars, and manufactured goods as well as in its capital accumulation. However, Chang argued, there were no intrinsic obstacles to modernization. The real difficulty came from the impatient and persistent pressure from the territories that happened to have already modernized. In the past ten years, and particularly during the past four, there had emerged in China a new movement, one which could be characterized as a critical adjustment, according to Chang. No longer would there be a blind imitation of cultural trends and political institutions, but, instead, Chang hoped, from this movement would emerge something that would make real improvements possible.⁴²

      Chang’s assertions about China’s past and the positive appreciation of China from European scholars are nonetheless vulnerable to the charge of being overly idealizing and generalized. There were also Enlightenment philosophers in Europe during the eighteenth century who were more critical of China’s political system and traditions. Baron de Montesquieu, for example, regarded the government of China as a despotic system that created a social and political order through repression and fear.⁴³ Some Enlightenment philosophers in Europe may also have idealized Chinese history and culture for political reasons. They were eager to criticize the role of the state churches in their countries, and they looked favorably upon the more secular character of Confucian ethics.⁴⁴

      Chang’s talk of China and its millennia-long history in his writings was also a modified version of the facts. In an interview I conducted with the sinologist Willard Peterson in 2015, he noted that, while the term “Middle Kingdom”—Chung-kuo, or Zhongguo—is more than two thousand years old, the idea of a homogenous Chinese nation is a relatively late invention. When scholars and politicians refer to a Chinese history that stretches back three to four thousand years, they do not have in mind a Chinese nationstate as part of an international system. This notion of the nation-state only took hold at the time of the establishment of the republic in 1912, being further consolidated with the founding of the new People’s Republic in 1949. Chinese history prior to this point had been a succession of different political entities, often called dynasties, and a dominant social group, the Han people. Yet these entities did not collectively form a nation-state in the current sense of the word. To describe China as having a three-thousand-year history is thus to project a modern, twentieth-century notion backward onto the past. For Chang’s ideas about China’s millennia-long history to have validity, it is therefore important to acknowledge that the word “China” denotes a long line of dynasties that emerged as a nation-state only in the twentieth century. It should also be noted that Chang subsequently qualified his account of China’s long history precisely by referring to the separate histories of those territories that today compose the state of China. At the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, China was no longer seen by many citizens as an empire, representing a world civilization. It was perceived more as a state among other states in an international system.⁴⁵

      Chang’s book China at the Crossroads was nevertheless well received, and the reviewers were evidently surprised by the amount of factual information and reflections that he had managed to compress into a work of under 200 pages.⁴⁶ It was often remarked that Chang had a particular talent for condensing texts and finding more concise formulations. This ability would serve him well during his work on the UN Declaration, when he would distinguish himself by presenting alternative formulations for the articles that were short and elucidative.

      During his time in England, Chang was also in demand as a speaker on political and cultural issues in a range of settings. Chinese culture such as fine art or horticulture, Chang argued, was relatively accessible for those from a Western cultural setting. Philosophy and poetry had also become available thanks to translations. By contrast, Chang noted, Western audiences still found it extremely difficult to understand and appreciate Chinese music, although the enthusiastic reception of Mei Lanfang in the West had shown that this was changing.⁴⁷

      Chang also wrote an article during his time in England that compared the different university systems in the UK and in China.⁴⁸ In this article, Chang spoke favorably about the tutorial system at Oxford and Cambridge. This system created a personal relationship between the tutor and the student, according to Chang. It also encouraged the students to be humble and creative in their pursuit of knowledge through critical engagement with the opposing views of the tutor. In the Chinese universities, teaching was based more on lectures, which was a less costly system than the tutorial system but more “mechanical” in nature. The Chinese universities suffered also from a lack of a critical and personal/communal atmosphere in the academic environment. Chang pointed out critically, however, that the Oxbridge system had a close connection to the state church, a connection that curtailed freedom of religion for the students who did not belong to this church.

      Chang emphasized in his article that the Chinese university education should not be involved in the “lazy” enterprise of copying Western universities. One should instead utilize one’s own experiences and look carefully at what the most crucial problems are at the moment. This was a well-known theme from the educational philosophy of John Dewey. Similar thoughts about the problems of an uncritical imitation would also appear later in Chang’s work on the Universal Declaration. Chang meant in this context that the declaration should not be an imitation of earlier rights documents.⁴⁹

       The Second Chinese-Japanese War, Escape, and the Family Divided

      What had been happening in China during Chang’s visit to Britain? The years 1935 and 1936 witnessed dramatic events in China, above all in the form of the Communists’ Long March. After Chiang Kai-shek’s troops surrounded the Communists in Jiangxi Province in 1934, the Communists tried to break through their lines and find a safe haven. They were forced to make a long march to Shanxi Province in the northwest.

      Of the eighty thousand who set out, only four thousand reached their “final destination.” Thereafter, fortune favored the Communists, who, with the help of Manchuria’s military leader, Zhang Xueliang, succeeded in kidnapping Chiang Kai-shek, in the so-called Xi’an Incident of December 1936. Zhang opposed the idea of fighting the Communists before defeating the Japanese. The condition for Chiang’s release was therefore that the Communists and the Kuomintang would begin to collaborate again in order to present a united front against Japan. During this period, Mao Zedong increasingly emerged as the self-evident leader of the Communists, a charismatic revolutionary who wanted to transform Chinese society, starting with its peasant farmer class.⁵⁰

      The economic and political problems faced by Chiang Kai-shek’s republic in the 1930s and 1940s, which resulted in the Communists seizing power, are customarily explained in relation to two phenomena.⁵¹ One key reason why the republic had encountered such difficulties in its attempts at modernization was that it had focused on the populations of the major cities and failed to recognize that peasant farmers constituted China’s real core. These latter were to become Mao Zedong’s primary focus. The second principal reason for the weakening of the republic was the Second Chinese-Japanese War, which lasted from 1937 to 1945, in which the Kuomintang and the Communists’ Eighth Route Army fought against the Japanese invasion. This was triggered by the Marco Polo Bridge Incident of 7 July 1937. A Japanese soldier was assumed to have deserted to the fortress city of Wanping, southwest of Peking. The Japanese army asked for permission to enter Wanping in order to arrest the soldier. When the Chinese refused, the Japanese attacked, taking control of the Marco Polo Bridge (Lugou Bridge). Although СКАЧАТЬ