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

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СКАЧАТЬ article titled “Chinese Themes on the Stage—A Comment on ‘Mr. Wu,’” Chang wrote:

      If we believe that struggle of the human will is the central support of the structure of the drama, as it is, then perhaps, there is no other country where this struggle in the political and social realm is so marked and inevitable as in China today. She is undergoing a great transition … and dramas of all descriptions are being acted out in real life every day. That this is a ready and prolific field for dramatic themes, every student of the history of the drama can easily discern. But it is a sad fact that so far, on the western stage, these legitimate and truly dramatic stories have scarcely been touched.⁴⁸

      Chang emphasized that there needed to be more plays that did not reiterate common misconceptions about the Chinese people and prejudice about their characteristics, such as deviousness in business (a theme of the play Mr. Wu). Chang cited Aristotle’s dictum that “a work of art must be full of beauty, agreeable, desirable, and morally worthy.” According to Chang, no prejudice, however cleverly dramatized, could ever form the substance of a work of art, “for it is neither beautiful, nor agreeable, nor desirable—the present war ought to convince us of this. And certainly not morally worthy if we believe in any Golden rule other than the Golden rule that the only Golden rule is that there is no Golden rule” (Chang apologized for the reiteration!).⁴⁹ Chang here touched upon issues that would later form the focus of the “Orientalism debate” initiated by the Palestinian scholar Edward W. Said in his famous book Orientalism (1978), which examines misperceptions and misrepresentations of Asia by the Europeans, particularly European scholars.

      In his early years in New York, Chang also wrote plays—The Intruder, The Man in Grey, and The Awakening—that reflected topical political and social problems in China, where some of these problems had been caused by the conflicts with Japan and the deep divisions in the country.⁵⁰ All three plays were subsequently staged at the Nankai School in both Chinese and English. The Intruder was also performed in New York in 1915. The Awakening proved very popular in China, where it was the first English-language play to premiere before a Chinese audience. Since Chang’s political involvement often overlapped with his artistic endeavors, the plots of his plays warrant brief summaries here.

      The Intruder takes as its theme the significance of social virtues, such as family togetherness, diligence, courage, and the importance of contributing to the common good. The play centers upon the threat posed to a family by greedy creditors in a hardening social atmosphere. The family has fallen into debt because several of the sons have borrowed money from an unscrupulous creditor, with devastating consequences for the family. The play ends, however, with the situation being partly resolved by the return of the hardworking and conscientious son. He keeps the loan shark at bay and, with his sister’s help, saves the family from shame and ruin.

      The Man in Grey is a tale of war and peace whose main protagonists are evoked allegorically as “the red man” (war), “the white man” (peace), “the yellow woman” (love), and “the grey man” (the people). The play takes the form of a dialogue in which peace and love try to convince the people to love their neighbor. Love, the yellow woman, appeals to the people (the grey man) to cooperate with their neighbors instead of waging war against them as the red man (war) has been urging. Only through cooperation can the barriers to making life more acceptable be removed. According to love, these barriers comprise poverty, ignorance, selfishness, prejudice, injustice, and hypocrisy. The struggle against these negative qualities was also to be a guiding principle of Chang’s political project within the framework of the UN.

      The Awakening is about a scholarship student who has just returned to China from his studies in the United States and is now looking for work. He meets an old friend and his sister. They discuss the societal problems of the day, including the rise in selfishness and short-sightedness. The trio also discuss how the returning student ought to approach his native land in light of his experiences overseas, an issue with which Chang himself wrestled intensely after his own return from studying in the United States. In the play, the student’s friend is investigating a sprawling network of corruption in the railways, and the drama ends with him falling victim to one of the subjects of his investigation.⁵¹ After his friend is murdered, the scholarship student promises the sister of the friend that he will try to help to realize the ideals articulated by his deceased friend in their conversations. Chang makes a thinly concealed gesture toward his brother Poling’s Nankai School by having his protagonist harbor the ambition of opening a small school that might help create a new social order free from corruption and greed.

      Chang also wrote another play in 1915, The New Order Cometh, which deals with the tension between loyalty to the old family traditions in China and the “new values” that the Chinese students encountered in the US in the form of individual freedom. The play was staged in New Haven and New York and had a cast of Chinese students from Yale and Columbia. The play was reviewed in very positive terms in the newspapers. It grappled with the theme of romantic love as the foundation of marriage. Two students fall in love during their time of study in the US. The boy tries to end his previous engagement with a Chinese girl in China. Her father, who represents “the old order,” refuses to accept the break up because the engagement has been decided by both the boy’s and the girl’s families. According to the girl’s father, because the boy’s father no longer lives, the engagement should continue, unless the boy can bring his father back to life again and ask him for permission to disengage. However, the girl in China solves the stalemate, and, with a surprising act of generosity, she accepts the breakup. As a “reward,” at the end of the play she meets another man with whom she falls in love.⁵²

       China in the 1910s

      During Chang’s early years of study in the US, China underwent dramatic political changes. Between 1907 and 1911, disaffection with Qing dynasty rule became increasingly apparent, resulting in riots in several cities across China. By 1911, the situation for certain religious groups, among them Christians, was becoming precarious as a consequence of the mid-nineteenth-century Taiping Rebellion, which the imperial regime regarded as a religious uprising. Following the revolution, the Republic of China was created in 1912, forcing the abdication of the last of the Qing dynasty emperors, six-year-old Puyi. This marked the end of more than two thousand years of imperial rule.⁵³ China became a nation-state with leaders by election instead of being an imperial state having leaders by inheritance. Following the dissolution of the empire, the situation for religious groups was also improved by greater religious freedom. Many Christian missionaries from the West came to China in these years, with intense and successful missions from a number of churches during the 1920s in particular.⁵⁴

      In 1912, Sun Yat-sen (1866–1925), an intellectual anti-Manchu leader who was also a converted Christian, became the first president of the republic. That year also saw the founding of the Kuomintang (KMT), the Chinese nationalist party. Sun Yat-sen’s first term of office was cut short, however, when a general from the late Qing dynasty, Yuan Shikai, seized power. Sun Yat-sen was driven into exile in Japan, while his challenger sought to restore the monarchy and appointed generals as administrative commanders of China’s provinces. (In July 1913, seven of those provinces rose up against Shikai’s rule.) In 1915, during Shikai’s rule, China became a signatory to the Twenty-One Demands, which resulted in Japan gaining considerable jurisdiction over Manchuria and the Shandong Province as well as special protectorate-like rights. These concessions led, four years later, to protests in the form of the May Fourth Movement.

      After Yuan Shikai’s death in 1916, China became fragmented as a national entity, with local warlords assuming control of the provinces.⁵⁵ The period directly following the revolution of 1911 was thus a great disappointment for all who had hoped that it would usher in a new, modernized, and unified China. Nonetheless, the one great consequence of the revolution was that the empire was dissolved and the ideological debate over China’s future social development became more intense.

      In 1917, СКАЧАТЬ